By Henry Drummond
I, John,
Saw the Holy City,
New Jerusalem,
Coming down from God out of Heaven.
* * *
And I saw no Temple therein.
* * *
And His servants shall serve Him;
And they shall see His Face;
And His Name shall be written on their foreheads.
TWO very startling things arrest
us in John's vision of the future. The first is that the likest thing to
Heaven he could think of was a City; the second, that there was no Church
in that City.
Almost nothing more revolutionary could be
said, even to the modern world, in the name of religion. No Church--that
is the defiance of religion; a City--that is the antipodes of Heaven.
Yet John combines these contradictions in one daring image, and holds up
to the world the picture of a City without a Church as his ideal of the
heavenly life.
By far the most original thing here is the
simple conception of Heaven as a City. The idea of religion without a Church--
"I saw no Temple therein"--is anomalous enough; but the association
of the blessed life with a City--the one place in the world from
which Heaven seems most far away-- is something wholly new in religious
thought. No other religion which has a Heaven ever had a Heaven like this.
The Greek, if he looked forward at all, awaited the Elysian Fields; the
Eastern sought Nirvana. All other Heavens have been Gardens, Dreamlands--passivities
more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves Heaven is a
siesta and not a City. It remained for John to go straight to the other
extreme and select the citadel of the world's fever, the ganglion of its
unrest, the heart and focus of its most strenuous toil, as the framework
for his ideal of the blessed life.
The Heaven of Christianity is different from
all other Heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from
all other religions. Christianity is the religion of Cities. It moves among
real things. Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working-life
of the world.
And what interests one for the present in
John's vision is not so much what it reveals of a Heaven beyond, but what
it suggests of the nature of the heavenly life in this present world. Find
out what a man's Heaven is-- no matter whether it be a dream or a reality,
no matter whether it refer to an actual Heaven or to a Kingdom of God to
be realized on earth--and you pass by an easy discovery to what his religion
is; And herein lies one value at least of this allegory. It is a
touchstone for Christianity, a test for the solidity or the insipidity
of one's religion, for the wholesomeness or the fatuousness of one's faith,
for the usefulness or the futility of one's life. For this vision of the
City marks off in lines which no eye can mistake the true area which the
religion of Christ is meant to inhabit, and announces for all time the
real nature of the saintly life.
City life is human life at its intensest,
man in his most real relations. And the nearer one draws to reality, the
nearer one draws to the working sphere of religion. Wherever real life
is, there Christ goes. And He goes there, not only because the great need
lies there, but because there is found, so to speak, the raw material with
which Christianity works--the life of man. To do something with this, to
infuse something into this, to save and inspire and sanctify this, the
actual working life of the world, is what He came for. Without human life
to act upon, without the relations of men with one another, of master with
servant, husband with wife, buyer with seller, creditor with debtor, there
is no such thing as Christianity. With actual things, with Humanity in
its everyday dress, with the traffic of the streets, with gates and houses,
with work and wages, with sin and poverty, with these things, and
all the things and all the relations and all the people of the City, Christianity
has to do and has more to do than with anything else. To conceive of the
Christian religion as itself a thing--a something which can exist apart
from life; to think of it as something added on to being, something kept
in a separate compartment called the soul, as an extra accomplishment like
music, or a special talent like art, is totally to misapprehend its nature.
It is that which fills all compartments. It is that which makes the whole
life music and every separate action a work of art. Take away action and
it is not. Take away people, houses, streets, character, and it ceases
to be. Without these there may be sentiment, or rapture, or adoration,
or superstition; there may even be religion, but there can never be the
religion of the Son of Man.
If Heaven were a siesta, religion might be
conceived of as a reverie. If the future life were to be mainly spent in
a Temple, the present life might be mainly spent in Church. But if Heaven
be a City, the life of those who are going there must be a real life. The
man who would enter John's Heaven, no matter what piety or what faith he
may profess, must be a real man. Christ's gift to men was life, a rich
and abundant life. And life is meant for living. An abundant life does
not show itself in abundant dreaming, but in abundant living--in abundant
living among real and tangible objects and to actual and practical purposes.
