Washington Gladden

“ In our own country we have given, in theory, the most unreserved expression to the principle of political democracy; the principle is yet but imperfectly worked out here, as everywhere, and we have much exacting business upon our hands in completing and developing our democratic institutions—work that will call for a great deal of patience and toil and self-denial; but we believe, most of us, in the principle; we have committed ourselves to it, and we expect, by means of it, to unify the diverse races now thronging upon this continent and to make of them a strong, free, self-governing people. ”

“ To keep it fresh and wholesome it must be taken out into the light and air; the winds of heaven must blow through it; our desires must mingle with the desires of others; our voices must join with their voices; we must learn to think of the needs, the struggles, the sorrows, the hopes that are common to us all, to put ourselves in other people's places when we pray, to feel that our religion is a bond that binds us to our kind.
There is a kind of prayer which we could only use in the closet,--intimate, personal, dealing with matters of which no one else has any right to know. ”

“ I want it to protect me, to care for me, to give me an equal opportunity with every other man to secure the good of life. As I wish the community to do to me, so must I also do to it. I must not try to thrive at the expense of the community; I must be ready to render the service which is due from me to the community; I must take good care that I take out of the commonwealth no more than I put into it; I must do to the collective neighbor of mine as I would have him do to me. This is the law which is always' in force, in every community, no matter which party is in power. ”

“ The ages which we have been traversing in this chapter--when the Bible was a manuscript--were ages of great darkness. The copies of the book were few, and the common people could neither possess them nor read them. It is hard for us who have had the book in our hands from our infancy, who have gone to it so freely for light in darkness, for comfort in sorrow, for wisdom to work with, for weapons to fight with, to understand how men could have lived the life of faith without it; how a godly seed could have been nourished in the earth without the sincere milk of the word for them to feed on. ”

“ More than any other branch of the Christian church the Greek church has put the emphasis upon orthodoxy. The natural and inevitable result has been that that church has destroyed itself and the nation whose life it has dominated and blighted. It is the Greek church that has led Russia to its doom. And it is orthodoxism that has made the Greek church a blind leader of the blind, and has plunged nation and church into the ditch together.
Truth, not orthodoxy, is the sovereign mistress of the human intellect. What I must know, for my salvation, is not what everybody says, but what is true. ”

“ Kier Hardie, with your labor organizations, and we do not believe that you really want to do any such thing. You are going to stand by our side, with power in the industrial realm to assert and maintain your rights as men, and with a sense of justice in your breasts that will enable you to fully recognize the rights of your capitalist employer; and we are going to work together, all classes—men of capital, men of organizing talent, men of skill, men of brains and men of brawn—to build a real commonwealth. ”

“ It is not only the interest of other individuals, but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician sacrifices upon the altar of cupidity or ambition; and when a man has learned to turn the one great privilege of service and sacrifice which citizenship offers into an opportunity of private gain, he has sunk about as low as man can go. What more urgent task has the church upon her hands than that of making men see the treachery and infamy of this kind of conduct? And unless men can be made to see it and feel it, what hope is there for free government? ”

“ The employer's reason for an open shop is his need of a force near at hand to fight the union; when he makes the union his ally instead of his enemy, non-unionism becomes both to him and to his men a negligible quantity. The man who takes up a purpose of this kind, whether he is proprietor or general manager, cannot be guaranteed an easy job. It will not be possible for him to turn it over to subordinates; he will have to keep close to it himself. It will call for labor, for self-control, for faith in men, for all the best qualities of mind and heart. ”

“ The old apple-tree growing in my garden is the witness to me of some transcendent truths, the shrine of mysteries that I cannot unravel. What the life is that was hidden in the seed from which it sprang, and that has shaped all its growth, coördinating the forces of nature, and producing this individual form and this particular variety of fruit,--this I do not know. There are questions here that no man of science can answer. Life in the seed of the apple as well as in the soul of man is a mystery. ”

“ Whenever the penalties of a law are strictly and invariably inflicted, then the law is in force. The law of cleanliness is mercilessly enforced in every plague-ridden city. It is disobeyed, of course, and the people are suffering the consequences of disobedience. Just so the law which bids us love our neighbor—our collective neighbor—as ourselves, is enforced in every city where the government is bad. ”

