There is a faith that overcomes the world, or at least there has been such a faith, and there is a faith, as is only too obvious, that is overcome by the world. The prophets who write “Declines and Falls” have in recent times been busy with their forecasts and they have found much disturbing material. There are many confusions abroad which are bound to arrest attention and to chill optimistic hopes. Among the many confusions there are two types that are most clearly in the foreground of present-day consciousness. The financial confusion is a well-recognized fact, patent to all observers. Every industry is affected. Every investor of money is seriously concerned. Every laborer is made anxious. Every banker is worried. Every statesman in every country is harried over problems of budgets and balances, currency values and doles. Never before, perhaps, to quite the same extent has the whole world been made conscious at one time of business depression and of the tragedies of unemployment.
There is at the same time a drift of moral and spiritual confusion which is as widespread and as ominous, though it does not come home in the same arresting [p. vi] fashion to every home and to every class of society. It is not evenly distributed. It is more obvious in some places than it is in others. The great flywheel of habit carries many persons along their old paths and ensures social stability at least for a time, but the old order has given way and there is a vast element of moral chaos. Crime waves have swept over great centers of population in countries that used to be sane and ordered. Bandits infest not only what the pious call “heathen lands,” but, as well, lands which boast of “Christian civilization.” They are almost certainly symptoms of a deeper trouble. The steadying stabilizing power of a great faith has for many persons waned. The rush and hurry, the speed and drive, which prevail, are significant signs of nervous restlessness, if not of hysteria. Serenity and calm are not characteristic virtues of the age. Depth of life and power of endurance which come from the vision of great realities are none too common. The horizon of life with its far perspectives and expectations has narrowed, and the focus of attention has become distinctly secular and this-worldly. Question marks blur the most sacred arks and sanctuaries. There is a “run” on the bank of the ages and the most stable moral and spiritual assets of the past are being critically scrutinized.
At last, the world has been shaken awake and is clearly conscious of its financial confusions. Its experts are busy night and day endeavoring to discover how to [p. vii] save the remnants of wealth, how to stabilize currency, and how to care for those who suffer from unemployment, with the hope eventually of finding a way to give regular employment to all the able-bodied workers of the world.
There is as yet no such awakening to the prevailing moral and spiritual confusion, no such urgency to discover what is the matter with our lives, or what is more important, to find out how to rebuild the shattered foundations of the spiritual structure. It is high time to awake out of sleep and to put on the armor of light. If bankers and statesmen of all countries come together to consult, and hurry from land to land to study the situation, why do not the leaders of thought and the experts concerning the way of life, show a like concern to re-assess the spiritual assets of the race and to point out those realities which still abide because they possess an eternal quality and cannot be shaken?
This situation in which the world finds itself cannot be remedied by a spray of rose water. There is no quick panacea which will put things right. The kind of obsession which has infected our lives and minds calls for a new type of “cure of souls,” and a most serious work of searching the deeps of our being. It is not the business alone of some one lone prophet crying in the wilderness. It will need the cooperative efforts of all those who have experience and wisdom and vision and [p. viii] insight. If we could get all such leaders awake to the issues, as at last the financial experts are awake, there would be good ground for hope that solid foundations for the spiritual structure would be found.
The various types of confusion, almost certainly, go back to a common root and basis. We shall not get permanent stability in any one field until we are on the way to get it in the other fields. There are moral and spiritual grounds involved in the economic and financial confusion as well as purely economic grounds. It is impossible to defy the moral laws of the world and still to have a stable, economic order and to have business go on “as usual.” Before the troubles of the world are over we must rigut wrongs, deal justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly before our God. There are moral and spiritual principles of life that are older than banks or stock-markets and they underlie and undergird the whole of individual and social and national well-being. The bankers and statesmen in the end will need to ask some deeper questions than those that merely concern budgets and balances and the stabilization of currency. The times call for a new type of leadership.
The Christian message and the spiritual task, like the economic and financial problems, have suddenly broadened out and become world-wide issues. We cannot have an effective message or a dynamic gospel for China or for India unless we can discover some fresh [p. ix] power, some deeper interpretation of life that will transform our own civilization and inaugurate a new epoch of faith here in America. We shall not see a new stage of Christian life in far-away fields where missionaries labor until a new breath of life and power touches us and breaks the stranglehold of secularism in the homelands. We must learn how to consume our own selfishness in a new flame of love for Christ and His Kingdom. We need to have our smug selfsatisfied lives invaded by an absorbing and self-annihilating passion of sacrificial love.
We want to know why Christianity is running on low gear. We need to ask what ought to be expected of the Christian Church in this new age. What is its program and what is the secret of its power? What realities survive all the acid tests? What is the live rolled up an immense total of achievements. It has nucleus of our faith to-day and what message can the churches offer a confused world in these days? This book is not a complete survey. It makes no claims to finality or to comprehensiveness. It is what it modestly calls itself, a Preface. The author of it is a member of the Foreign Missions Appraisal Commission for the Orient. He felt that he could not consistendy bring himself to accept a place in that Commission if nothing was to be done to search our own souls and to inquire into the state of Christianity here at home. It seemed to him unwise to try to appraise the situation [p. x] abroad while assuming, without further question, that everything is as it should be here in the home field.
He expressed that view to the Directors of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry and to the other members of the Commission of Appraisal whom they had chosen. It was largely due to the warm encouragement of these Directors and of the Commission itself that the author undertook to prepare this volume, but it should be added that the Inquiry has no official connection with it and is therefore in no way responsible for the views here expressed. With such encouragement the author selected a small Council of Advisers to give him assistance and to criticize his work. The Council of Advisers consisted of the following persons: Professor John Bennett, Auburn, N. Y.; President Henry Sloan Coffin, New York City; Dr. Julius Seelye Bixler, Northampton, Mass.; Dean Charles W. Gilkey, Chicago; Dr. Henry T. Hodgkin, Wallingford, Pennsylvania; Dr. Lynn Harold Hough, Madison, N. J.; Professor Walter M. Horton, Oberlin, Ohio; Rev. Arthur Lee Kinsolving, Boston; Rev. Joseph Fort Newton, Philadelphia; Richard Roberts, Toronto, Canada; Professor Douglas V. Steere, Haverford, Pennsylvania; Rev. Ernest F. Titde, Evanston, 111.; and Dean Robert R. Wicks, Princeton, N. J. The thirty-three Directors of the Fellowship for Christian Cooperation were also invited to sit with the advisers at an important conference and [p. xi] to share in the study and criticism o£ the original draft. It was, further, sent to a large list of thoughtful religious leaders in America and abroad. The help and guidance from these various sources have been generously given and most gratefully received. It is impossible adequately to express what I owe to the Council of Advisers. But all responsibility for the conclusions and for the way of expressing the conclusions must rest with the author. Nobody on earth could deal with all these complicated matters sincerely, honestly and fearlessly, and at the same time satisfy all the diverse minds in all the branches of thought and sectarian folds in our divided Christendom. But there is a faith, a message, a power of life, a mighty experience of God, which goes down under all these divisions and differences and which can unite us all in one tremendous world task, adequate for this epoch. This work will fail of its aim if it does not rally its readers, young and old, to this supreme business of life.
Haverford College,
Haverford, Pa.