It is generally assumed that in fighting Germany we were fighting a specific doctrine of life. Many crusaders are now in search of the doctrine which has brought on this iniquitous war. To hunt down the German philosophy has become a favorite indoor sport. But what is the result? The result threatens to blur all distinctions. The adjective “German” now connotes everything and denotes nothing. If, for instance, the national differentia of both German philosophy and German politics be Egotism, as has been maintained, many doctrines having their origins outside the boundaries of Germany would have to be defined as “German.” Again, if Germany's national trait be “Absolutism” in logic and morals (and this too has been seriously held), what shall we do with Belgium? Shall we call her German because in defiance of all consequences she remained absolutely true to her duty? Not Germany but Belgium is the nation that acted in conformity with Kant's Categorical Imperative. If it is true that America's national philosophy is pragmatism, then the “masters” of Germany are entitled to American citizenship.

“The fourth and last lecture,” said Judge Dudley, “I would have for the maintaining, explaining, and proving the validity of the ordination of ministers or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of the sacraments or ordinances of religion as the same hath been practised in New England, from the first beginning of it, and so continued at this day. Not that I would in any wise invalidate Episcopal Ordination, as it is commonly called and practised in the Church of England; but I do esteem the method of ordination as practised in Scotland, at Geneva, and among dissenters in England, and in the churches in this country, to be very safe, Scriptural, and valid; and that the great Head of the Church, by his blessed spirit, hath owned, sanctified, and blessed them accordingly, and will continue to do so to the end of the World. Amen.”

One would be indeed presumptuous to predict the effect of this war upon foreign missionary operations. Indeed, to report fully the present effect of this world war upon the work of the various foreign missionary societies of the world is an impossible task. Missionary leaders are, however, attempting to estimate the significance of the present bearing of war conditions, while few would be so bold as to suggest even what the future may be.

It is somewhat singular that the teachers of Protestant theology who have had probably the widest influence have been not professors of divinity, not preachers, not persons of any standing as theological instructors, but unofficial men and women, often laymen and always self-appointed. For I suppose it is unquestionable that poetry and especially hymns have spread theology more widely than have treatises of divinity. Calvinism was stamped upon English-speaking peoples not so much directly by the Institutes as by Milton's Paradise Lost; and even more efficient in establishing the system which came to be known as Evangelicalism were the hymns of the eighteenth century; secondarily those of Newton and the Wesleys but primarily those of Isaac Watts. The formative influence of Watts, especially upon the religious life of New England, has been profound.

Whatever the outcome of the war, it has already rendered the world an immense service in defining with unexampled clearness and on a hitherto unmatched scale an ethical issue of the profoundest and most far-reaching significance. I do not mean the old issue raised by every war since the time of Christ—whether war is ever right and to engage in it ever Christian. That question is largely academic and in existing circumstances of altogether minor importance. In a situation like the present, Christian men as well as other men will fight, and fight with a good conscience, whatever may be said as to the abstract right or wrong of war, or as to its consonance with Christian principles. It would be easy to show that to identify Christianity with pacifism, as many devout and eager Christians are doing, is profoundly to misinterpret it and to lose sight altogether of its great controlling principles. But I am concerned this morning with another matter altogether—the fundamental moral issue raised by this particular war and Christianity's relation to that issue. I refer—to put it in a single phrase—to the issue between autocracy and democracy.

Most current references to European Congresses prior to the one now sitting in Paris go no farther back than the Congress of Vienna in 1815. These references generally suggest that, whatever may have been done at Vienna, this we do not propose to do at Paris. The implication is that the European world has been running on the wrong track, and that now it is the mission of somebody to set it right and start it anew on wiser and safer lines. Students of history, however, know that Vienna and Paris mark only two stages in a long succession of efforts to bring the peoples of Europe into some kind of harmonious working together for common ends. The terminology of these attempts, the immediate interests involved, vary greatly, so greatly that the casual reader of history easily fails to recognize the community of purpose; but to one who has in mind the fundamental principle of historic continuity the chain of ideas is fairly distinct and complete.

