SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 28 January 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING

the late REV.

A. H. COLLINS

RELIGION AND REFORM. “The Realm of Heaven, He said, is like dough which, a woman took and 'buried in three pecks of flour, till all of it was leavened.” —Saint Matthew XIII., 33 (Dr. Moffatts translation). The group of parables which make up this chapter 'have a common subject, “the kingdom of Heaveh,” not Heaven above, but .the reign of God on earth. Each parable deals with some aspect of that kingdom and \the parable of the leaven is concerned with the growth of the kingdom. How does this grow? How is the religion of Christ to expand in the earth? There are two possible answers. One is the way of organisation,'and the other is the way of conteOur'age has almost unlimited faith in organisation. If we want a truth to spread we organise. We elect officials, appoint committees, hold conferences, pass resolutions and resort to a publicity campaign. We set the “pros and the “antis” in battle array. . Hence we have a perfect maze of institutions, and of these the Christian Church is probably the most impressive example. But organisation occupied a very slender place in the consciousness of Christ. He founded no institution, and appointed no official. He wrote nothing, neither commanded others to write. Christ’s way of propagating truth was the way of personal contagion. Instead of forming a system or creating external machinery, He counted upon the spontaneous and dynamic influence of life on life, personality on personality. He would produce a new social order through the contagious and transmissive character, of personal goodness. Once "the new spirit of love and. goodness gets formed in one person, that person, infects others, and a social group is formed; the group will create new conditions and children born into a new social environment will suck in the new ideals with their mother’s milk. ' A LIGHT TO ILLUMINE. The kingdom of Heaven is as light to illumine, salt to save, leaven to lift. The Jesus kind of goodness is illuminative, antiseptic and contagious; and He has no other way. The point of this parable is sometimes missed. Leaven is an active, pungent, transmuting influence which silently assimilates and' changes the dull, soddened, indigestible dough and makes it 'wholesome and satisfying bread. It works by contact; it touches the particles that lie nearest, and transforms them into vehicles for the further transmission of influence. Each particle, touched by the ferment, in turn becomes a ferment; and thus the process, working outward, ever outward, permeates the entire mass. In this way the simple, sublime truths Christ taught would spread with noiseless, irresistible energy in the world. Each Christian soul is to become a propagandist. Each individual Christian Is to transmit the influence that changed him untilthe man next to him is changed. Phillips Brooks defined preaching as “truth plus personality.” Some great commanding principle grips a man's very soul, , and demands that he give it utterance, and he becomes a, flaming herald. A man. .will do little until the- truth he holds holds him, and he must speak it with quivering passionate energy. “It needs a soul to life a soul e’en to a cleaner sty.”' . Tepid, calculating, prudential, folk never accomplish much in a world like ours. The leaven must work, else what is the use of it? “Truth plus personality,” explains the work of Mazzini in modem Italy, Luther in Germany, Tolstoi in Russia, and Gladstone in England. And if we are ever to see a free, virile, godly nation under the Southern Cross, we shall have to catch the sacred, infectious enthusiasm of these Empire builders. We, too, must be propagandists. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. But I have said the point of the parable is sometimes missed. Did Jesus mean that the kingdom of Heaven comes by the secret, silent penetration of truth in the lives , of men? That in part, but something else. He fastened on the suggestive, wonderful fact that in breadmaking the housewife takes that which is harsh and sour to the taste, and plunges it into that which is insipid, and dry, and out of these produces a third thing—bread, which is wholesome and satisfying. Leaven alone is sour; meal alone is tasteless; but leaven and meal make bread. That is the point, “The kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven.” Religion by itself, religion out of contact with life and reality, is sour, useless, offensive; and life without true religion is insipid, unsatisfying, dull. To put it another way, religion that is out of touch with public life and social questions has no tang, and social progress which is not inspired and regulated by moral and religious principles is progress over a precipice. Religion must touch life on all sides. The whole life of man belongs to the whole realm of religion, and so includes questions of social betterment and moral uplift. The leaven must be in the meal, and not on the shelf. That sounds simple and sensible enough. But think of it. The teachers and teachings of Christ’s own time represented religion separated from the practical affairs of \ life. To offer sacrifices, to keep feasts and fasts, to tithe the Anise and Cummin, to observe Sabbath days, to repeat daily prayer, and to avoid ceremonial unclearmess, made up the sum of religion, and religion so constituted was held to be the all important thing in life, and Jesus Christ loathed it. THE MONASTIC IDEA. Later, the monastic idea of religion arose, when men and women withdrew from contact with their fellows, lived in a nice damp cave, wore hair shirts or no shirt at all, practised pains and penance, persecuted the body to im-. prove the soul, and left the world to go to the devil! They were judged devout according as they were dirty, and saintly according as they were cadaverous. I am not saying there were not good ; men and women in the monastic order. To say that would be false to facts. But the whole conception of religion was mistaken, and the effect was mischievous. But a lie that dies hard, and it is not yet dead. It obtains to-day though it clothes itself in venerable formula and utters itself in pious phrases. There are those who regard themselves as ultra Evangelical and stoutly Protestant who practically cling to the monastic idea of religion, and think that Christian people should be very tepidly interested, if interested at all, in anything save what they call preaching the gospel and saving souls. No one whq knows me and the trend of my teaching will charge me with under-valuing these things, but the gospel is: a bigger thing than some suppose, and saving souls is a greater thing than they imagine,, and these things do not exhaust our Christian duty. To keep to the metaphor of the text,