"His servants," John tells us, "shall serve." In this
vision of the City he confronts us with a new definition of a Christian
man-- the perfect saint is the perfect citizen.
To make Cities--that is what we are here
for. To make good Cities--that is for the present hour the main work of
Christianity. For the City is strategic. It makes the towns: the towns
make the villages; the villages make the country. He who makes the City
makes the world. After all, though men make Cities, it is Cities which
make men. Whether our national life is great or mean, whether our social
virtues are mature or stunted, whether our sons are moral or vicious, whether
religion is possible or impossible, depends upon the City. When Christianity
shall take upon itself in full responsibility the burden and care of Cities
the Kingdom of God will openly come on earth. What Christianity waits for
also, as its final apologetic and justification to the world, is the founding
of a City which shall be in visible reality a City of God. People do not
dispute that religion is in the Church. What is now wanted is to let them
see it in the City. One Christian City, one City in any part of the earth,
whose citizens from the greatest to the humblest lived in the spirit of
Christ, where religion had overflowed the Churches and passed into the
streets, inundating every house and workshop, and permeating the whole
social and commercial life--one such Christian City would seal the redemption
of the world.
Some such City, surely, was what John saw
in his dream. Whatever reference we may find there to a world to come,
is it not equally lawful to seek the scene upon this present world? John
saw his City descending out of Heaven. It was, moreover, no strange
apparition, but a City which he knew. It was Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem.
The significance of that name has been altered for most of us by religious
poetry; we spell it with a capital and speak of the New Jerusalem as a
synonym for Heaven. Yet why not take it simply as it stands, as a new Jerusalem?
Try to restore the natural force of the expression--suppose John to have
lived to-day and to have said London? "I saw a new London?" Jerusalem
was John's London. All the grave and sad suggestion that the word London
brings up to-day to the modern reformer, the word Jerusalem recalled to
him. What in his deepest hours he longed and prayed for was a new Jerusalem,
a reformed Jerusalem. And just as it is given to the man in modern England
who is a prophet, to the man who believes in God and in the moral order
of the world, to discern a new London shaping itself through all the sin
and chaos of the City, so was it given to John to see a new Jerusalem
rise from the ruins of the old.
We have no concern--it were contrary to critical
method--to press the allegory in detail. What we take from it, looked
at in this light, is the broad conception of a transformed City, the great
Christian thought that the very Cities where we live, with all their suffering
and sin, shall one day, by the gradual action of the forces of Christianity,
be turned into Heavens on earth. This is a spectacle which profoundly concerns
the world. To the reformer, the philanthropist, the economist, the politician,
this Vision of the City is the great classic of social literature. What
John saw, we may fairly take it, was the future of all Cities. It was the
dawn of a new social order, a regenerate humanity, a purified society,
an actual transformation of the Cities of the world into Cities of God.
This City, then, which John saw is none other
than your City, the place where you live--as it might be, and as you are
to help to make it. It is London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Melbourne, Calcutta--these
as they might be, and in some infinitesimal degree as they have already
begun to be. In each of these, and in every City throughout the world to-day,
there is a City descending out of Heaven from God. Each one of us is daily
building up this City or helping to keep it back. Its walls rise slowly,
but, as we believe in God, the building can never cease. For the might
of those who build, be they few or many, is so surely greater than the
might of those who retard, that no day's sun sets over any City in the
land that does not see some stone of the invisible City laid. To believe
this is faith. To live for this is Christianity.
The project is delirious? Yes--to atheism.
To John it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nay, knowing all he
knew, its realization was inevitable. We forget, when the thing strikes
us as strange, that John knew Christ. Christ was the Light of the World--the
Light of the World. This is all that he meant by his Vision, that
Christ is the Light of the World. This Light, John saw, would fall everywhere--especially
upon Cities. It was irresistible and inextinguishable. No darkness could
stand before it. One by one the Cities of the world would give up their
night. Room by room, house by house, street by street, they would be changed.
Whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie would disappear. Sin, pain,
sorrow, would silently pass away. One day the walls of the City would be
jasper; the very streets would be paved with gold. Then the kings of the
earth would bring their glory and honour into it. In the midst of the streets
there should be a tree of Life. And its leaves would go forth for the healing
of the nations.
