 File 9 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond The Second Address The Program of Christianity Section 3 The Program of the Society Hundreds of years before Christ's society was formed, its program had been issued to the world. I cannot think of any scene in history more dramatic than when Jesus entered the church in Nazareth and read it to the people. Not that when he appropriated to himself that venerable fragment from Isaiah he was uttering a manifesto or announcing his formal program. Christ never did things formally. We think of the words as he probably thought of them, not in their old world historical significance, nor as a full expression of his future aims, but as a summary of great moral facts now and always to be realized in the world since he appeared. Remember, as you read the words, to what grim reality they refer. Recall what Christ's problem really was, what his society was founded for. This program deals with a real world. Think of it as you read, not of the surface world, but of the world as it is, as it sins and weeps and curses and suffers and sends up its long cry to God. Limit it, if you like, to the world around your door, but think of it. Of the city and the hospital and the dungeon and the graveyard, of the sweating shop and the pawn shop and the drink shop. Think of the cold, the cruelty, the fever, the famine, the ugliness, the loneliness, the pain. And then try to keep down the lump in your throat as you take up his program and read. To bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive, to comfort all that mourn, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. What an exchange! Beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, liberty for chains. No marvel that the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him as he read. Or that they wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his lips. Only one man in that congregation, only one man in the world today could hear these accents with dismay. The man, the culprit who has said hard words of Christ. We are all familiar with the protest, of course, as if there were no other alternative to a person of culture. Of course, I am not a Christian, but I always speak respectfully of Christianity. Respectfully of Christianity. No remark fills one's soul with such sadness. One can understand a man as he reads these words, being stricken speechless. One can see the soul within him rise to a white heat as each fresh benediction falls upon his ear and drives him, a half-mad enthusiast, to bear them to the world. But in what school has he learned of Christ who offers the Saviour of the world his respect? Men repudiate Christ's religion because they think it a small and limited thing, a scheme with no large human interests to commend it to this great social age. I ask you to note that there is not one burning interest of the human race which is not represented here. What are the great words of Christianity according to this program? Take as specimens these liberty, comfort, beauty, joy. These are the greatest words of life. Give them their due extension, the significance which Christ undoubtedly saw in them, and which Christianity undoubtedly yields, and there is almost no great want or interest of mankind which they do not cover. These are not only the greatest words of life, but they are the best. This program, to those who have misread Christianity, is a series of surprises. Observe the most prominent note in it. It is the note of gladness. Its first word is good tidings. Its last is joy. The saddest words of life are also there. But there as diseases which Christianity comes to cure. No life that is occupied with such an enterprise could be other than radiant. The contribution of Christianity to the joy of living, perhaps even more to the joy of thinking, is unspeakable. The joyful life is the life of the larger mission, the disinterested life, the life of the overflow from self, the more abundant life which comes from following Christ. The joy of thinking is the larger thinking. The thinking of the man who holds in his hand some program for humanity. The Christian is the only man who has any program at all. Any program either for the world or for himself. Goethe, Byron, Carlisle taught humanity much, but they had no program for it. Byron's thinking was suffering, Carlisle's despair. Christianity alone exalts. The belief in the universe as moral, the interpretation of history as progress, the faith in good as eternal, in evil as self-consuming, in humanity as evolving. These Christian ideas have transformed the malady of thought into a bounding hope. It was no sentiment but a conviction matured amid calamity and submitted to the tests of life that inspired the great modern poet of optimism to proclaim. Gladness be with the helper of the world. I think this is the authentic sign and seal of Godship. That it ever waxes glad and more glad until gladness blossoms, bursts into a rage to suffer for mankind and recommends at sorrow. But that is not all. Man's greatest needs are often homely. And it is almost as much in its fearless recognition of the commonplace woes of life and its deliberate offerings to minor needs that the claims of Christianity to be a religion for humanity stand. Look, for instance, at the closing sentence of this program. Who could have expected to find among the special objects of Christ's solicitude the spirit of heaviness? Supreme needs, many and married, had already been dealt with on this program. Many applicants had been met. The list is about to close. Suddenly the writer remembers the nameless malady of the poor, that mysterious disease which the rich share but cannot alleviate, which is too subtle for doctors, too incurable for parliaments, too unpicturesque for philanthropy, too common even for sympathy. Can Christ meet that? If Christianity could even deal with the world's depression, could cure mere dull spirits, it would be the physician of humanity. But it can. It has the secret, a hundred secrets for the lifting of the world's gloom. It cannot immediately remove the physiological causes of dullness, though obedience to its principles can do an infinity to prevent them. And its inspirations