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ordination of the many to the will of the few, has dominated Christian states and shaped the foreign policies of Christian empires. The slavery of men has been sanctioned by Christian opinion. Race hatreds, deep and implacable as those of Islam, have flourished in the soil of Christendom and wafted their influence to the Far East. The provincialism of proud nations, glorying in the name of Christian, has nourished morbid beliefs in destiny, which have made them destroyers, and, to the Oriental mind, have identified Christianity and armed imperialism as synonymous terms.

Not with rash and shallow condemnation does one speak of these historic aspects which have arisen in the evolution of the Western world. However regrettable they may appear from the standpoint of an idealist, doubtless they have been part of the travail of creation, without which mighty products of good could not have been born. Doubtless they shall be overruled, both in their direct and indirect influences of evil, through the great providence of God, who makes the wrath and the error and the vain pride of man to praise Him. And we must not forget that with these regrettable things have come also many things of priceless value, that are of the essence of our religion and in harmony with the mind of Christ; truths that have been purged of dross in the alembic of controversy; institutions, domestic, social, political, sacramental, that have survived, as if immortal; moral ideas that must remain, though heaven and earth should pass away. It is true that the West dare not point to its historical development as an example of ideal Christian evolution. But it is also true that the West, ascending through strife, and sin, and sorrow to its present greatness, bears witness to the imperishable essence of the Revelation of Christ.

To all who observe the passage of events, and who reflect on what they observe, the present state of the world speaks of impending changes, the meaning and extent of which are not to be predicted. The acute crisis in the Far East suggests immeasurable possibilities in the redistribution of controlling interests. Beyond this obvious portent of change are other signs which, though obscured for the moment by the clouds of war, strike the practised eye, and shall in their succession appear before the public mind. The familiarity of intercourse between the most remote part of the world is the more impressive because it excites comment no longer. We go to the Far East to-day with less difficulty of preparation and less sense of remoteness than our fathers who went from Boston to the valley of the Mississippi. We expect the presence of Orientals in our seats of learning; at Berlin, at Strasburg, at Oxford, at Harvard, at Princeton. Nor are there lacking,

in the East, seats of learning rivaling our own, where science and literature and politics of the West are taught. Academic interchanges within the East are habitual. India and China are dispatching the flower of their youth to Japan to study European biology and philosophy in the imperial universities of Kyoto and Tokyo.

Numerous local movements of spiritual reform are taking place in Hindu, Mohammedan, and Buddhist circles; movements that appear to be sporadic, but reveal, on closer scrutiny, one common term, the assimilation of portions of the Christian truth; and, like the returning of a Nova Scotian tide from its long ebb, there is rolling in upon the educated life of the Orient the pressure of mysterious impulses making for a new social order; the flood of fresh suggestion, bespeaking hope. and energy to cover the wreckage of long passivity and philosophical despair; the mysterious appreciation of Christ and of the esoteric aspects of Christianity.

As one ponders the present state of the world, noting these phenomena of the East, with others, ominous, yet not less evident, darkening the sky of northern Europe, and as one reflects that God's plan moves onward, whatever else be stayed, the question presses, Is there shortly to be a new interpretation of the mission of Christianity to the world? After the long ages of the historical evolution of the West, during which ecclesiastical despotism and sectarian strife, and the spirit of feudalism, and race-hatred, and the provincial pride of destiny have drawn the thick veil of Western civilization between the face of Christ and the waiting East, is there to be a new Epiphany, a fresh manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles through some nation that has come out of the blind evolutionary struggle into the simplicity that is in Christ?

If so, can we be that nation? There are conditions present in our life that suggest the possibility of our election for this benign service. In the heart of our people is the spirit of civil liberty. That spirit has so incarnated itself in our life that it determines, more or less, our world-view. We judge of the blessedness or misery of nations by the measure of their freedom and their self-sufficiency. Therefore, whatever may exist in the thinking of individuals, there exists not, in the thinking of the American people, the desire to enslave, the lust to conquer. If, lately, we have appeared to the East as a military power, it was because honest men deemed, whether rightly or wrongly, that this was a step toward the ultimate liberty of enslaved peoples, not a barrier against it, and I believe that this desirable view of our motive prevails throughout the East up to this time.

Nor is the American view of religious liberty less pronounced. Our

most holy traditions are the voluntary principle and the unfettered right of conscience. To scorn the faith of any man is to surrender what our fathers won and held through suffering.

But, if it be God's pleasure to use this nation, so wondrously segregated from the complications of European politics, to make to the bewildered world a new demonstration of the essential spirit of Christianity, there must come a great deepening in the nation's heart of the sense of universal brotherhood, which is (to use the venerated language of our authorized version) "good will toward men." Peace on earth‍ comes not, abides not, returns not, save where there there is good will toward men; a deep solicitude for the world's good, a growing tradition of world-wide love in a nation's heart, supplanting that unchastened selfishness which is the first tendency of a prosperous and progressive people.