the doush is not to be kept on one shelf, and the leaven on another. The leaven must be plunged into the heart of the meal, and kneaded in the pan, until the whole is leavened. I mean that Christian people are not doing their plain duty unless, and until they fling themselves quite frankly and energetically into the broad stream of human life and seek to Christianise the social or der—social, municipal, national, and international. Trade needs to be Christianised; so does education, so does sport, so does politics—aye, and so does religion itself! The “salt” must be rubbed in; the “leaven” must touch; the light must shine. Religion by itself and separated from the stuff of which life is made is sour dough. “Beware, says Bernard Shaw in winged, almost inspired, phrase, “beware of the man whose God is. in the sky.” It is not only allowable it is demanded that we apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to social questions, and if any should challenge, that I would say this: Do you seriously imagine that commerce and learning, literature and music, public life and public morals, are nothing to God, and that only churches count? Is the State nothing to Him? Has the Lord of the whole earth nothing to do with land tenure and a system which excludes multitudes of God’s creatures from their inheritance in the land? Is it nothing to the Great Father that people live in slums and drink themselves blind, and bet themselves bankrupt, and live and breed and die in rags and squalor? Cares He nothing for the straining of those who seek liberty, equality and fraternity, even though their methods seem to us doubtful? Does God employ none save pious people to work His will? not use Pharaoh and Cyrus, and might He not do the like again? THE CHURCH’S DUTY. If the Church should discrown itself and refuse to give moral leadership on public questions, then others will step to the front, and the Church will miss her high calling. It happened to Judaism; it happened to Rome; it happened in England. I sometimes fear it has happened in New Zealand. Has the Church lost moral leadership ’on public questions. Whenever religion has grown old, decrepit, sleek and formal, and tasteless, as the white of an egg, the Master comes with His leaven, sets up a ferment, destroys an old and brings in. a new and better state. Leaven alone is sour, and religion separated from life is sour dough. , . And now will you consider the complementary truth? Leaven alone is sour, and meal alone is choking. It is leaven and meal that make bread. I mean that social service that is not inspired and regulated by religious principle is not only powerless to effect its purpose, it is perilous. I use the word religion m no narrow, sectarian sense. I would give it the widest interpretation, as including the love of God and the service of men. With one foot of your compass you may describe a circle as wide as human life and need; but the other foot of the compass must rest on religion. DIVINE FATHERHOOD. It is vain to talk of human brotherhood if you deny Divine Fatherhood. How can men be brothers if there is no Father? You can have no enduring liberty that does not rest on obedience to divine law; no equality which is not the fruit of love. You can never have a Christian State unless the individuals who make up the State are Christian in spirit and deed. The meal must have the leaven, if it is to rise. Reform must be penetrated through and through with a deep, sincere, religious spirit, or it cannot succeed* For what gain, would, it be if we exchanged a selfish oligarchy for an equally selfish democracy? The change of form would matter nothing if the spirit were the same. The one hope of a better social order lies in the uprising of moral passion in the hearts of men. Economies can do something;’ a changed environment can do something; but at bottom our social problems are moral problems, and Jesus Christ holds the secret of their solution. A QUESTION OF MANHOOD. i■. ■ ■ ’ - At bottom it is a question of manhood, and until you change poor manhood for a “better, your efforts are futile. You may paint the pump any colour you like, but the fundamental question is how to cleanse the spring. We need a social programme, of course, but the main thing is not a programme, but a dynamic. How to get there is the question, and I have no hope we shall ever get there save as we follow the spirit and method of Jesus.

Leadership is often a thankless task, for leaders are criticised, sometimes abused, and even cruelly assailed. It .is then they need to fall back on Christian principles. There is a small collection of essays, edited by Mr. George Haw, and called “The Religious Doubts of Democracy.” Among them is a paper in which the writer, a working man, speaks of his own religious experience and the social service he rendered. He tells how years before he gave up religion because he felt the churches were anti-social. He flung himself into democratic movements. After years of labour he fell ill, and began to ask himself why he should devote himself to the service of others. Why should he not make money as others did? Why should he not think of himself instead of other people? They were ungrateful and gave him no thanks. He had almost decided to give up and work for himself. Then he began to think of the religion he had abandoned and the Christ he had ignored, and thinking of Christ he realised that he had forgotten Him. Old convictions came back to him, and he felt that Jesus Christ was necessary for the individual, and for the world. It inspired him with a new enthusiasm. He took up his old work with re-doubled energy and did it for Christ’s sake, which is the greatest and only enduring motive. For I do not think any of us can do our work, as it should be done, save as the passion for humanity is bom of the passion for Christ