It may be objected to our title that it begs the most important question at issue. Who knows whether tomorrow there will be any seminary? In the stern competition that is before us no institution can hope to survive which does not prove itself indispensable. What right have we to assume that the seminary will be found in this class?

In the popular mind, the Book of Revelation is doubtless the most difficult of all New Testament writings. Whether it deserves that reputation may well be doubted, for there are other books of the Bible in which scholars would probably say that the unsolved problems are more fundamental. But the Book of Revelation stands at the end of the collection, and few readers penetrate so far. It seems remote from modern habits of thought and expression. It lends itself for the most part less readily to the practical, if sometimes superficial, use of the ordinary reader.

The individual's attitude toward the Determiner of Destiny, which is religion, has always an essentially practical coloring. It involves a belief, to be sure, but this belief is never a matter of pure theory; it bears a reference, more or less explicit, to the fate of the individual's values. Hence in nearly every religion which history has studied or anthropology discovered, the question of the future in store for the individual believer has been one of prime importance. The content of this belief is a question for the theologian and the historian of religion; the psychologist, however, may be able to throw some light on the related question why people believe, or fail to believe, in immortality at all. What, in short, are the psychological sources from which this belief springs, and what are the leading types of this belief?

The spread of pre-millennial and kindred views—by which we mean the scriptural thousand years of peace following the more or less early return of Christ in physical manifestation—is an unmistakable fact of present-day religious thinking. Some of the causes of the pre-millennial revival are incidental and can be dismissed in a word. For example, some pre-millenarianism is the after-effect of the powerful personality of Dwight L. Moody. Mr. Moody was one of the greatest personal forces for righteousness of his time; and some of the movements which resulted from his influence—like the Student Volunteer Movement—were at their beginning considerably colored by the Moody theology. Again, as a plain matter-of-fact, pre-millenarianism has made an appeal to not a few rich men who have given their money to carefully planned propaganda. Furthermore the Great War has raised in many minds the question as to whether the world is not indeed standing at Armageddon.

When the momentous news of an armistice in the world-war stirred vociferous multitudes to turbulent rejoicing, they were thrilled by the one overwhelming thought that peace at last had come. The war was at an end, and it must be the last of wars. A huge wave of grateful surprise surged up from the common level of national life and broke into a foam of high emotion. The thought of millions flashed across the sea by the wireless telegraphy of the spirit to those who on land and water and in the air had borne the part of America in the great adventure; and this message of thanksgiving could find no better words than the ancient Beatitude: “Blessed are the Peace-Makers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

Recent studies in religious mysticism from the standpoint of psychology have netted, inter alia, the following contributions: (1) The conceptualization of divine reality, apprehended through the peculiar spiritual experience of the mystic, is based, not upon some aboriginal idea of deity, but upon the humanization of some sacred aspect of nature. (2) Mystical intuition is not a unique form of experience, but simply a way of experiencing which involves more of consciousness than is ordinarily exercised in plain matter of fact attention to the familiar object of the world. (3) The objectivity of God aroused as a postulate in the mind under the pressure of an intensified interest in, or concentration upon, the causal meaning of holy aspirations, is but the projection of the idealized self before the retina of the actual self as though it were a disparate entity independent of any necessary connection with consciousness. (4) The ideational aspects of the mystical superself, to which is attributed extraneous being, are such as denote social rather than individual qualities of life. And further (5), this subjective creation appears more intensely real (vital) or dynamic in its manifestations than the normal self, owing of course to the heightened form of the feelings and emotions out of which it is generated. In fine, the nature of the “unchartered reality,” which makes itself felt in the excess of spiritual ecstasy, appears to overlap or transcend the natural bounds which limit human nature and to elicit potentialities of perfection.

With the guns of Flanders and Picardy shaking our deepest being, it has been almost impossible for us during the last two years to think at all. Thinking demands the calm hour and the dispassionate frame of mind, and no one of us has had many such hours or many such mental dispositions for some time past. But it is our duty as moral leaders in our respective communities to think as steadily and dispassionately as we can, so that our leadership shall be, not that of hysteria and emotion, but of a discriminating and inwardly controlled moral intelligence. To that end I invite your attention in this Berry Street Conference—so long devoted to serious discussion of vital topics—to a subject that seems to me of great, if not supreme, importance at the present time, namely, The Nature and Validity of Conscience and Moral Principle.