can do even more to lift the mind above them. But where the causes are moral or mental or social, the remedy is in every Christian's hand. Think of anyone at this moment whom the spirit of heaviness haunts. You think of a certain old woman, but you know for a fact that you can cure her. You did so perfectly only a week ago. A mere visit and a little present, or the visit without any present, set her up for seven long days and seven nights. The machinery of the kingdom is very simple and very silent, and the most silent parts do most, and we all believe so little in the medicines of Christ that we do not know what ripples of healing are sent in motion when we simply smile on one another. Christianity wants nothing so much in the world as sunny people. The old are hungrier for love than for bread, and the oil of joy is very cheap. And if you can help the poor on with the garment of praise, it will be better for them than blankets. Or perhaps you know someone who is dull, not an old woman this time, but a very rich and important man, but you also know perfectly what makes him dull. It is either his riches or his importance. Christianity can cure either of these, though you may not be the person to apply the cure, at a single hearing. Or here is a third case, one of your own servants. It is a case of monotony. Prescribe more variety, leisure, recreation, anything to relieve the wearing strain. A fourth case, your most honored guest. Condition, leisure, health, accomplishment, means. Disease, spiritual obesity. Treatment, talent to be put out to usury. And so on down the whole range of life's dejection and ennui. Perhaps you tell me this is not Christianity at all, that everybody could do that. The curious thing is that everybody does not. Goodwill to men came into the world with Christ, and wherever that is found, in Christian or heathen land, there Christ is, and there his spirit works. And if you say that the chief end of Christianity is not the world's happiness, I agree. It was never meant to be. But the strange fact is that without making it its chief end, it wholly and infallibly and quite universally leads to it. Hence the note of joy, though not the highest on Christ's program, is a loud and ringing note, and none who serve in his society can belong without its music. Time was when a Christian used to apologize for being happy, but the day has always been when he ought to apologize for being miserable. Christianity, you will observe, really works. And it succeeds, not only because it is divine, but because it is so very human, because it is common sense. Why should the garment of praise destroy the spiritual heaviness? Because an old woman cannot sing and cry at the same moment. The society of Christ is a sane society. Its methods are rational. The principle, in the old woman's case, is simply that one emotion destroys another. Christianity works as a railwayman would say, with points. It switches souls from valley lines to mountain lines, not stemming the currents of life, but diverting them. In the rich man's case, the principle of cure is different. But it is again principle, not necromancy. His spirit of heaviness is caused, like any other heaviness, by the earth's attraction. Take away the earth, and you take away the attraction. But if Christianity can do anything, it can take away the earth, by the wider extension of horizon which it gives, by the new standard of values, by the mere setting of life's small pumps and interests and admirations in the light of the eternal, it dissipates the world with a breath. All that tends to abolish worldliness tends to abolish unrest. And hence, in the rush of modern life, one far-reaching good of all even commonplace Christian preaching, all Christian literature, all which holds the world doggedly to the idea of a God and a future life, and reminds mankind of infinity and eternity. Side by side with these influences, yet taking the world at a wholly different angle works another great Christian force. How many opponents of Christianity are aware that one of the specific objects of Christ's society is beauty. The charge of vulgarity against Christianity is an old one. If it means that Christianity deals with the ruder elements in human nature, it is true, and that is its glory. But if it means that it has no respect for the finer qualities, the charge is baseless. For Christianity not only encourages what so ever things are lovely, but wars against the whole theory of life which would exclude them. It proscribes aestheticism. It proscribes aestheticism. For those who preach to Christians that in these enlightened days they must raise the masses by giving them noble sculptures and beautiful paintings and music and public parks, the answer is that these things are all already being given and given daily and with an increasing sense of their importance by the society of Christ. Take away from the world the beautiful things which have not come from Christ and you will make it poorer scarcely at all. Take away from modern cities the paintings, the monuments, the music for the people, the museums, and the parks which are not the gifts of Christian men and Christian municipalities, and in ninety cases out of a hundred you will leave them unbereft of so much as a well-shaped lamppost. It is impossible to doubt that the decorator of the world shall not continue to serve his later children and in even finer forms the inspirations of beautiful things. More fearlessly than he has ever done the Christian of modern life will use the noble spiritual leverages of art. That this world, the people's world, is a bleak and ugly world we do not forget. It is ever with us. But we esteem too little the mission of beautiful things in haunting the mind with higher thoughts and begetting the mood which leads to God. Physical beauty makes moral beauty. Loveliness does more than destroy ugliness. It destroys matter. A mere touch of it in a room, in a street, even on a door-knocker, is a spiritual force. Ask the working man's wife and she will tell you there is a moral effect even in a clean tablecloth. If a barrel organ in a slum can but drown a curse let no Christian silence it. The mere light and color of the wall