VIII

The New Evangelism

Those who have followed these discussions from the beginning will not be inclined to hesitate in answering the question with which the last chapter closed.  That society can be redeemed, and that the church can and will purge herself from the things that defile her beauty and corrupt her powers, and gird herself for the redemptive work assigned her, is the faith of every loyal Christian.  The grievous failures of the church we cannot deny and must not palliate; it is of the utmost importance that she be brought face to face with them, and be made to see how far short she has come of her high calling.  Such criticism she has received from the beginning.  The seven churches of Asia were sharply called to account by the beloved disciple; their faithlessness and neglect were unflinchingly brought home to them.  The churches at Ephesus and Sardis and Laodicea had as hard things said about them as have been said in these chapters of the churches of this generation, and probably deserved them no less.  We cannot doubt that that clear-eyed witness, if he were confronting the church of the twentieth century, would be constrained to say:  “I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead....  Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:  I counsel thee to buy of me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich; and white garments, that thou mayest clothe thyself, and that the shame of thy nakedness be not made manifest; and eye-salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see.  As many as I love, I reprove and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent.”  In every generation such chastisement has been needed; the need is no greater to-day than in past generations, and the chastening love no less.  What Lowell says of this country, many a Christian believer has been constrained to say of the church:—­

    “I loved her old renown, her stainless fame;
    What better proof than that I loathed her shame.”

But this keen sense of her shortcomings is not inconsistent with an unfaltering faith in the recovery of her integrity and in her final triumph.  And those who have read the history of the Christian church with sympathetic vision can hardly doubt that her brightest days are still before her.

For while it must be admitted that she has neglected, hitherto, her great work of social redemption, it cannot be said that she is more neglectful of it now than she has been in past years; the truth is that she is nearer to the recognition of it to-day than she has ever been.  Derelict as she is to her primary obligation, it must yet be said that a consciousness of that dereliction is beginning to make her uneasy, and that has never before been true of any large portion of her membership.  Since the earliest centuries the possibility of transforming the social order by purely spiritual influences has scarcely dawned upon her.  So long as society was feudalistic or aristocratic, the problem seemed to be beyond her reach; she might hope to improve society, by inculcating kindness and charity, but hardly to reconstruct it upon new foundations.