Survey the Cities of the world today, survey
your own City--town, village, home --and prophesy. God's kingdom is surely
to come in this world. God's will is surely to be done on earth as it is
done in Heaven. Is not this one practicable way of realizing it? When a
prophet speaks of something that is to be, that coming event is usually
brought about by no unrelated cause or sudden shock, but in the ordered
course of the world's drama. With Christianity as the supreme actor in
the world's drama, the future of its Cities is even now quite clear. Project
the lines of Christian and social progress to their still far off goal,
and see even now that Heaven must come to earth.
IF any one wishes to know what
he can do to help on the work of God in the world let him make a City,
or a street, or a house of a City. Men complain of the indefiniteness of
religion. There are thousands ready in their humble measure to offer some
personal service for the good of men, but they do not know where to begin.
Let me tell you where to begin--where Christ told His disciples to begin,
at the nearest City. I promise you that before one week's work is over
you will never again be haunted by the problem of the indefiniteness of
Christianity. You will see so much to do, so many actual things to be set
right, so many merely material conditions to alter, so much striving with
employers of labour, and City councils, and trade agitators, and Boards,
and Vestries, and Committees; so much pure unrelieved uninspiring hard
work, that you will begin to wonder whether in all this naked realism you
are on holy ground at all. Do not be afraid of missing Heaven in seeking
a better earth. The distinction between secular and sacred is a confusion
and not a contrast; and it is only because the secular is so intensely
sacred that so many eyes are blind before it. The really secular thing
in life is the spirit which despises under that name what is but part of
the everywhere present work and will of God. Be sure that, down to the
last and pettiest detail, all that concerns a better world is the
direct concern of Christ.
I make this, then, in all seriousness as
a definite practical proposal. You wish, you say, to be a religious man.
Well, be one. There is your City; begin. But what are you to believe? Believe
in your City. What else? In Jesus Christ. What about Him? That He wants
to make your City better; that that is what He would be doing if He lived
there. What else? Believe in yourself--that you, even you, can do some
of the work which He would like done, and that unless you do it, it will
remain undone. How are you to begin? As Christ did. First He looked at
the City; then He wept over it; then He died for it.
Where are you to begin? Begin where you are.
Make that one corner, room, house, office as like Heaven as you can. Begin?
Begin with the paper on the walls, make that beautiful; with the air, keep
it fresh; with the very drains, make them sweet; with the furniture, see
that it be honest. Abolish whatsoever worketh abomination--in food, in
drink, in luxury, in books, in art; whatsoever maketh a lie--in conversation,
in social intercourse, in correspondence, in domestic life. This done,
you have arranged for a Heaven, but you have not got it. Heaven
lies within, in kindness, in humbleness, in unselfishness, in faith,
in love, in service. To get these in, get Christ in. Teach all in the house
about Christ--what He did, and what He said, and how He lived, and how
He died, and how He dwells in them, and how He makes all one. Teach it
not as a doctrine, but as a discovery, as your own discovery. Live your
own discovery.
Then pass out into the City. Do all to it
that you have done at home. Beautify it, ventilate it, drain it. Let nothing
enter it that can defile the streets, the stage, the newspaper offices,
the booksellers' counters; nothing that maketh a lie in its warehouses,
its manufactures, its shops, its art galleries, its advertisements. Educate
it, amuse it, church it. Christianize capital; dignify labour. Join Councils
and Committees. Provide for the poor, the sick, and the widow. So will
you serve the City.
If you ask me which of all these things is
the most important, I reply that among them there is only one thing of
superlative importance and that is yourself. By far the greatest
thing a man can do for his City is to be a good man. Simply to live there
as a good man, as a Christian man of action and practical citizen, is the
first and highest contribution any one can make to its salvation. Let a
City be a Sodom or a Gomorrah, and if there be but ten righteous men in
it, it will be saved.
It is here that the older, the more individual,
conception of Christianity, did such mighty work for the world--it produced
good men. It is goodness that tells, goodness first and goodness last.