advertisements are a gift of God to the poor man's somber world. One Christmas time a poor drunkard told me that he had gone out the night before to take his usual chance of the temptations of the street. Close to his door, at a shop window, an angel, so he said, arrested him. It was a large Christmas card, a glorious white thing with tinsel wings, and as it glittered in the gaslight it flashed into his soul a sudden thought of heaven. It recalled the earlier heaven of his infancy and he thought of his mother in the distant Glen and how it would please her if she got this Christmas angel from her prodigal. With money already pledged to the devil he bought the angel and with it a new soul and future for himself. That was a real angel. For that day as I saw its tinsel pinions shine in his squalid room I knew what Christ's angels were. They are beautiful things which daily in common homes are bearing up heavy souls to God. But do not misunderstand me. This angel was made of pasteboard. A pasteboard angel can never save a soul. Tinsel reflects the sun, but warms nothing. Our program must go deeper. Beauty may arrest the drunkard, but it cannot cure him. It is here that Christianity asserts itself with a supreme individuality. It is here that it parts company with civilization, with politics, with all secular schemes of social reform. In its diagnosis of human nature it finds that which most other systems ignore which, if they see, they cannot cure which, left undistroyed, makes every reform futile and every inspiration vain. That thing is sin. Christianity, of all other philanthropies, recognizes that man's devouring need is liberty. Liberty to stop sinning, to leave the prison of his passions and shake off the fetters of his past, to surround captives with statues and pictures, to offer them that are bound a higher wage or a cleaner street or a few more cubic feet of air is solemn trifling. It is a cleaner soul they want, a purer air or any air at all for their higher selves. And where the cleaner soul is to come from apart from Christ I cannot tell. By no political alchemy, Herbert Spencer tells us, can you get golden conduct out of lead and instincts. The power to set the heart right, to renew the springs of action, comes from Christ. The sense of the infinite worth of the single soul and the recoverableness of man at his worst are the gifts of Christ. The freedom from guilt, the forgiveness of sins come from Christ's cross. The hope of immortality springs from Christ's grave. We believe in the gospel of better laws and an improved environment. We hold the religion of Christ to be a social religion. We magnify and call Christian to the work of reformers, statesmen, philanthropists, educators, inventors, sanitary officers, and all who directly aid a bet or further the higher progress of mankind. But in him alone, in the fullness of that word, do we see the Saviour of the world. There are earnest and gifted lives today at work among the poor, whose lips at least will not name the name of Christ. I speak of them with respect. Their shoe latches, many of us, are not worthy to unloose. But because the creed of the neighboring mission hall is a travesty of religion, they refuse to acknowledge the power of the living Christ to stop man's sin, of the dying Christ to forgive it. Oh, narrowness of breath! Because there are ignorant doctors, do I yet rail at medicine or start an hospital of my own? Because the poor, raw evangelist or the narrow ecclesiastic offer their little all to the poor, shall I repudiate all they do not know of Christ because of the little that they do know? Of Gospels for the poor, which have not some theory, stated how you will, of personal conversion, one cannot have much hope. Personal conversion means for life, a personal religion, a personal trust in God, a personal debt to Christ, a personal dedication to His cause. These, brought about how you will, are supreme things to aim at, supreme losses if they are missed. Sanctification will come to the masses only as it comes to individual men, and to work with Christ's program and ignore Christ is to utilize the sun's light without its energy. But this is not the only point at which the uniqueness of this society appears. There is yet another depth in humanity which no other system even attempts to sound. We live in a world not only of sin, but of sorrow. There is no flock, however watched and tended, but one dead lamb is there. There is no home, however defended, but has one vacant chair. When the flock thins and the chair empties, who is to be near to heal? At that moment the Gospels of the world are on trial. In the presence of death how will they act? Act! They are blotted out of existence. Philosophy, politics, reforms are no more. The picture galleries close, the sculptures hide, the committees disperse, there is crepe on the door. The world withdraws. Observe. It withdraws. It has no mission. So awful in its loneliness was this hour that the Romans paid a professional class to step in with its mummaries and try to fill it. But that is Christ's own hour. Next to righteousness the greatest word of Christianity is comfort. Christianity has almost a monopoly of comfort. Renan was never nearer the mark than when he spoke of the Bible as the great book of the consolation of humanity. Christ's program is full of comfort, studded with comfort, to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort all that mourn, to give unto them that mourn in Zion. Even the good tidings to the meek are in the Hebrew, a message to the afflicted or the poor. The word gospel itself has come down through the Greek from this very passage so that whatever else Christ's gospel means it is first an evangel for suffering men. One note in this program jars with all the rest. When Christ read from Isaiah that day he never finished the passage. A terrible word, vengeance, yawned like a precipice across his path and in the middle of a sentence he closed the book and gave it again to the minister and sat down. A day of vengeance from our God. These were the words before which Christ paused. When the prophet proclaimed it some great historical fulfillment was in his mind. Had the people to whom Christ read been