“ Perhaps no community calling itself Christian suggests so remotely the tender name Jesus gave His disciples, "my sheep." Who, looking on a prosperous Protestant congregation in town or country, with shrewdness, vigilance, self-reliance written on almost every face, would think of saying, "Fear not, little flock"? Freedom is what Protestantism has demanded and fought for, freedom to think for herself and take her own course and fight her own battles, every kind of freedom but one, the only freedom that need not be fought for, that can never be fought for,--freedom to love and to serve. ”

“ One is, that no Western people is likely to escape it, and certainly not the peoples of this Continent. The other is, that even in its most confused and explosive forms it is a divine movement. Mistaken, sordid, violent, even cruel forms it may assume. Strange agencies it may utilize. None the less no student of history, no one, at least, who has any faith in the divine government of the world, can doubt that these great sweeping movements owe their power and prevalence to the good in them, not to the evil that is always mingled, to us at least, so perplexingly and distressingly with the good. ”

“ In the name of the brotherhood of Christianity, in the name of the richness and variety of the human soul, the Church must declare a truceless war upon this sterilizing and dehumanizing competition and upon the source of it, an economic order based on profit-seeking.
With profits not merely as an inducement but as the absolutely essential condition, the sine qua non not merely of success but of a livelihood, competition, even desperate competition, is inevitable. ”

“ There is in every nation a Jekyll and a Hyde, but not in every nation to-day is the struggle between the two so keen or the possibilities of its settlement so dramatic. The turn that our church life, our business life, our public life, may take in the next few years--which, indeed, I think, it is already taking--may be decisive and glorious. Canada has the faults of youth but also its energy, its courage, and its idealism. I believe it is possible that she may be the first to find the new social order and the new Christianity, and so become a pathfinder for the nations. ”

“ To discredit and attack the principle of public ownership is to discredit and attack Christianity. It would seem to be the special sin against the Holy Ghost of our age. He who doubts the practicability of public ownership is really doubting human nature and Christianity and God.
What we are facing to-day is the issue between learning to do things together and a struggle between competing individuals, competing classes, and competing nations, so frantic and ferocious that in it our civilization may go down. ”

“ Protestantism must pass away. It is too rootedly individualistic, too sectarian, to be the prevailing religion of a collectivist age. It is passing away before our eyes. Everywhere it reveals the marks of decay or of transformation. It must change or die.
Not to Protestantism, not to Roman Catholicism, belongs the age now dawning, but to a new Christianity which will, indeed, have affinities with them both but still more deeply with the Christianity of Jesus. ”

“ It is a lovely and thrilling hope that the twentieth century may prove to be the century of the Great Christianity, the Christianity which will extinguish neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity but comprehend and blend them, the simple, yet free and varied, democratic, passionate Christianity of all who love the Lord Jesus Christ and seek His Kingdom on the earth, the Christianity which was the first and will be the last. ”

“ Business competition to-day is, conceivably, as great an evil as ever intemperance was. Its working is more subtle, more wide-spread, more deeply destructive.
It hardens men. It dries up their natural and almost inextinguishable kindliness. It demoralizes them. It almost compels them to resort to crooked methods. It subjects them to temptations sometimes virtually irresistible. It presents them with the alternatives of failure and starvation for themselves and their loved ones or the doing of something, not right indeed, but which plenty of others do and which seems imperative. ”

“ But deepest and most vital of all the elements that have found their way into historic Christianity is what Christ hid there,--the equality of brotherhood. That hidden element, too, must find its way to the light. Early repressed, driven in, well nigh smothered, it has, nevertheless, never been extinguished, for it is the secret force, the most deeply vital essence of Christianity. As Bernard Shaw has said, it is not true that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and has never been tried. ”

“ Such an era summons the prophetic gifts of the Church, first, to the task of interpretation--to discern amid the turmoil and confusion the hand of God, and secondly, to the task of inspiration--to breathe into the hearts of men the faith, the courage, the patience, the brotherliness, by which alone the happy harbor can be won. And no Church is under a deeper obligation to assist in this two-fold task than our own. Methodism was born in a revolt against sin and social extravagancies and corruption. ”

“ It will be over what touch men ordinarily much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than their profits. It will be a struggle no class can escape.
The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.
Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this unparallelled crisis. ”

“ Already, in that forever holy strip of land where towns were reduced to heaps of dust and trees to splintered trunks, where earth was gashed and torn as men never gashed and tore the kindly bosom of mother earth before, and where beautiful human bodies were mutilated and destroyed with a fury unknown in history, there the Great Christianity has disclosed itself. ”

“ These two centuries have thus established beyond dispute the right of those two great historic forms of Christianity to the lasting reverence and gratitude of mankind.
Roman Catholicism has cherished the divine principle of unity. At great cost it has preserved unity. It has not been equally careful of the divine principle of liberty.
Protestantism has gloriously fought and suffered and died for liberty. It has never highly valued unity. It has even gloried in division. But unity is a diviner thing than even liberty. ”

“ Eventually, when a measure of peace came at last to the lands so long in distress and turmoil, the irrepressible impulses of the human soul for knowledge asserted themselves. The youth of Europe, eager to know, flocked in increasing numbers to the teachers who began to be famous, and the university took its rise.
Education placed in the hands of the people the key to other doors. As a natural consequence, democracy found its way into the jealously guarded realm of religion. ”

“ Like medieval Christianity, it calls for a new Reformation--not a new creed but a new heart, the heart of a little child, humble, self-distrustful, not quick to resent, or even to see a slight, eager to love, delighting to serve. ”

