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conscience and his own thinking present to him. And yet, nothing is more clear than the fact that this freedom does not necessarily mean peace or contentment, or a higher spiritual life. In America, not only in intellectual and religious matters, but in political matters as well, we are constantly tempted to regard freedom as an end, not a means; to consider it happiness in itself, not the road to happiness; to think of it as a release from responsibility, not to realize that freedom brings greater responsibility; to enter into it carelessly and lightly as if our service were at an end, not reverently and in the knowledge that it is the beginning of a higher, a larger, a deeper service.

Shall our children of God ever learn that freedom brings service? God led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, into freedom. But, brethren, that freedom was not Sinai, nor yet the promised land; it was the wilderness. Let us rejoice in the complete freedom of our generation and of our country, for the way of Freedom is God's way; but let us not think we are at Sinai or in the promised land when we are only in the wilderness. Men have no more adjusted themselves to the new conditions of this freedom than they have adjusted themselves to the new conditions of transportation, and to the enormous industrial changes which have come through it. We are out of the house of bondage, both as men and as organizations, — political, civil, religious, - but we have only entered into the wilderness of political, intellectual, and religious freedom.

Taking into account these conditions, thanking God for the freedom into which the world has come, but looking with clear eyes at the fact that this freedom has brought us only into the wilderness, the question we ask ourselves is, What is, then, to be done, and, more particularly, what is there for college men to do, to educate the conscience of men to right ethical standards?

So far as I can see my way to answer this question, the answer is this:

The education of the conscience of mankind is not a matter of ethics, but of religion; not a matter of moral distinctions and of rules of life, but a matter of spiritual development in a new environment; not a matter of high ethical appreciation, but a matter of the divine life in the individual human soul. If men are to be led through the wilderness of freedom into the promised land of a higher religious conscience and a deeper service, it will come only through religious leadership,-but one capable of dealing with the conditions of the day and of the age,the age of reason and of freedom. If there is any one service above

all others which the college men of to-day may render to their race, it lies in the training of leaders who have in their hearts the simple religion of Jesus Christ without the theology of the Church which calls itself by His name. A religious leadership, intelligent, scholarly, devoted, spiritual, — but divorced from theology, is the greatest agency which college men can bring to the education of public opinion. Men will no longer accept authority outside of their own consciences, but leadership plays as great a part as it ever did; and religious leadership, just as political leadership, must take hold, not only of the mind, but of the emotional nature, that deep endowment of our being in which lies, for the most part, our loves and our hates, our hopes and our fears, our aspirations and our ideals. A man to-day, whether in the Church or out of it, must have the quality of leadership if he is to influence. public opinion.

I am aware, that in making such an answer, we only push back the difficulty one step. The question still confronts us, how to prepare men for religious leadership; and this is as difficult a problem to answer as the original question, but it has the advantage of at least greater definiteness. I may do nothing more than make a few statements concerning it.

And, first, I will say that any man who has to do with a great student body, under whose eyes pass year by year the great stream of energy and devotion and power contained in the lives of young men, must feel keenly the tremendous preponderance of material influences which bear upon those men in the education of to-day. Somehow, in the rush of their lives, in the sharp competition to get a living, in the national readiness of Americans for a trial of strength with one another, the spiritual forces of the student life seem to have less chance at a man then they did twenty-five years ago. Even when one admits the narrowness of the religious teaching, the barrenness of the traditions which went as truths, the constant tendency for mistaking the letter for the spirit which characterized religious instruction in the last generation, he nevertheless realizes that through all this ran a deeper significance which did turn the thoughts of men continually away from the daily treadmill of that which is material. No man can have at heart the welfare of his country, and of his race, without a deep desire for a stronger spiritual influence in the lives of those armies of students, for something adequate to deal with the ever-growing tide of materialism which sweeps over them.

On the other hand, the more experience one has with this question, and the closer contact he gains with the student life, the less sure he is

as to the specific means to bring about this end; the more he comes to distrust specifics in education in any direction, religious education included. Of this much only he feels certain, that he who seeks to deal with the men of our colleges,- men who are intellectually alert, in the main earnest, ambitious, — he who seeks to deal with these men in religious matters must do so upon a plane of intellectual sincerity far above that which satisfied the men of a generation ago. No hiding behind authority, no quibble about words, no sanctity of inspired page, will avail. The unconscious traditions of religious life, the store of memorized verses of the Scripture, the inbred respect for the preacher and his profession with which you and I grew up, do not exist for them. We scarcely realize how great these forces were in our lives until we feel their absence in this man of a new generation of freedom. He looks, clear-eyed and unblinkingly, at the questions of religious observance and of religious life, and he will face your theological statement in exactly the same mental attitude in which he deals with a formula in chemistry. And yet, deep down in his breast the same spiritual possibilities lie, and when you touch him on the great fundamental questions of our human life, its meaning, its outcome, its greater possibilities, you find him responsive, and thoughtful, and eager.