Good men even with small views are immeasurably more important to the world
than small men with great views. But given good men, such men as were produced
even by the self-centred theology of an older generation, and add that
wider outlook and social ideal which are coming to be the characteristics
of the religion of this age, and Christianity has an equipment for the
reconstruction of the world, before which nothing can stand. Such good
men will not merely content themselves with being good men. They will be
forces--according to their measure, public forces. They will take the city
in hand, some a house, some a street, and some the whole. Of set purpose
they will serve. Not ostentatiously, but silently, in ways varied as human
nature, and many as life's opportunities, they will minister to its good.
To help the people, also, to be good people
good fathers, and mothers, and sons, and citizens--is worth all else rolled
into one. Arrange the government of the City as you may, perfect all its
philanthropic machinery, make righteous its relations great and small,
equip it with galleries and parks, and libraries and music, and carry out
the whole programme of social reform, and the one thing needful is still
without the gates. The gospel of material blessedness is part of a gospel--a
great and Christian part-- but when held up as the whole gospel for the
people it is as hollow as the void of life whose circumference even it
fails to touch.
There are countries in the world--new countries--where
the people, rising to the rights of government, have already secured almost
all that reformers cry for. The lot of the working man there is all but
perfect. His wages are high, his leisure great, his home worthy. Yet in
tens of thousands of cases the secret of life is unknown.
It is idle to talk of Christ as a social
reformer if by that is meant that His first concern was to improve the
organization of society, or provide the world with better laws. These were
among His objects, but His first was to provide the world with better men.
The one need of every cause and every community still is for better men.
If every workshop held a Workman like Him who worked in the carpenter's
shop at Nazareth, the labour problem and all other workman's problems would
soon be solved. If every street had a home or two like Mary's home in Bethany,
the domestic life of the city would be transformed in three generations.
External reforms-- education, civilization,
public schemes, and public charities--have each their part to play. Any
experiment that can benefit by one hairbreadth any single human life is
a thousand times worth trying. There is no effort in any single one of
these directions but must, as Christianity advances, be pressed by Christian
men to ever further and fuller issues. But those whose hands have tried
the ways, and the slow work of leavening men one by one with the spirit
of Jesus Christ.
The thought that the future, that any day,
may see some new and mighty enterprise of redemption, some new departure
in religion, which shall change everything with a breath and make all that
is crooked straight, is not at all likely to be realized. There is nothing
wrong with the lines on which redemption runs at present except the want
of faith to believe in them, and the want of men to use them. The Kingdom
of God is like leaven, and the leaven is with us now. The quantity at work
in the world may increase but that is all. For nothing can ever be higher
than the Spirit of Christ or more potent as a regenerating power on the
lives of men.
Do not charge me with throwing away my brief
because I return to this old, old plea for the individual soul. I do not
forget that my plea is for the City. But I plead for good men, because
good men are good leaven. If their goodness stop short of that, if the
leaven does not mix with that which is unleavened, if it does not do the
work of leaven--that is, to raise something-- it is not the leaven
of Christ. The question or good men to ask themselves is: Is my goodness
helping others? Is it a private luxury, or is it telling upon the City?
Is it bringing any single human soul nearer happiness or righteousness?
If you ask what particular scheme you shall
take up, I cannot answer. Christianity has no set schemes. It makes no
choice between conflicting philanthropies, decides nothing between competing
churches, favours no particular public policy, organizes no one line of
private charity. It is not essential even for all of us to take any public
or formal line. Christianity is not all carried on by Committees, and the
Kingdom of God has other ways of coming than through municipal reforms.
Most of the stones for the building of the City of God, and all the best
of them, are made by mothers. But whether or no you shall work through
public channels, or only serve Christ along the quieter paths of home,
no man can determine but yourself.
There is an almost awful freedom about Christ's
religion. "I do not call you servants." He said, "for the
servant knoweth not what his lord doeth. I have called you friends."