“ Protestantism has taught her people to fight for their rights and now is helpless before the selfish conflict of her own children that have learned too well her spirit.
In the great industrial conflict now reaching its height, one may safely prophesy Protestantism will perish--or be transformed.
She has taught her children to think; she has taught them to cherish freedom; she has not taught them to love. ”

“ Equality everywhere or equality nowhere! The soul of every man who has seen the divine beauty of equality must forever war against all limitations and impairments of it. Even human logic can not permanently tolerate such a fundamental incompatibility and irrationality as religious equality and social inequality sleeping in the same bed. Religious equality has already worked itself out in political equality. ”

“ Christian perfection, in the thought of Francis and of General Booth, is for the man who withdraws from the ordinary work of the world, turns away from its culture, crucifies a thousand human instincts, breaks all the strings of the human lute but one. Both movements organized by these great saints are eccentric, abnormal. Neither is workable on a catholic, or universal, scale. Both sectionalize the holy life.
What is needed to-day is another leader, a leader for the ordinary man. The ordinary man is neither saint nor fanatic, neither preacher nor monk ”

“ Here is where, probably, Protestantism most sharply differs from Primitive Christianity and from the Christianity which was in the mind of Jesus.
Protestantism is a fighting faith. It trains men to be self-reliant and hard. Fair play is its substitute for brotherliness, and it often finds it difficult to get as high as that.
The divine note of love is faint. Protestantism has never caught the passion for brotherhood. So it is not strange that, where the reviving spirit of brotherhood, which is the divinest movement in modern life, is strongest, there is the least drawing to Protestantism. ”

“ Just as clear as the incompatibility of Christianity with social inequality is its incompatibility with business competition.
Competition for a livelihood, competition for bread and butter, is the denial of brotherhood. It is the antithesis of the Golden Rule. It is not the doing unto other men as we would that they should do to us. ”

“ No other form of Christianity has as yet rendered so great a service to the race. It is questionable whether any other form of Christianity, even if it had been in existence, could at that stage have rendered so great a service. It was precisely those features in the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards her people which are most uncongenial to the Protestant temper which were the disciplinary agencies needed by the lawless, seething Europe of the Dark Ages to qualify it for the personal liberty the vindication of which has been the faith and service of Protestantism. ”

“ When had the men and the women who did the rough and necessary work of the world, smoothed the highways, dug the drains, built the houses and the bridges, carried the burdens over the mountains and across the seas, tilled the fields and cared for the herds and the flocks--when had they been other than the despised, ill-paid, ill-housed servants of the classes who through their fighting-power or their money-power could command the services of the toilers? ”

“ Gentleness, patience, humility have not been the strong points of Protestantism. She has been proud, vigorous, masterful, impatient of control, and to her have been given the kingdoms of the world. But not to her has been given the Kingdom Jesus promised to the meek.
In short, in Protestantism there is much of Christianity but there is also much simply of the old Teutonic spirit. Protestantism is not pure or primitive or ultimate Christianity. It is Teutonic Christianity, no more fitted to prevail than Greek or Latin Christianity. ”

“ The Greek, the Italian, the Frank, the Spaniard, the Anglo-Saxon have successively held the premier place. The day of the Slav may now be dawning.
Nor yet is our forecast of the Great Christianity complete. It may be that there awaits us, though in a more distant future, a still more striking illustration of how God chooses for honor the despised things of the world. Of all races the most despised, the most oppressed, has been the African, and that not for generations or centuries but for millenniums. Europe, Asia, and America have all made Africa their servant. ”

“ The triumph of democracy, the demand of the educated workers for human conditions of life, the deep condemnation this war has passed on the competitive struggle, the revelation of the superior efficiency of national organization and co-operation, combine with the unfulfilled, the often forgotten, but the undying ethics of Jesus, to demand nothing less than a transference of the whole economic life from a basis of competition and profits to one of co-operation and service. ”

“ It is difficult, indeed, to imagine how a more inhuman method of business could be devised short of methods which no man who had not ceased to be human would tolerate. Inhuman and dehumanizing. How deeply dehumanizing is seen in the effort of Christian men to justify it--the supreme illustration in our day of the morally blinding power of the accustomed, the familiar, and, above all, the profitable, which has made Christian men defenders of competition, of war, of the drink traffic, of the opium traffic, and of slavery. ”

“ A democratically organized church could not have fulfilled the mission of the Church, could not, indeed, have existed. With great hordes of half-savage people precipitating themselves upon the Empire and almost extinguishing the ancient civilization, the only kind of Church that could grapple with the problem--the most formidable and appalling that civilization and Christianity ever had to face--was a Church organized on thoroughly aristocratic principles. ”

“ Wages of labor, wages of invention, wages of superintendence, are just; profits of capital must grow less and less to the vanishing point. The bitter conflict between capital and labor over the division of the profits will never be settled. It probably never can be settled. It will cease to be. Capital will cease to be a factor; only labor in the broadly inclusive sense of the term will remain.
The onward march of democracy, then, cannot be staid. It ought not. Democracy is nothing but the social expression of the fundamental Christian doctrine of the worth of the human soul. ”

“ The need is for the leader who can show this ordinary man how to bring the truest love and the deepest piety into the ordinary, commonplace, work-a-day life, revealing the glory of God, not alone as gilding the cold snows of Alpine peaks or bathing the distant desert with unearthly beauty, but transfiguring the city street, the cozy home, the quiet fields where lovers walk at even. ”