What agency can be invoked to stir this latent critical spirit of freedom into the earnestness of religious leadership? In seeking to answer such a question, one turns naturally to the Christian Church. Is the Church, in its various denominational efforts, able to furnish a religious leadership which shall be efficient in the education of the Public Conscience?

This is a serious question for the Church and for those out of its formal relationship. The outlook to-day is not the most hopeful. The Church suffers under certain great disadvantages. It is an organization, and shows the inertia of all human organizations. Organizations, for this reason, never lead; men lead. To-day the Church is trying to hold on with one hand to a traditional theology and with the other to reach out to the fast changing forces of science and the new industrial life. Any organization is, in one sense, curiously unfitted to undertake the promotion and the care of religion. For what is religion, after all, but the divine life in the individual human soul, a divine flower growing up in its natural soil from the ever-present energy of the Father himself? It was of the very essence of Christ's leadership that it lent itself to the inspiration of the individual religious life, so that each man led his own life with God. Inevitably, no organization can deal

with this problem as such; this is one reason why the better the organization, the more difficult the production of leaders of this type, and the greater the tendency for the organization and those in it to be diverted to the advancement of the organization or to the science of religion, which is theology, and which has the same relation to religion which botany has to the flowers, or which astronomy has to the stars, or which chemistry has to the chemical reactions. Now, in the freedom of our twentieth-century wilderness there is a demand, not for leaders who can perfect the organization, or who can defend the science of religion, but for leaders who may show men how to grow in their own hearts the flowers of true religion; how to see in their own skies the stars of everlasting hope and truth; how to keep alive in their own hearts the chemistry of love and devotion and unselfishness, and commune with Him who is the Father of all.

That a great undercurrent of religious influence and of religious thought is beginning to stir in human affairs which has no connection. with Church organization, is evident to every man. Through the world there is striving a deep, sincere reaching after God. In many ways this spirit is crude, indefinite, and sometimes wavering. Will there come out of this movement religious leaders able to influence public opinion, and to lead the consciences of men to the thought of their individual religious life? The political, not less than the religious, future of the nation hangs upon such leadership, for right government of the people, for the people, and by the people will come, not out of political organization or out of drastic municipal regulations: it will come, if it come at all, out of the growth of a true religious life in the hearts of all men.

To plan for such a leadership, and to bring forth such leaders, is the noblest work to which college men may give themselves, and in such leadership lies the most powerful influence to affect at once the conscience of the individual, and of the nation, and of the race. Give us from the college life religious leaders able to deal with to-day's problems and the ethical and religious education of public opinion will follow.

DISCUSSION

PROFESSOR HENRY S. NASH, D. D.

EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

I assume, first, that the pith of the question we are handling concerns the younger generation. The training of the young is our supreme problem. If we can solve that problem well, the question of the older generation will take care of itself. Second, that effective moral teaching cannot be abstract. It must be vivid and concrete. The ideal method of moral teaching would be one that took great conceptions and visualized them, embodying them in high imagination.

With this much taken for granted, it follows of itself that we must implant the social conscience in the young by keeping our great conceptions close to the ground. Not very long ago, all our teaching was bookish; now, it aims at concreteness. Thus, in teaching geology to the children of Boston, the good teacher starts with the immediate locality. So in the "training of the social conscience." It is only our ingrained individualism that prevents our seeing that the substantive and the adjective in this phrase were joined together by God, and that man cannot put them asunder. If we take the young in the natural order of their thought, our task is easy. Boys run as naturally to groups, and teams, and gangs as they run to a swimming-pool in the dog-days. So, the moral education of the young should work in this natural and instinctive direction. It should find children at home and teach them there.

But morality is enfeebled if it be detached from high imagination. The morality of the young, therefore, must be steeped in imagination, in noble and compelling forms. Now, no form of thought is both noble and compelling unless it takes a great conception and endues it with a more or less visible body. And here it is that the laws of teaching, as we are beginning to apply them, find in the ripe results of the critical study of the Bible the best means of training the social conscience. All the more is this true if we can teach the Bible as we have seen it grow, without spending our time in explaining or explaining away the old conceptions of the Bible.

The aim is to train the conscience so that it shall be a social conscience, so that every thought of duty shall have a social side. How can that be better done, or so well as by teaching the Scriptures in an historical

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