The herald., 1897-05-03
! CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY
ur scUssED By THE REV. BURT
ESTES HOWARD
DR.. Thomson Considers the Symboli-
cal Meaning Of the Cross Of Christ.
DR.. Mclean on Revivals

second sermon by Mr.. Howard at the
First Presbyterian church on the theme,
"A Catholic Christianity" The text was
found in John xii:47, For came not
to Judge the world, but to save the
world"
No notion could be farther from the
truth than the conception, far too COM
mon, that the business of religion is the
saving of a few individuals out of a
wrecked world. with little or no redemp-
tive mission to the world itself. Some
how we have fallen into the way of look
ing at the things which legitimately
claim the greater portion of our time and
strength and thought, as having no
spiritual significance and no religious
quality. The various departments OF
our social system which we dub "secu-
lar" such as business, politics, art, ed
ucation and amusement, have been
treated as IL they were wholly nom
moral. Religion has been cooped up in
cloister or bottled up in cult, while
the busy, work-a day life Of the people
has been regarded as thing in which
God takee little interest-as If God of
any intelligence and common sense, to
say nothing Of justice and righteousness.
were more concerned about getting men
bowling and scraping, and sermonizing,
and psalm singing. and praying in public
every seventh day. than in getting men
to be true and, earnest and holy seven
whole days in every week in all their
pursuits.
Religion is a poor. miserable little af-
fair. too puny and petty to merit the at
tention of men who are busy trying to
right the wrongs of this world of ours,
if it means only system of ceremonial
ism and set of dogmatic formulas, and
leaves the great problems Of civilization
out of its direct consideration and
sphere. And little God, who is more
anxious about the little trumpery of
little ecclesiastical proprieties, and who
is more Interested in the little niceties
of an aesthetic adoration~of Himself,
than He is in the great tide of life that
is pulsing and throbbing through the
mighty heart of humanity, rushing out
into all the arteries of human activity,
is altogether too little for great souled
men to waste any time on. He is not the
God that Jesus revealed, nor is He the
God that is working out the problems of
universal destiny.
If the words of Jesus we are studying
have any meaning at all they declare un-
equivocally that the purpose Of God and
of His Christ is to get the whole organ
lied life Of the world pervaded with
righteousness. The language is specific.
1t cannot be contracted to fit the little
theologies of little men without doing
violence to the main thought. 1t is the
world itself that God is trying to save,
and it is the world itself that Jesus sets
forth as the sphere of His own redemp-
tive ministry. But with blindness that
is shameful We have forsaken the great
inclusive ideal of God, and have nursed
our shrunken, withered, arbitrary eX-
clusivism that has little of Christ's broad
spirit in it, and we have deemed it the
divine mission of religion to get every
body that we could into the church, in
stead of seeing that what God wants.
and what the church itself is for, is to get
society so pervaded with the mind and
spirit of Christ that there will be no
need of any church as the center of wor-
ship, because all the world will be Gods
temple ard all life will be worship.
Christianity was not sent into the world
to build fences and run walls of separ-
tion between the world and snug little
ecclesiasticism of its own, into which
men may come on presentation of a
ticket stamped with the proper Calvinis-
tic or Arminian label.
We have made the mistake of looking
at the substance of Jesus teachings as
If He were preaching the gospel of the
social unit, instead of the gospel of the
social unity. All the teaching and
preaching of Jesus, all the working of
God in human life, converge in this one
vast purpose-not to save individuals
primarily-but to redeem the organized
life Of the world into holy social order
which Jesus called the kingdom of God.
He meant by it the inspiration of God
in the whole social life Of the world
commerce, government, industry, art,
education and recreation. This is the
root of it. The burden of t. gospel is
not the snatching of few individuals
out Of this world into another, but the
establishment of human society on earth
In spirit of love and justice and truth.
The failure to recognize the fundamental
fact of Christianity that it is a force re-
leased into this life to redeem it, and
that the kingdom God is trying to set
up is a kingdom of men in this world and
not a kingdam of dieembodied spirits in
another world, has narrowed the scope
of religious action and has cut off by
abandonment some of the strongest
moral agencies the world can know.
Because the church has devoted itself
to building up aa.prim little cult in the
complex life of the world, it has loosened
the hold both of religion and morals on
that part of life which is greatest and
the most intimate. Christianity was
sent into the world to be a saving, glow
Ing, uplifting energy in the heart of all
our social life-winning souls into its
fellowship of service, but winning them
into something definite, earthly and
practical, into something real and tangi-
BILE and present. Jesus did not come to
withdraw men from the worlds busy
life, but to teach them how to live it, He
saw life with a clear vision and saw it
whole" To HINT was all sacred. The
horizon of the spiritual was not mar
rowed till it embraced only a rite and
ceremony Of worship. All things were
clasped BY it and the business of relig-