John Haynes Holmes

“ We have created a vast machine which proves to be a Frankenstein which is devouring us. This monster has bound us to the wheel of labor, deceived us with the lure of wealth, degraded us to the base uses of materialism, leveled to the ground our standards of moral and spiritual idealism. Even in a physical sense it is a failure, for in the end it brings only such calamity as the Great War. It is this system of economic ruin which Gandhi sees coming into Asia, after having conquered and ravaged our western world. ”

“ The Germans understood this when they sent their men into the conflict with the music of military bands and with the choral chants of Luther on their lips. Every humblest subaltern officer in any army understands this when he places the flag at the head of the moving regiment. Such appeals to the senses change men on the instant—make the best of them into saints and the worst of them into momentary heroes. They become stimulated as by some strange intoxicant, transformed as by some mystic conversion of the soul. ”

“ Man after man has returned from the front, to tell us that the denominational church is dead. A new ordering of Christendom is at hand. The unit of organization will be not the one belief, nor even the one spirit, but the one field of service. Not the sect, but the community, will be the nucleus of integration. We will have groupings not of Methodist churches, and Baptist churches, and Unitarian churches, to remind the world of ancient differences, but of New York churches, and Boston churches, and San Francisco churches, to teach the world of present needs and future hopes. ”

“ To Gandhi, release from this economic system of western capitalism is as important for India as release from the political system of British imperialism. If English rule is overthrown, only to leave behind it English railroads, English factories, English promoting companies, and so on, the Indian people will have gained only the substance and not the shadow of independence. They will still be enslaved, and enslaved to a system which is fatal to the best interests of humanity. At the heart of this western civilization of ours, Gandhi believes, is death and not life. ”

“ Now we begin to get just a glimpse, at least, of a nobler and rarer type of heroism than that of the soldier, when we look upon the man who, in obedience to some inner impulse of the soul, deliberately alienates himself from the sympathy and the applause of his fellows. Such a man must be regarded as a kind of pioneer or explorer, who goes into the solitudes not of the physical but of the spiritual realm, there to blaze new trails, and, perhaps like Captain Scott, to die alone. ”

“ Men must be free from all oppression, because they are children of God, and therefore living souls. They must be equal in opportunity and privilege, because they are members of the holy family of God, and therefore brothers. They must be lifted up out of poverty, disease, war, because their heritage is the life of God, and they must have it abundantly. The material aspects of the social question, I would be among the last, I trust, to ignore. These are central—but central only as the fetters are central to the problem of slavery. ”

“ At once Gandhi appeared in public, on the country highways and even in the cities, clad in nothing but a loin-cloth, that no man in all the land should be embarrassed by a poverty greater than his own. Such deeds are a commonplace in Gandhi’s life. His whole career reveals a positive passion for community of experience with mankind. When his people look upon him, therefore, they see not a leader merely but a comrade and a brother, one who is in all things like unto themselves ”

“ At last came a conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas. I was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light. Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change. Of course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more directly practical interests. You know how the character of my preaching has changed since I first entered the Messiah pulpit. ”

“ Heroism! my friends! What is the heroism of even the bravest soldier compared to heroism such as this? I would not disparage the men who have suffered and died on the fields of Flanders and Galicia. But is it not true, after all, that we can do much if only we have the dear friends to bear us company, and that the real test comes when we stand "alone, alone, all, all alone," with the universe and God. ”

“ What we have here in the case of Gandhi, as always in the case of the non-resistant, is a religious leader, a man not of local, or national, but of universal significance. It is in the realm of the spirit that Gandhi “lives and moves and has his being.” It is not primarily with the kings and premiers, but with God and the soul of man, that he does business. Above and beyond the political liberation of his own or any other people, he seeks the spiritual redemption of mankind. ”

“ But however fine and pure may be the valor of his soul, it still must be admitted, in the last analysis, that the soldier never rids himself of the material accessories and trappings of the world. The flag that greets his eye and the music that beats upon his ear, the personal contact of his fellows upon the march and in the trenches, the medals and monuments that embody a nation's applause and gratitude—all these things, with however high an admixture of spiritual elements, are still fundamentally "of the earth, earthy." ”

“ He sees it victorious in Japan, he sees it invading China, he sees it planted at the heart of India—and he declares war against it! He fights the opium trade, he battles against the liquor traffic, he substitutes the domestic spindle for the factory loom, he denounces the railroad, the automobile, and the machine in general. What Gandhi is attempting to do is to save India from the blight of western materialism by restoring her own native civilization and culture before it is too late. ”

“ Not to divide, but to unite you, am I speaking: for it is the challenge of high aim and struggle which alone can hold [23] us to accord. I call as well to people outside this church—strangers and friends alike, who have turned from the churches of the past, but, still devout in expectancy and love, have waited long for the new church of the morrow. Our vision may be dim, our purpose weak; but we are trying for something higher and better than man has ever known—and we need the help that you can give. ”