As Christ's friends, His followers are supposed to know what He wants done,
and for the same reason they will try to do it--this is the whole working
basis of Christianity. Surely next to its love for the chief of sinners
the most touching thing about the religion of Christ is its amazing trust
in the least of saints. Here is the mightiest enterprise ever launched
upon this earth, mightier even than its creation, for it is its re-creation,
and the carrying of it out is left, so to speak, to haphazard--to individual
loyalty, to free enthusiasms, to uncoerced activities, to an uncompelled
response to the pressures of God's Spirit. Christ sets His followers no
tasks. He appoints no hours. He allots no sphere. He Himself simply went
about and did good. He did not stop life to do some special thing which
should be called religious. His life was His religion. Each day as it came
brought round in the ordinary course its natural ministry. Each village
along the highway had someone waiting to be helped. His pulpit was the
hillside, His congregation a woman at a well. The poor, wherever He met
them, were His clients; the sick, as often as He found them, His opportunity.
His work was everywhere; His workshop was the world. One's associations
of Christ are all of the wayside. We never think of Him in connection with
a Church We cannot picture Him in the garb of a priest or belonging to
any of the classes who specialize religion. His service was of a universal
human order. He was the Son of Man, the Citizen.
This, remember, was the highest life ever
lived, this informal citizen-life. So simple a thing it was, so natural,
so human, that those who saw it first did not know it was religion, and
Christ did not pass among them as a very religious man. Nay, it is certain,
and it is an infinitely significant thought, that the religious people
of His time not only refused to accept this type of religion as any kind
of religion at all, but repudiated and denounced Him as its bitter enemy.
Inability to discern what true religion is,
is not confined to the Pharisees. Multitudes still who profess to belong
to the religion of Christ, scarcely know it when they see it. The truth
is, men will hold to almost anything in the name of Christianity, believe
anything, do anything--except its common and obvious tasks. Great is the
mystery of what has passed in this world for religion.
"I SAW no Church there,"
said John. Nor is there any note of surprise as he marks the omission of
what one half of Christendom would have considered the first essential.
For beside the type of religion he had learned from Christ, the Church
type --the merely Church type--is an elaborate evasion. What have the pomp
and circumstance, the fashion and the form, the vestures and the postures,
to do with Jesus of Nazareth? At a stage in personal development. and for
a certain type of mind, such things may have a place. But when mistaken
for Christianity, no matter how they aid it, or in what measure they conserve
it, they defraud the souls of men, and rob humanity of its dues. It is
because to large masses of people Christianity has become synonymous with
a Temple service that other large masses of people decline to touch it.
It is a mistake to suppose that the working classes of this country are
opposed to Christianity. No man can ever be opposed to Christianity who
knows what it really is. The working men would still follow Christ
if He came among them. As a matter of fact they do follow anyone, preacher
or layman, in pulpit or on platform, who is the least like Him. But what
they cannot follow, and must evermore live outside of, is a worship which
ends with the worshipper, a religion expressed only in ceremony, and a
faith unrelated to life.
Perhaps the most dismal fact of history is
the failure of the great organized bodies of ecclesiasticism to understand
the simple genius of Christ's religion. Whatever the best in the Churches
of all time may have thought of the life and religion of Christ, taken
as a whole they have succeeded in leaving upon the mind of a large portion
of the world an impression of Christianity which is the direct opposite
of the reality. Down to the present hour almost whole nations in
Europe live, worship, and die under the belief that Christ is an ecclesiastical
Christ, religion the sum of all the Churches' observances, and faith an
adhesion to the Churches' creeds. I do not apportion blame; I simply record
the fact. Everything that the spiritual and temporal authority of
man could do has been done-- done in ignorance of the true nature of Christianity--to
dislodge the religion of Christ from its natural home in the heart of Humanity.
In many lands the Churches have literally stolen Christ from the people;
they have made the Son of Man the Priest of an Order; they have taken Christianity
from the City and imprisoned it behind altar rails; they have withdrawn
it from the national life and doled it out to the few who pay to keep the
unconscious deception up.
