Principles of Our Vice-President
By Editor
IN another column we have given excerpts from a soul-impelling speech from President Wilson. We feel it but just also to let our readers know the principles of our vice-president, Thomas R. Marshall. The quotations which follow are taken from an address by him before the second quadrennial council of the Federation of Churches of Christ in America, and was delivered Friday evening, December 6, 1912. It was an address delivered upon the Young People's Organizations and Christian Unity. We know of no stronger utterances of the need of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and of the true principles of Christian liberty than these, and we will say of this, as of the extracts from the president's address, that we hope that our readers who pray, will pray that these may be the principles which will guide and direct in the mighty responsibilities which will rest upon him in his new office.14 "What are the conditions of the various Christian denominations in America to-day? Is it just the complaint of old men like myself, founded upon no facts whatever, that the church organization is losing to a greater or less degree its hold upon the lives and conduct of men? Is it true that the pews of our places of worship are measurably being deserted by the men of America? Has the church organization lost its ancient power and its all-compelling influence? When asked if her husband was a member of the church, Mrs. Wiggs said, 'No, he is just a well-wisher.' Are men now, whether their names are upon the rolls of the churches or not, just well-wishers?" "There is, I sometimes think, a weakening to a greater or less degree in the spiritual power of the church together with a lessening of the faith and hopes of men. I think I know what has produced it. From my view-point, Jesus Christ was not a reformer in the usual and ordinary acceptance of that term. He lived when the greatest despotism that the world has ever known ruled the habitable globe. Yet, the only recorded statement of anything He said with reference to the Roman Empire was, 'Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's.' Slavery had reached the very depths of degradation, and yet His great apostle advised a runaway slave to return to his master. The Christ was not engaged in repealing bad laws nor in providing criminal punishments for the violators of good ones." "Jesus Christ was more than a reformer. He was a regenerator. The church is to stand as the representative of the kingdom of God on earth, and 'except ye be born again, ye can not enter into the kingdom.' He brooded over Jerusalem as a hen broods over her chickens, and yet, He never strove to make bad Jerusalem appear to be good Jerusalem. He was wiser, because He was divine, than we are. He sought to teach men that God was their Father; that He had come to save them from their transgressions; and that no man could approximate unto good citizenship, or hope to enter into His kingdom, unless he had an abiding faith in Him as the mediator and redeemer of mankind, despite the weakness, frailties, follies, and sins of human nature." "It may be that there is no lessening of faith upon the part of the people, but that it is only a lessened knowledge. It is true that the average of knowledge among all the people with reference to the vital principles of our religious faith, is not as great as it was in the days of our fathers." "If I remember aright, the Shorter Catechism defines sin as any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God. The church was a divinely appointed institution to proclaim the necessity of regeneration and an honest endeavor to be obedient unto the law of God. I do not wish to criticize, but I do want you to look around and see whether the church is not more and more becoming an ethical society interested in the uplift of humanity by good works and good laws, and in the preaching of propagandas against public evils which it dreams are immediately suppressed, if general assemblies and congresses enact laws making such evils offenses. This, I call symptomatic treatment. I do not deny that it affords some relief, but it does not go to the root. You may investigate and should investigate a thieving public official, and you should put him out of office for the protection of the public service. But by so doing, you have not added anything to the sum of the world's honesty. With like opportunity he will be a thief somewhere else. It is only when he is regenerated, and comes to regard larceny not as a breach of faith nor as a violation of the civil law but as a violation of the law of God, that the sum of human honesty has been increased, and I maintain that the state can not do this thing. That is the work for which the Saviour of mankind set up His church in this world." "Let me ask, Are not men more and more picking out some particular evil of the day and devoting their entire time, energy, and ability to the enactment of some law which will make that evil unlawful, and are they not shouting with joy when some general assembly enacts a statute to cover it? If there is a weakness in the church organization of to-day, that weakness springs from the fact that too many of the followers of the Nazarene are more interested in some particular phase of evil in civil life than they are in proclaiming the original sin of mankind and its only sure remedy—an undoubting, unqualified, and everlasting hold upon the gospel of the Galilean." "The world is filled full of good works and good workers; of men and women who want things to be right; who are striving to have right laws; who are