“In evil times men turn their minds more anxiously to religion.” Thus wrote that hearty atheist, Lucretius, amidst the alarums of those far-off, uneasy, Roman days. Equally true is the saying of the still more desperate years through which the world has lately been passing. Even before the torrent of war broke, in the confused and restless prelude of the opening century, many hands were outstretched, many hearts yearning for a new vision of God. For God, or for something to take His place, something to give an ultimate meaning to life, an ideal dimension, an underglow of purpose and a deep tide of peace—

“Round our restlessness His rest.”

The idea of a Messianic kingdom pervades the whole of Acts. It is the subject of the discourse of the Risen Lord who speaks to his disciples “the things concerning the kingdom of God,” and the disciples ask him if he will “restore the kingdom to Israel” in their time. In the prayer of the Apostles, when they quote the words of the Second Psalm “the kings of the earth set themselves in array,” they are evidently regarding these as the natural antagonists of the Christ. When Peter preaches to Cornelius he says that Jesus of Nazareth was anointed by God and went about doing good (εὐεργετῶν, a word applied to kings) and healing those under the rule (καταδυναστευομένους) of the devil, as though Satan were a rival prince.

The basis of theistic belief is fortunately broader than the theistic arguments. People believe in God before they argue in favor of His existence, and the fortunes of theism are not inseparably bound up with any of the arguments framed in its support. No one, however, who is interested in the rational basis of theology can be indifferent to the fate of an argument which, whatever the philosophical objections to be brought against it, has in all ages of the world made a powerful appeal to human reason.

In the process of world readjustment incident to the war no department of man's life is likely to remain unaffected. Probably the more deeply we go into human nature, the more profound will be the reactions. On the surface the earth will not be the same. The scars which the Thirty Years' War left upon Europe have not yet been wholly effaced. Although the World War did not last as long, its far greater intensity and destructive force insure a vaster modification of outward nature. We already begin to see how powerfully government, society, and industry are to be affected. The whole order of life is being subjected to new pressures and set in new directions. The programme of education will have to be rearranged to meet the demands of a young manhood which has been tested ideally and practically as no other has ever been tested. Is it then likely that religion, that last resort of the human spirit, can hope to escape the challenge of the hour? To indicate certain tendencies which are already apparent and to point out the probable changes which they foreshadow—one can hardly hope to do more at this time—is the purpose of this article. It will have to do not merely with the attitude of the popular mind toward religion in general, but more particularly with the demand which it is likely to make upon the Church as the depositary and working instrument of religion.

“I have never had any contemporaries,” said Lord Acton toward the close of his life; and, in the main, he was right. His broad cosmopolitanism made him impatient of English insularity. His belief in the necessity of freedom of conscience alienated him, in spirit if not in form, from the church of his birth. His insistence upon the absolute validity of the moral law as the final measure of all things isolated him in the midst of a century which seemed largely to have concluded that morality and success are synonymous. Certain it is that his own age did not estimate him over highly. At his death in 1902 there were not a few who asserted that for all his depth of erudition, Acton had contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. He had been an omnivorous reader and possessed a greater knowledge of the sources of modern history than any other man of his day. Yet all this store of learning had been of no avail to the world, for Acton had written nothing. At his death, a lecture in English, a letter in German, were all that represented Acton on the shelves of the library of his own university, Cambridge. Even today, after his lectures, his letters, and his periodical writings have been collected and edited, his output remains small: two volumes of lectures, three of letters, two of historical essays contributed to the reviews of his time. Yet in spite of the scantiness of his written work, Acton must be numbered among the great historians of the last century.

Perhaps the most remarkable collection of autograph letters in the world is that made by the late Frederic A. Dreer and now housed in the Pennsylvania Historical Society at 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia. Among the several thousand letters, there are specimens of the writing of most of the famous people who have lived during the last four centuries. During various short visits at Philadelphia I have run through the whole collection and have copied fifty of the most important epistles written during the period before 1650. For, to my great surprise, a number of the most valuable have lain for all these centuries unknown.