Do not do the Church, the true Church at
least, the injustice to think that she does not know all this. Nowhere,
not even in the fiercest secular press, is there more exposure of this
danger, more indignation at its continuance, than in many of the Churches
of to-day. The protest against the confusion of Christianity with the Church
is the most threadbare of pulpit themes. Before the University of Oxford,
from the pulpit of St. Mary's, these words were lately spoken: "If
it is strange that the Church of the darker ages should have needed so
bitter a lesson (the actual demolition of their churches), is it not ten
times stranger still that the Church of the days of greater enlightenment
should be found again making the chief part of its business the organizing
of the modes of worship; that the largest efforts which are owned as the
efforts of the Church are made for the establishment and maintenance of
worship; that our chief controversies relate to the teaching and the ministry
of a system designed primarily, if not exclusively, for worship; that even
the fancies and the refinements of such a system divide us; that the
breach between things secular and things religious grows wider instead
of their being made to blend into one; and that the vast and fruitful spaces
of the actual life of mankind lie still so largely without the gates? The
old Jerusalem was all temple. The mediaeval Church was all temple. But
the ideal of the new Jerusalem was--no temple, but a God-inhabited society.
Are we not reversing this ideal in an age when the church still means in
so many mouths the clergy, instead of meaning the Christian society, and
when nine men are striving to get men to go to church for one who is striving
to make men realize that they themselves are the Church?"
Yet even with words so strong as these echoing
daily from Protestant pulpits the superstition reigns in all but unbroken
power. And everywhere still men are found confounding the spectacular services
of a Church, the vicarious religion of a priest, and the traditional belief
in a creed, with the living religion of the Son of Man.
"I saw no Temple there"--the future
City will be a City without a Church. Ponder that fact, realize the temporariness
of the Church, then--go and build one. Do not imagine, because all this
has been said, that I mean to depreciate the Church. On the contrary, if
it were mine to build a City, a City where all life should be religious,
and all men destined to become members of the Body of Christ, the first
stone I should lay there would be the foundation-stone of a Church Why?
Because, among other reasons, the product which the Church on the whole
best helps to develop, and in the largest quantity, is that which is most
needed by the City.
For the present, and for a long time to come,
the manufactory of good men, the nursery of the forces which are to redeem
the City, will in the main be found to be some more or less formal, more
or less imperfect, Christian Church. Here and there an unchurched soul
may stir the multitudes to lofty deeds; isolated men; strong enough to
preserve their souls apart from the Church, but shortsighted enough perhaps
to fail to see that others cannot, may set high examples and stimulate
to national reforms. But for the rank and file of us, made of such stuff
as we are made of, the steady pressures of fixed institutions, the regular
diets of a common worship, and the education of public Christian teaching
are too obvious safeguards of spiritual culture to be set aside. Even Renan
declares his conviction that "Beyond the family and outside the State,
man has need of the Church . . . Civil society, whether it calls itself
a commune, a canton, or a province, a state, or fatherland, has many duties
towards the improvement of the individual; but what it does is necessarily
limited. The family ought to do much more, but often it is insufficient;
sometimes it is wanting altogether. The association created in the name
of moral principle can alone give to every man coming into this world a
bond which unites him with the past, duties as to the future, examples
to follow, a heritage to receive and to transmit, and a tradition of devotion
to continue." Apart altogether from the quality of its contribution
to society, in the mere quantity of the work it turns out it stands alone.
Even for social purposes the Church is by far the greatest Employment Bureau
in the world. And the man who, seeing where it falls short, withholds
on that account his witness to its usefulness, is a traitor to history
and to fact.
"The Church," as the preacher whom
I have already quoted, most truly adds, "is a society which tends
to embrace the whole life of mankind, to bind all their relations together
by a Divine sanction. As such, it blends naturally with the institutions
of common life--those institutions which, because they are natural and
necessary, are therefore Divine. What it aims at is not the recognition
by the nation of a worshipping body, governed by the ministers of public
worship, which calls itself the Church, but that the nation and all classes
in it should act upon Christian principle, that laws should be made in
Christ's spirit of justice, that the relations of the powers of the state
should be maintained on a basis of Christian equity, that all public acts
should be done in Christ's spirit, and with mutual forbearance, that the
spirit of Christian charity should be spread through all ranks and orders
of the people. The Church will maintain public worship as one of the greatest
supports of a Christian public life; but it will always remember
that the true service is a life of devotion to God and man far more than
the common utterance of prayer." I have said that were it mine to
build a City, the first stone I should lay there would be the foundation-stone
of a Church. But if it were mine to preach the first sermon in that Church,
I should choose as the text, "I saw no Church therein." I should
tell the people that the great use of the Church is to help men to do without
it As the old ecclesiastical term has it, Church services are "diets"
of worship. They are meals. All who are hungry will take them, and, if
they are wise, regularly. But no workman is paid for his meals. He is paid
for the work he does in the strength of them. No Christian is paid for
going to Church. He goes there for a meal, for strength from God and from
his fellow-worshippers to do the work of life --which is the work of Christ.