longing to do good and kindly things; but no man can go through life successfully upon a mere emotion. He is foolish who thinks to minister to a soul diseased by some sporadic deed of goodness. I do not care how much the prominent member of the church may give to missions and to charities; if I am convinced that he got the money from the blood and sweat and toil of his weak brothers and sisters, or if he made it by transgressions—legal under the law of the land, but unmoral under the law of God—he is not a Christian. Such men would better cease trying to bribe God by good works; they would much better seek for forgiveness, and, Zaccheus-like, try to straighten the past." "I do not think that we would be harmed if denominationalism were a bit stronger than it is at the present time. I think there is a noblesse oblige of religion as there is of patriotism. The three hundred made the charge at Balaklava not because of hope of success but because England expected every man to do his duty. Men daily do things they do not want to do because the obligations of society or of business require it of them. The fine things of life are done in this spirit." "No one will ever be able to convince me that the church is not a divinely appointed organization upon earth; that it is not a hospital wherein men and women are to be reborn, not once, but at least once a week, and soon, I hope, once each day; reborn to a knowledge of their need of dependency and reliance upon a higher power; reborn to a faith that if they will grip the Unseen, the Eternal, and trust it in every hour of sunshine and in every moment of despair, that not by might and by power, but by the Spirit of the living God, out of weakness shall come strength, and out of evil shall arise good, and that sometime, somewhere, somehow, the new-born soul, stripped of the sins of life, shall rise in a newer and a brighter life in the perfection of beauty and of holiness." Value of a Young People's Organization
"The kingdom of God was to be in the earth and not of it. I hope soon, all church organizations will make it their exclusive mission to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to reach the conclusion that the world is to be regenerated by regenerated men and women and not by regenerated laws and ordinances. The value and efficiency of a young people's organization must essentially depend upon the zeal and fervor of the church from which it springs. If its minister can draw more inspiration from a Titanic disaster than from the cross of Calvary, the church will be a very beautiful literary society, whose Saturday evening hops are largely attended, but so wearying as to keep the members from church until some fresh horror has furnished the pastor with a text upon which to preach. If, however, the organization springs from a church whose pastor has the spirit of John Knox, when he cried, 'Give me Scotland or I die,' who is not brooding over laws and ordinances and constitutions, but over the ruined and needy condition of men, who is not taking men in a mass, but who is taking them one by one and bearing them to the throne of God, then that organization will be strong not only in the good works of this life but in the faith which it has in the ultimate triumph of the gospel of Christ. . . . The real life of the people depends on their faith in Almighty God." "It should be the business of a young people's society to get a firm hold not only upon the good works of life but also upon the vital principles of our religion. The members should grapple them to their hearts as with hooks of steel, and set them as jewels in the coronets of their lives. They should understand that there can not be much faith in any person or anything about which we know nothing. The pendulum of good works has swung us too far away from God. Some of us trust Him with utter indifference, as tho He did not exist. Some of us have exalted His goodness and mercy until we trust Him as tho He were a next-door neighbor with whom we have no social relations, but whom we trust will send flowers at our funerals. I hope that I may not be considered a mere carping critic. I am sure I am not an iconoclast. I do not want to tear down one good thing in society. I do not knowingly want to prevent one good thing from being accomplished, but I would like to have every single church organization in America and every young people's society connected therewith, to understand that there are certain truths of religion which no man is wise not to learn and which every man is foolish to neglect." "The church anywhere that is being deserted, is being deserted because its various organizations are not appealing to the one vital need of every sentient human being, a need which may not be everywhere and always present, but which is sometime and somewhere surely present—a feeling by man that he can not bear the burdens of life alone, that he must rest his faith and hope upon the Unseen and the Eternal. When that feeling comes, man wants some place in which some person may tell him how to grasp and hold securely in his hand the one great fact of human history—the sacrifice upon the cross of Calvary." "Churches and church organizations ought always to have their lamps trimmed and burning, that there may be no night so dark that one who wants to find his way may not be enabled to grasp the flickering torch of faith in the sacrifice of the Sinless One. And these lamps will only burn brightly when all of us not only know but believe that all the law and all the prophets found their fulfilment in that cross which the Man of sorrows bore in weariness along the Via Dolorosa."