“ And similar, to the degree of humble deserts, is the cry of every soldier or sailor who takes up arms for his country. For the moment he is the symbol of the nation. He embodies within his own single person the hopes and praises of an entire people. He lives, and, if he dies, he dies in the good opinion of mankind. And I can tell you that nothing makes life so smooth and death so comparatively simple as this good opinion of which I speak. ”

“ The wilderness and the solitary place, as well as the crowded city, is the abode of God. But better than loneliness is comradeship. The explorer may see from afar the Promised Land, the pioneer may spy it out, but it is the marching host that enters to conquer and possess. ”

“ The non-resistant of the Middle Ages was the monk of the St. Francis type, who abandoned the world and went off to live alone by himself or with his group of disciples. The supreme non-resistant of modern times was Tolstoy, who characteristically cut himself off from his family, his country, his church, and lived like a kind of hermit on the land; and at the end fled away, like a wounded animal in the brush, to die alone. These men were sublime in their personal lives. The non-resistant in all ages has marked the highest attainment of inward purity and outward sacrifice. ”

“ They forget the horrors of the struggle, the peril of disaster, the chances of life and death. They are conscious only of glory and delight. Their eyes gleam, their hearts throb, the earth changes to beauty, the heavens break into song. And straightway deeds of valor become easy, heroism commonplace, and sacrifice the order of the day. ”

“ My problem was to determine where I could best advance the ideals to which I have given my life—where I could find the weapons or tools best fitted to my hand for the doing of my work—and there to stand. To remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other! ”

“ Instead of climbing up, up the ladder of achievement to wealth and fame, and thus away from the common people, he proceeded deliberately to move down—down to the depths of human misery and woe, down to where men toiled desperately and died miserably, down to the dark places of sweat and tears and blood. ”

“ It is only when the arms of the flesh are broken and cast aside, and the soul stands naked before its Maker, that heroism becomes transcendant in obscurity, loneliness, persecution; when all things that the world can give have failed and dropped away it reveals itself, like a star at midnight, shining to the glory of Almighty God. Emerson has summed it all up, in his introductory lines to his essay on Heroism ”

“ He is more than the leader of a movement for national independence— his task is nobler even than that of championing the political emancipation of a great people. Dear to his heart as is the deliverance of India from English rule, immediate as is his concern with this great cause at the present moment, it must still be reckoned as a mere incident in his career, a passing episode in a life devoted to higher and further issues. If the movement for independence had never appeared, Gandhi would still be the same transcendent figure that he is today ”

“ Walk the streets of any city in any land, and everywhere you will see statues of military chieftains, as though these were the only heroes the world had ever produced who were worthy of commemorative monuments. "To most people," as Prof. MacMechan has well said, "'hero' means simply soldier"; or, if we be enlightened enough now and then to extend this title to men who have achieved fame in other walks of life, it is because we see in them some analogy to the warrior. "It is to the military attitude of the soul," says Emerson, "that we give the name of heroism." ”

“ Our western civilization is in exactly the situation of Rome in the days of the great Caesar. It has mastered the world by the power of its arms, and is exploiting its resources and peoples to its own advantage. As its outward glory increases, however, its inward disintegration proceeds. At the critical moment in Roman history, there appeared Jesus and the Christians, who brought to the perishing world a new source of life which preserved its vitality for a period of two thousand years. At the critical moment in our not dissimilar age, there appears Gandhi! ”

“ I must confess that I have both admiration and love for the men who march away to trench and battlefield, there to fling away their lives as little things for the sake of some great cause which they hold to be supremely dear. "Every heroic act," says Emerson again, in his essay on Heroism, "measures itself by its contempt of some external good"; and what man, I ask you, has more contempt for certain external goods, and therefore more heroism, than the loyal soldier? ”

“ Greater than all that we have yet mentioned in the character of Gandhi, is the love with which his entire being is saturated. No man of our time, few men of any time, have risen to such heights of tenderness and compassion for mankind as this Mahatma of India. ”

“ The fields of home, the byres, the market towns"
and then, with weary heart, leaves all these things behind to perish in "the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice. The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms which make war almost as glorious as it is hideous. ”

“ Non-resistance may be all right, he has been told, as a personal idiosyncrasy or as a means of escape from social responsibility, but it has nothing to offer the man who has to meet things as they are! And now, behold, comes Gandhi, a new type of non-resistant, a man who leads his people in the greatest movement of revolt our age has known, and does it on the basis of a program of “resist not evil”! ”

“ The true soldier, as we have seen, is necessarily a hero; but the true hero is by no means necessarily a soldier. On the contrary, there have been thousands of men who have ascended to heights of heroic endeavor and achievement, to which the soldier from the very nature of his profession has never been able to attain. Emerson declares in his great essay that the heroism of war is heroism in "its rudest form." May we not also say, perhaps, that heroism of war is heroism in its easiest and therefore least extraordinary form? ”