The Church is a Divine institution because it is so very human an institution.
As a channel of nourishment, as a stimulus to holy deeds, as a link with
all holy lives, let all men use it, and to the utmost of their opportunity.
But by all that they know of Christ or care for man, let them beware of
mistaking its services for Christianity. What Church services really express
is the want of Christianity. And when that which is perfect in Christianity
is come, all this, as the mere passing stay and scaffolding of struggling
souls, must vanish away.
If the masses who never go to Church only
knew that the Churches were the mute expression of a Christian's wants
and not the self-advertisement of his sanctity, they would have more
respectful words for Churches. But they have never learned this. And the
result in their case of confounding religion with the Church is even more
serious than in the case of the professing Christian. When they break with
the Church it means to them a break with all religion. As things are it
could scarce be otherwise. With the Church in ceaseless evidence before
their eyes as the acknowledged custodian of Christianity; with actual stone
and lime in every street representing the place where religion dwells;
with a professional class moving out and in among them, holding in their
hands the souls of men, and almost the keys of Heaven--how is it possible
that those who turn their backs on all this should not feel outcast from
the Church's God? It is not possible. Without a murmur, yet with results
to themselves most disastrous and pathetic, multitudes accept this
false dividing-line and number themselves as excommunicate from all good.
The masses will never return to the Church till its true relation to the
City is more defined. And they can never have that most real life of theirs
made religious so long as they rule themselves out of court on the ground
that they have broken with ecclesiastical forms. The life of the masses
is the most real of all lives. It is full of religious possibilities. Every
movement of it and every moment of it might become of supreme religious
value, might hold a continuous spiritual discipline, might perpetuate,
and that in most natural ways, a moral influence which should pervade all
Cities and all States. But they must first be taught what Christianity
really is, and learn to distinguish between religion and the Church. After
that, if they be taught their lesson well, they will return to honour both.
Our fathers made much of "meetness"
for Heaven. By prayer and fasting, by self-examination and meditation they
sought to fit themselves "for the inheritance of the saints in light."
Important beyond measure in their fitting place are these exercises of
the soul. But whether alone they fit men for the inheritance of the saints
depends on what a saint is. If a saint is a devotee and not a citizen,
if Heaven is a cathedral and not a City, then these things do fit for Heaven.
But if life means action, and Heaven service; if spiritual graces are acquired
for use and not for ornament, then devotional forms have a deeper function.
The Puritan preachers were wont to tell their people to "practise
dying." Yes; but what is dying? It is going to a City. And what is
required of those who would go to a City? The practice of Citizenship--the
due employment of the unselfish talents, the development of public spirit,
the payment of the full tax to the great brotherhood, the subordination
of personal aims to the common good. And where are these to be learned?
Here; in Cities here. There is no other way to learn them. There is no
Heaven to those who have not learned them.
No Church however holy, no priest however
earnest, no book however sacred, can transfer to any human character the
capacities of Citizenship--those capacities which in the very nature of
things are necessities to those who would live in the kingdom of
God. The only preparation which multitudes seem to make for Heaven is for
its Judgment Bar. What will they do in its streets? What have they learned
of Citizenship? What have they practised of love? How like are they to
its Lord? To "practise dying" is to practise living. Earth is
the rehearsal for Heaven. The eternal beyond is the eternal here. The street-life,
the home-life, the business-life, the City-life in all the varied range
of its activity, are an apprenticeship for the City of God. There is no
other apprenticeship for it. To know how to serve Christ in these is to
"practise dying."