“ Neither in the State nor in the factory will our democracy be fulfilled without patient, heroic, self-denying work. But the work will be rewarding. Can any compensation be higher or finer than that of the man who wins, as Baldwin won, the loyal affection of scores or hundreds or thousands of men; who helps them to stand on their own feet and work out their own fortunes; who makes them see that the industry by which they gain their livelihood is one in which they have a real stake, so that they are not merely dependents on it, but, in a true sense, partners in it ”

“ Can this society be redeemed? Can this all-ruling commercialism be held in check, and this reign of plunder be overthrown, and all this seething selfishness and heartlessness and suspicion be made to give place to good-will and kindness, to trust and truth, to faith and honor? It will never be done without a vast expenditure of sacrificial love. "This kind goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting." Is the church ready for this struggle? Is she willing to put forth the effort and pay the cost which is required for the redemption of society? ”

“ In all the temples of religion is its voice lifted up week by week. The sun never sets on its gleaming page. It goes equally to the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is woven into the literature of the scholar, and colors the talk of the street. The bark of the merchant cannot sail the sea without it; no ships of war go to the conflict, but the Bible is there. It enters men's closets; mingles in all their grief and cheerfulness of life. ”

“ No school of the prophets, from the days of Samuel downward, could be compared to that sacred college of apostles,--that group of divine peripatetics, who followed their master through Galilee and Perea, and sat down with him day by day, for three memorable years, on the mountain top and by the lake side, to listen to the words of life from the lips of One who spake as never man spake.
To say that this training made them infallible is to speak beyond the record. There is no promise of infallibility, and the history makes it plain enough that no such gift was bestowed. ”

“ To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a fair and futile dream. Yet, in fact, it is not one tithe as hopeless as when Jesus set out to do it. When he told his disciples, 'Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world,' he expressed the consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity. ”

“ Now, it is a melancholy fact that a good many of our well-to-do and not evil-minded citizens are getting tired of the responsibilities of democracy; they find that it is a strenuous business, and they would fain be rid of it. They would rather give their days to gain and their nights to pleasure than to shoulder the task of governing this republic. Some of them talk very pessimistically about the future of popular government, and even hint now and then at the beneficence of a dictatorship. Such men are not likely to welcome the suggestion of the extension of democracy to the industrial realm. ”

“ That great city Nineveh--a city which was, in its day, as Dr. Geikie says, "as intensely abhorred by the Jews as Carthage was by Rome, or France under the elder Napoleon was by Germany"--was a city dear to God! He had sent his own prophet to warn it of its danger; and his prophet, instead of being stoned or torn asunder, as the prophets of God had often been by their own people, had been heard and his message heeded. The Ninevites had turned to God, and God had forgiven them! God was no less ready to forgive and save Nineveh than Jerusalem. ”

“ Religion is not an ultimate fact. When men are religious just for the sake of being religious, their religion is good for nothing. Religion is for character. Its end is gained when it has made us good men and women. Religion is for service. It finds its justification in the work that it can do in making a better world of this. Jesus gave us the truth about it when he said, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath." And he carried the truth forward to a larger application when he said, "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." ”

“ Can anybody imagine that democracy can long endure if the ruling motive of the citizen in his relation to the commonwealth is a purpose to get as much out of it as he can and give it as little as he can? All political reforms which leave the citizen in this state of mind are futile. There is no salvation for a democracy which does not change the direction of the motive in the heart of the individual citizen. And this is the business of the church. Without this, social redemption is impossible, and there is no other agency which even proposes to accomplish this. ”

“ It is precisely at this epoch that the civilized world finds itself face to face with the Jewish faith. Based upon the clear and simple dogma of the divine unity, discarding naturalism and pantheism by the marvelously terse phrase, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' possessing a law, a book, the depository of grand moral precepts and of an elevated religious poetry, Judaism had an incontestable superiority, and it might have been foreseen then that some day the world would become Jewish, that is to say, would forsake the old mythology for monotheism. ”