Sir

From that tendency we are by no means exempt. At present its expression in the terms of militarism is held in check by the traditional love of liberty for ourselves and for all mankind; but in the more subtle forms of commercial ambition it may steal upon us unawares. William Humber, in his history of British India, affirms that Great Britain entered the East with no thought of military empire. Her motive was a commercial motive. The subjugation of the peoples of India was a dream born of her mercantile successes.

There is no guaranty, save one, and that is the pervading influence of the spirit of Jesus Christ in our people, that commercial eagerness shall not lead us on to aggression, and aggression issue in conquest.

Conquest may bring wealth, and conquest may bring glory, but the price of it shall be to forfeit the chance of interpreting the mission of Christianity to the Eastern world.

It is certain that the representatives of Western nations never can reinterpret the mission of Christianity to the Orient, in part enraged, in part jaded and dispirited, by sword-thrusts from the West, unless there be shown in the nations they represent a purpose to temper selfish ambition by that first law of Christ's life, "good will toward men." In these proud days of the republic we hear much spoken of our mighty destiny among the nations. God save us from being inebriated with the sense of destiny, and from losing the sense of justice to remote nations and respect for Asiatic rights and aspirations.

It is also certain that the representatives of Western nations must relatively fail to interpret Christianity to the scholarly minds of the East, if they insist that Christianity necessarily implies ecclesiastical institutions and dogmatic definitions identical with those of the Occi

dental worshipers of Christ. To say this is in no sense an undervaluation of our Christian theology. So far from undervaluing theology as a hindrance upon life, I should esteem life as not worth living, were it not for those apostolic beliefs concerning God and the person and work of Christ which, because I hold them, and in the way in which I see them, are my theology, upon which my life is founded. But I cannot demand of men whose institutional conceptions are the fruit of Oriental inheritancy, and whose points of contact with the revelation of God in Christ are determined by the canons of Oriental thinking, that they shall adopt all the intellectual terms in which I, of another inheritance, formulate my belief in these great primary beliefs of Christianity, or else be understood to have no share in an essence of truth which, on Christ's own word, is of universal application and for universal possession. Let me rather so believe in the Holy Ghost, so trust that Light which lighteth every man coming into the world, so honor the attempts of all nations and kindreds and peoples to attain unto God, so wait for the East to lift herself from her long bewilderment and for God to complete what He Himself has begun, so dismiss that inherent scorn of the East which has been the stumbling-block cast by Anglo-Saxon pride in the path of Christ's world conquest, that in my heart there shall be but a Godlike yearning for the souls of all men, and in my life a Christlike mark of sacrifice.

There is but one way to preserve and to propagate this spirit in the American nation, with our genius for commercialism, our love for progress, our perilous pride of destiny. It is to promote the influence of this large view of the mission of Christianity to the world upon the millions of our younger citizens in their school and college days. Intensify this by wise and well-considered methods, and they shall develop a sense of the brotherhood of the world, a zeal for the advancement of the world, a deference for the rights of the world, a respect for the aspirations of the world that shall make our national spirit an interpretation of the mission of Christianity to the non-Christian races. Permit these younger citizens, on the other hand, in the most impressionable years of life, to drink only the heating wine of secular ambition, to acquire only the hunger for control of the world's resources, to foster race prejudice and crude Occidentalism, and each generation, moving further away from the ancestral heritages of the Christian religion, shall postpone the coming of the kingdom of God on earth.

Men, judging in haste, may call the deliberations of this Convention academic, but time will show that, among the voices that have pleaded from this platform for a greater emphasis upon religion throughout our whole educational system, all have spoken as patriots, some as prophets.

ADDRESSES AT DEPARTMENTAL SESSIONS

THE JOINT SESSIONS OF DEPARTMENTS

THE PLACE OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION

IN THE HOME

PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL, PH.D., LL.D.

CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

From a biological standpoint, good parenthood, in all that that noble and pregnant term involves, is the supreme end of man. This means that that man and woman is the best who produces and rears to fullest bodily, mental, and moral maturity the most and the best children. No other service equals this. God's covenant with Abraham, that if he did His will his children should be as the stars, only expresses a universal law of life. Nature's one penalty for every kind of violation of the fundamental laws of our being is progressive extinction. No matter what the sin, its punishment is some form of lessened vitality, perversion or arrest. The ultimate test of every question of personal or social virtue is its effect on the child in our midst, and yet more its effect on the unborn, with the fate of countless generations of whom every fruitful life is freighted. All the culture and institutions of every race are sound and abiding, or false and transient, according as they favor or hinder the transmission of the sacred torch of life undimmed to posterity. This is the standpoint of the new movement in eugenics or practical heredity, a factor in every life far more important than environment and education combined. In this large sense let us not forget that paternity is as much the culmination of man's education as maternity is of woman's, and Mr. Galton's proposed certification and endowment of those fittest for each is only recognizing the fact that these are exactly the diplomas and these the highest degrees, summa cum laude, which nature has always conferred on those who finish their course in her great university.

How do we stand in the light of this great and awful bionomic law that makes our very life its sport? Statistics show that among both the oldest American stirps, and also among the educated classes, marriages, in both sexes, are later and fewer, that children of those who do marry are less numerous and less often nursed, and more often and

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