To move among the people on the common street;
to meet them in the market-place on equal terms; to live among them not
as saint or monk, but as brother-man with brother-man; to serve God not
with form or ritual, but in the free impulse of a soul; to bear the burdens
of society and relieve its needs; to carry on the multitudinous activities
of the City--social, commercial, political, philanthropic--in Christ's
spirit and for His ends: this is the religion of the Son of Man, and the
only meetness for Heaven which has much reality in it.
.
No Church however holy, no priest however
earnest, no book however sacred, can transfer to any human character the
capacities of Citizenship--those capacities which in the very nature of
things are necessities to those who would live in the kingdom of
God. The only preparation which multitudes seem to make for Heaven is for
its Judgment Bar. What will they do in its streets? What have they learned
of Citizenship? What have they practised of love? How like are they to
its Lord? To "practise dying" is to practise living. Earth is
the rehearsal for Heaven. The eternal beyond is the eternal here. The street-life,
the home-life, the business-life, the City-life in all the varied range
of its activity, are an apprenticeship for the City of God. There is no
other apprenticeship for it. To know how to serve Christ in these is to
"practise dying."
To move among the people on the common street;
to meet them in the market-place on equal terms; to live among them not
as saint or monk, but as brother-man with brother-man; to serve God not
with form or ritual, but in the free impulse of a soul; to bear the burdens
of society and relieve its needs; to carry on the multitudinous activities
of the City--social, commercial, political, philanthropic--in Christ's
spirit and for His ends: this is the religion of the Son of Man, and the
only meetness for Heaven which has much reality in it.
No; the Church with all its splendid equipment,
the cloister with all its holy opportunity, are not the final instruments
for fitting men for Heaven. The City, in many of its functions, is a greater
Church than the Church. It is amid the whirr of its machinery and in the
discipline of its life that the souls of men are really made. How great
its opportunity is we are few of us aware. It is such slow work getting
better, the daily round is so very common, our ideas of a heavenly life
are so unreal and mystical that even when the highest Heaven lies all around
us, when we might touch it, and dwell in it every day we live, we almost
fail to see that it is there. The Heaven of our childhood, the spectacular
Heaven, the Heaven which is a place, so dominates thought
even in our maturer years, that we are slow to learn the fuller truth that
Heaven is a state. But John, who is responsible before all other
teachers for the dramatic view of Heaven, has not failed in this very allegory
to proclaim the further lesson. Having brought all his scenery upon the
stage and pictured a material Heaven of almost unimaginable splendour,
the seer turns aside before he closes for a revelation of a profounder
kind. Within the Heavenly City he opens the gate of an inner Heaven. It
is the spiritual Heaven--the Heaven of those who serve. With two flashes
of his pen he tells the Citizens of God all that they will ever need or
care to know as to what Heaven really means. "His servants shall serve
Him; and they shall see His Face; and His Character shall be written
on their characters."
They shall see His Face. Where? In the
City. When? In Eternity? No; to-morrow. Those who serve in any City cannot
help continually seeing Christ. He is there with them. He is there before
them. They cannot but meet. No gentle word is ever spoken that Christ's
voice does not also speak; no meek deed is ever done that the unsummoned
Vision does not there and then appear. Whoso, in whatsoever place, receiveth
a little child in My name receiveth Me.
This is how men get to know God--by doing
His will. And there is no other way. And this is how men become like God;
how God's character becomes written upon men's characters. Acts react upon
souls. Good acts make good men; just acts, just men; kind acts, kind men;
divine acts, divine men. And there is no other way of becoming good, just,
kind, divine. And there is no Heaven for those who have not become these.
For these are Heaven.
When John's Heaven faded from his sight,
and the prophet woke to the desert waste of Patmos, did he grudge to exchange
the Heaven of his dream for the common tasks around him? Was he not glad
to be alive, and there? And would he not straightway go to the City, to
whatever struggling multitude his prison-rock held, if so be that he might
prove his dream and among them see His Face? Traveller to God's last City,
be glad that you are alive. Be thankful for the City at your door and for
the chance to build its walls a little nearer Heaven before you go. Pray
for yet a little while to redeem the wasted years. And week by week as
you go forth from worship, and day by day as you awake to face this great
and needy world, learn to "seek a City" there, and in the service
of its neediest citizen find Heaven.