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Vast multitudes today are seeing as never before that the moral and ethical foundations of the nation's and the world's life is a matter of primal concern to all.

We are finding more and more that the simple fundamentals of life and conduct as portrayed by the Christ of Nazareth not only constitutes a great idealism, but the only practical way of life. Compared to this and to the need that it come more speedily and more universally into operation in the life of the world today, truly "sectarian peculiarities are obsolete impertinences."

Our time needs again more the prophet and less the priest. It needs the God-impelled life and voice of the prophet with his face to the future, both God-ward and man-ward, burning with an undivided devotion to truth and righteousness. It needs less the priest, too often with his back to the future and too often the pliant tool of the organisation whose chief concern is, and ever has been, the preservation of itself under the ostensible purpose[Pg 259] of the preservation of the truth once delivered, the same that Jesus with his keen powers of penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high moral guide and as an inspirer to high and unself-centred endeavour, and that he characterised with such scathing scorn. There are splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now even as it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not a system; with righteousness, not custom; with justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare say that if Christianity—the Christianity of the Christ—had been actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would. We need again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us back to those simple fundamental teachings of the Christ of Nazareth, that are life-giving to the individual, and that are world-saving.

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and the common man, especially in times like these, asks what it is, where it is—and God knows that we have been for many hundred years wandering in the wilderness. He is[Pg 260] thinking that the Kingdom of God on earth that the true teachings of Jesus predicated, and that he laboured so hard to actualise, needs some speeding up. There is a world-wide yearning for spiritual peace and righteousness on the part of the common man. He is finding it occasionally in established religion, but often, perhaps more often, independently of it. He is finding it more often through his own contact and relations with the Man of Nazareth—for him the God-man. There is no greater fact in our time, and there is no greater hope for the future than is to be found in this fact.

Jesus gave the great principles, the animating spirit of life, not minute details of conduct. The real Church of Christ is not an hierarchy, an institution, it is a brotherhood—the actual establishing of the Kingdom of God in moral, ethical and social terms in the world.

Among the last words penned by Dr. John Watson—Ian Maclaren—good churchman, splendid writer, but above all independent thinker and splendid man, were the following: "Was it not the chief mistake and also the hopeless futility of Pharisaism to meddle with the minute affairs of life, and to lay down what a man should do at every turn? It was not therefore an education of conscience,[Pg 261] but a bondage of conscience; it did not bring men to their full stature by teaching them to face their own problems of duty and to settle them, it kept them in a state of childhood, by forbidding and commanding in every particular of daily life. Pharisaism, therefore, whether Jewish or Gentile, ancient or modern, which replaces the moral law by casuistry, and the enlightened judgment of the individual by the confessional, creates a narrow character and mechanical morals. Freedom is the birthright of the soul, and it is by the discipline of life the soul finds itself. It were a poor business to be towed across the pathless ocean of this world to the next; by the will of God and for our good we must sail the ship ourselves, and steer our own course. It is the work of the Bible to show us the stars and instruct us how to take our reckoning * * *.

"Jesus did not tell us what to do, for that were impossible, as every man has his own calling, and is set in by his own circumstances, but Jesus has told us how to carry ourselves in the things we have to do, and He has put the heart in us to live becomingly, not by pedantic rules, but by an instinct of nobility. Jesus is the supreme teacher of the Bible and He came not to forbid or to command, but to place the Kingdom of God as a[Pg 262] living force, and perpetual inspiration within the soul of man, and then, to leave him in freedom and in grace to fulfil himself."[G]

We no longer admit that Christ is present and at work only when a minister is expounding the gospel or some theological precept or conducting some ordained observance in the pulpit; or that religion is only when it is labelled as such and is within the walls of a church. That belonged to the chapter in Christianity that is now rapidly closing, a chapter of good works and results—but so pitiably below its possibilities. So pitiably below because men had been taught and without sufficient thought accepted the teaching that to be a Christian was to hold certain beliefs about the Christ that had been formulated by early groups of men and that had come down through the centuries.

The chapter that is now opening upon the world is the one that puts Christ's own teachings in the simple, frank, and direct manner in which he gave them, to the front. It makes life, character, conduct, human concern and human service of greater importance than mere matters of opinion. It makes eager and unremitting work for the establishing of the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of right relations between men, here on this earth, the[Pg 263] essential thing. It insists that the telling test as to whether a man is a Christian is how much of the Christ spirit is in evidence in his life—and in every phase of his life. Gripped by this idea which for a long time the forward-looking and therefore the big men in them have been striving for, our churches in the main are moving forward with a new, a dauntless, and a powerful appeal.

Differences that have sometimes separated them on account of differences of opinion, whether in thought or interpretation,[H] are now found to be so insignificant when compared to the actual simple fundamentals that the Master taught, and when compared to the work to be done, that a great Interallied Church Movement is now taking concrete and strong working form, that is equipping the church for a mighty and far-reaching Christian work. A new and great future lies immediately ahead. The good it is equipping itself to accomplish is beyond calculation—a work in which minister and layman will have equal voice and equal share.

It will receive also great inspiration and it will eagerly strike hands with all allied movements[Pg 264] that are following the same leader, but along different roads.

Britain's apostle of brotherhood and leader of the Brotherhood Movement there, Rev. Tom Sykes, who has caught so clearly the Master's own basis of Christianity—love for and union with God, love for and union with the brother—has recently put so much stimulating truth into a single paragraph that I reproduce it here: