[Understanding that we would not be able to hear from our regular correspondent relative to the Convention of Northern Baptists, we presented quite a full report last week. Since then we have received a report from our special correspondent, and give the additional space necessary to present some interesting matter not given previously.—EDITOR.]
The first annual meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention since its organization at Oklahoma City last year, was held in Portland, Ore., from June 25 to July 2. From the time the 1,342 delegates gathered at the White Temple for their first meeting on Friday night, until the close of the Convention a week later, it was evident from the admissions of almost every speaker from the platform that they realized the inactivity of the Baptist denomination in mission work, and desired to spur it to action.
An effort was made on the part of a large proportion of delegates, to have the tithing system officially adopted by vote of the Convention body, it being thought by many to be the best method of raising mission funds. But the executive committee recommended that the members of all Baptist churches in the country pay an amount proportionate to their earnings, the proportion to be left to each individual church. There were intimations on the part of a few that the tithing system is “Jewish,” but this was not general. The resolution, as finally adopted, was as follows:
“Resolved: That Christian stewardship with special reference to systematic and proportionate giving be made a leading feature in the work of all of our missionary organizations throughout the coming year. As a practical measure, We recommend:
“1. That the churches be requested to lead the largest possible number of their members to form the habit of laying aside a definite proportion of their income for distinctively Christian work.
“2. That while recognizing the fact that local conditions determine methods, we endorse for modern application the principle of Paul in 1 Cor. 16:2, and strongly recommend weekly offerings to missions as the method best suited to most churches. It is, of course, essential to the largest success of this method that it should be supported by a thorough-going, educational campaign, and in some cases by supplementary offerings. We believe that the method explained in “United instead of Divided Giving” is worthy of at least careful consideration. It provides that all current expenses of the church, with all its auxiliary organizations, and all missionary offerings from all departments of the church, be included in two budgets to be raised by weekly offerings.”
It was evident soon after the Convention opened that a careful pilot would be needed to guide the denominational bark safely into the harbor, where she was to remain for another twelve-month, for with many minds there were many different opinions upon important theological questions. Such a pilot was Dr. Harry Pratt Judson, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and chairman of the Convention. That he possessed “lubricating sagacity,” as one speaker remarked, the Convention delegates did not doubt.
A Crisis
Doctor Judson fully realized his position, for he remarked on the first day of the Convention that the Baptists had “arrived at a crisis in religious and denominational issues. We are facing the new in religious method and thought,” he said. “We must prove ourselves equal to a denominational crisis, and prevent retrogression or disruption.” Upon the last night of the Convention, he said that it had been “the pleasant duty of the chairman to prevent the Convention from tying its hands.”
It was on the last day, July 2, that Dr. Judson’s “lubricating sagacity” came unexpectedly into play. Dr. M. A. Levy, of Newtown Center, Mass., arose during the morning session, and asked the chairman if it would be proper for the Convention to express by resolution its appreciation of the action taken by the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition management in closing the Fair on Sunday, and in prohibiting the sale of liquor on the grounds. The chairman replied in a twinkling that this would be highly proper if warranted by the facts. That it was not warranted by the facts was discovered by Dr. Levy later. The state law governs the sale of liquor, he said, and the Fair is not entirely closed on Sunday.
Altho some of the speakers from the White Temple platform during the Convention favored religious liberty in its fullest sense, there was a noticeable leaning toward church-and-state combination on the part of other Baptist speakers. “The Catholic Church is a combination which speaks, and politicians listen,” said Dr. Thomas J. Villers, in his sermon the last Friday night of the Convention. “We are just beginning to find ourselves. Our hearts are beating as one. We are a body now to be reckoned with, not a jest or a plaything. Let us prove our fitness to grasp and grapple with the practical questions of our age, by bringing ourselves into contact with humanity at the point of need. Let us speak so as to make ourselves heard in reformatory legislation, and in the social questions of the day. That is our privilege as followers of the Nazarene Carpenter, for at bottom all social and industrial problems are religious. The social and industrial sores of this land, and of other lands, can be healed only by the touch of the wounded hand, and that hand the church holds.”
Vital Christianity Needed
Doctor Villers’ sermon subject was “A Preview, a New Emphasis.” In it he urged that preachers be daily incarnations of truth, that the laymen must win the world for Christ, that profession of Christianity without practise is dead, that all men are indebted to God for this world’s goods, and that all are indebted to races who grope in ignorance.
The speaker’s attitude toward the Sunday-closing laws which have been pressed upon Congress, session after session, he did not definitely express. But in alluding to Mr. Bolce’s article on college teachings, found in the June “Cosmopolitan,” he said: “Leave to others the flippant criticism which says of the Decalogue that God never turned stonemason, and chiseled it out of the rock, and of the New Testament that it is mostly composed of old Jew stars, burned out. Insist that men shall test Christianity by trying it. Let us put off the charge that the church is a woman’s organization.”
Church and State
Further evidence of the tendency on the part of some to weld the government with the church in the white-hot coals of present-day labor and social struggles, came to light in the address of Rev. M. P. Fikes, of Detroit, on “The Church and the Young People.” “The intelligent gaze of the world is focused upon the church,” said the speaker. “It is for the church to enter every door of opportunity. Some say, ‘Keep out of politics, don’t preach it in your pulpit; don’t talk it in private.’ Will some one arise and tell me what the object of the church is other than the purification of the state, the purification of the damnable doings which exist in the democracies of to-day? (Applause.) Tell me where there can be any content in listening to the war-drums sounding on the fields of action. Where can there be any content in the church of Christ so long as blood furnishes the ink with which human history is written? It is for the church of Jesus Christ to take boyhood and girlhood and to so instruct it that there will be a great abhorrence of war, so it will be considered better to develop brains and brawn, than bayonets and war-drums.”
“Upon the fields where capital and labor do battle to-day, and in the churches where the rich and poor sit together, it may be that the Lord is the Father of them all, but they have not yet realized it. There are all sorts of panaceas; God knows the world is full of them, from the Socialist who wants to slice up all the property to the anarchist who wants to slice up all the property owners. They are about as effective as a poultice of shingle nails would be in curing cancer. The one panacea is the God of our fathers.”
To describe the “higher criticism” of the Bible, indulged in by university professors before their classes, Dr. Villers used the somewhat inelegant expression “tommyrot.” “The college youth upon returning home,” sits before the preacher with a cynical smile upon his face, and says of the sermon, “That is antedated.”
Then the speaker turned again to politics, said politicians tell the church to keep off their territory, because they do not respect her authority, and this because she has lost her power.
“I would not restrict research or intelligent investigation,” he continued. “We should get at the root of the truth. If this church is not founded on the impregnable rock of Scripture, but a growth of Scripture instead, the root must drive itself down into the Rock of Ages, or down it will go.”
Views on Education
Rev. H. A. Green, of Illinois, urged that the Sunday-schools and the public schools be united. “It is the growing consensus of widespread conviction,” said he, “that the chasm between Sunday-school work, and the work of the public schools of our free democracy must not be bridged, but filled up, so there will be solid earth on which to tread down the paths between the two.”
“Fathers and mothers in modern Israel,” continued the speaker, “you send your children to the best academies, colleges, and universities, where they learn some facts, and learn to think under the inspiration of the brightest disciplined minds. Remember that the whole boy goes to day-school, and then to Sunday-school. He has not two isolated compartments in which he can tuck away two different styles of teaching, and two systems of thinking. We have a problem on our hands. I know that a good man, and a sweet Christian woman, with little book-knowledge, so-called, can by sheer goodness of character and sweetness of conduct, lead a boy into the Christian life, but after faith comes the demand for virtue, and then comes the demand for knowledge—knowledge that leads to unity and peace of mind.
“With such preaching in the pulpit as11should be given, and proper teaching in the school, the church will not be a competitor of clubs and societies, not a rival of the Y. M. C. A., not the tail-end of every new reform, not a faint imitation of a lecture bureau, not an annex to a therapeutic institute, not an enemy of the university, but a church with a distinct mission.”
Considering that the Baptists were leaders in the early history of the country in the separating of church and state, these words are significant of a new order of things that is to be lamented.
Modernizing Tendencies
Speaking upon “The Evangelistic Ideals of the Modern Church,” in the White Temple the night of June 26, Rev. Harold Pattison, of Minnesota, said:
“The evangelism of the modern church must not speak to the early Christian ages or the Middle Ages, but to the men of to-day. Its terms must be modern. Every age feels keenly some one thing, through which it can be touched. The belief of our fathers that they were to have a life of eternal bliss in the next world has weakened with the men of to-day. Even those who believe this with all their hearts are not influenced by it as were our fathers. But righteousness and religious reality are cravings in the hearts of men to-day. It is not what a church believes, but what this century demands, we emphasize, that counts.
“Biblical scholars have done more than we realize to make evangelism what it is to-day. The age when a man has the right to face the facts of life, and to interpret them fearlessly, according to his own intelligence and conscience, and to stand alongside of other men who may find another interpretation of the same facts, without quarreling, has, thank God, dawned upon us. Biblical scholarship has given to some of us a Book that is more dear and more real and powerful than that Book has ever been in the years of the past.
“What is it to be orthodox? I am sick and tired of hearing of those artificial terms, New Thought, Higher Criticism, Heterodoxy, and Orthodoxy. As men use them so glibly I am sure of one thing, and that is that they are not sure what those terms mean. What is it to be heterodox, and what is it to be orthodox, according to the New Testament? The only test of the New Testament is life. ‘I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.’ Whatever is dead is heterodox, and whatever good thing is alive is heterodox, according to the New Testament. (Applause.)
“If this be true, any man, whatever be the terms in which he expresses the message God has spoken, who has the power as Phillips Brooks had it, and as Horace Mann had it, to raise men into the higher world where they themselves dwelt, and to give them a greater knowledge of the eternal life throbbing in their hearts, is an evangelistic preacher. Such is the reasonable message of the evangelism of to-day. Had it been true, as Dr. George H. Gordon, of Boston, has recently declared, that the Christian intellect has in the past been forced to go outside of organized church gatherings for its progress and for its growth—if that be true, so much the worse then for organized Christianity. In my boyhood days I was almost told that a thing to be true could not be clear, and the mystier a thing was the truer it ought to be to me. When I said, ‘I can not understand it,’ I was told, ‘Of course you do not understand it, if you understood it you could not be saved.’ That day has gone by when men can choke down the throats of men and women, and boys and girls, a mystery, and say to them, ‘Whether you digest it or not, hold it, for by holding you are saved or damned.’
“Was it not Milton who described the Archangel as saying to Adam that God had made astronomy a complicated subject in order that the puzzles and the trials of scientific men should be a matter of entertainment to the Almighty? Systematic theology? You do not have to believe that to be saved. Thank God you don’t. Some of it is so systematic that it is unnatural.
Kuroki, one of the famous Japanese generals of the Russo-Japanese War, taken while on his visit to this country after the war.
“We recognize the need of a restatement of Christian doctrine, a need which is already being met. There are many who never rise, never enter the room of inquiry, because, though the personality of the evangelist may appeal to them, there is nothing in their hungry and thirsting hearts that can respond to the message which he bears. It is not right to sing, ‘The old-time religion is good enough for me,’ as tho we meant that all the past had for us must be clothed in past terms and manners. We must be saved by the same truths which saved our fathers, but that is not to say that they must be clothed in the same terms.”
“Beauty of Inconsistency”
“Tom Paine and men of his ilk could never trouble this age, because the Bible is recognized not as a rock of Holy Scripture, but as a growth of Holy Scripture. No longer can the Bible be appealed to to support polygamy, and slavery, and rum, because men are realizing that the Bible says what the Bible says and will not believe that because a thing is in the Bible, therefore it must be true, even if the devil did say it. That is the flat method of interpretation. I learned from a laundryman recently that flat work is done with a mangle, and surely some of the old interpretations were mangled work with a vengeance. Now we have a real Book, with real power, and with a human interest so high that it is divine.
“We are recognizing the variety of Christian experience. No two conversations are alike. We are recognizing the right to liberty, and learning to grow in Christian faith and Christian discipleship. The beauty of inconsistency is one of the messages of modern evangelism. ‘Speak what you think to-day,’ said Emerson, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks, tho it contradicts everything which you spoke to-day.’
“O, if some of us had only known these things from the evangelism of the past! It may have been our fault, but the pain was no less severe, when messages were crowded down our throats that called all that God had put within us to rise in rebellion. If some of us had only known, what nights of darkness and pain might have been saved? But then, at last, God’s light broke, and just as sailors clear away the wreckage from the deck after the storm, so that wreckage was cut away. And as we saw it drift yonder over the sea, we could only glory in that which was lost because of the greater which was found.
“Evangelism must be durable, it must result in permanent moral changes. . . . If Jesus Christ is a man, and only a man, I say that of all mankind I cleave to Him, and to Him will I cleave alway. If Jesus Christ is a God, and the only God, I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell, the earth, the sea, and the air.”
While this shows a reaction from the old dogmatic attitude of religious men of the generation that is past, it also voices a liberalism that sounds the note of danger for this large and popular denomination. Christ can not be a man and only a man, and continue to hold His power over human hearts. If the present generation can settle itself to the plane where it accepts Christ only as a man, the next generation will go further and call Him an impostor. The churches of to-day, unable to stem the tide of so-called liberalism, are making terms of peace with it. A sad compromise it is.