able to understand its ethical equivalents he would probably have read on. For so understood instead of filling the mind with fear the thought of this dread day inspires it with a solemn gratitude. The work of the Avenger is a necessity. It is part of God's philanthropy. For I have but touched the surface in speaking of the sorrow of the world as if it came from people dying. It comes from people living. Before ever the broken hearted can be healed a hundred greater causes of suffering than death must be destroyed. Before the captive can be free a vaster prison than his own sins must be demolished. There are hells on earth into which no breath of heaven can ever come. These must be swept away. There are social soils in which only unrighteousness can flourish. These must be broken up. And that is the work of the day of vengeance. When is that day? It is now. Who is the Avenger? Law. What law? Criminal law. Sanitary law. Social law. Natural law. Wherever the poor are trodden upon or tread upon one another wherever the air is poisoned and the water foul wherever want stairs and vice rains and rags rocked there the Avenger takes his stand whatever makes it more difficult for the drunkard to reform for the children to be pure for the widow to earn a wage for any of the wheels of progress to revolve with these he deals. Delay him not. He is the messenger of Christ. Despair not of him. Distrust him not. His day dawns slowly but his work is sure. Though evil stalks the world it is on its way to execution. Though wrong reigns it must end in self-combustion. The very nature of things is God's Avenger. The very story of civilization is the history of Christ's throne. Anything that prepares the way for a better social state is the fit work of the followers of Christ. Those who work on the more spiritual levels leave too much unhonored the slow toil of multitudes of un-churched souls who prepare the material or moral environments without which these higher labours are in vain. Prevention is Christian as well as cure and Christianity travels sometimes by the most circuitous paths. It is given to some to work for immediate results and from year to year they are privileged to reckon up a balance of success. But these are not always the greatest in the kingdom. The men who get no stimulus from any visible reward whose lives pass while the objects for which they toil are still too far away to comfort them. The men who hold aloof from dazzling schemes and earn the misunderstanding of the crowd because they foresee remotor issues who even oppose a seeming good because a deeper evil lurks beyond. These are the statesmen of the kingdom of God. End of File 9 of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond File 10 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. The Second Address The Program of Christianity Section 4 The Machinery of the Society Such in dimmest outline is the program of Christ's society. Did you know that all this was going on in the world? Did you know that Christianity was such a living and purpose-like thing? Look back to the day when the program was given and you will see that it was not merely written on paper. Watch the drama of the moral order rise up scene after scene in history. Study the social evolution of humanity, the spread of righteousness, the milleration of life, the freeing of slaves, the elevation of woman, the purification of religion, and ask what these can be, if not the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. For it is precisely through the movements of nations and the lives of men that this kingdom comes. Christ might have done all this work himself with his own hands, but he did not. The crowning wonder of his scheme is that he entrusted it to men. It is the supreme glory of humanity that the machinery for its redemption should have been placed within itself. I think the saddest thing in Christ's life was that after founding a society with aims so glorious, he had to go away and leave it. But in reality he did not leave it. The old theory that God made the world, made it as an inventor would make a machine and then stood looking on to see it work, has passed away. God is no longer a remote spectator of the natural world, but imminent in it, pervading matter by his present spirit and ordering it by his will. So Christ is imminent in men. His work is to move the hearts and inspire the lives of men and through such hearts to move and reach the world. Men, only men, carry out this work. This humanness, this inwardness of the kingdom is one reason why some scarcely see that it exists at all. We measure great movements by the loudness of their advertisement or the place their externals fill in the public eye. This kingdom has no externals. The usual methods of propagating a great cause are entirely discarded by Christ. The sword he declined, money he had none, literature he never used, the church disowned him, the state crucified him. Planting his ideals in the hearts of a few poor men, he started them out, unheralded, to revolutionize the world. They did it by making friends and by making enemies. They went about, did good, sowed seed, died, and lived again in the lives of those they helped. These, in turn, a fraction of them did the same. They met, they prayed, they talked of Christ, they loved, they went among other men and by act and word passed on their secret. The machinery of the kingdom of God is purely social. It acts not by commandment, but by contagion, not by fiat, but by friendship. The kingdom of God is like unto Levin which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. After all, like all great discoveries once they are made, this seems absolutely the most feasible method that could have been devised. Men must live among men, men must influence men. Organizations, institutions, churches have too much rigidity for a thing that is to flood the world. The only fluid in the world is man. War might have won for Christ's cause a passing victory. Wealth might have purchased a superficial triumph. Political power might have gained a temporary success. But in these there is no note of universality, of solidarity, of immortality. To live through the centuries and pervade the uttermost ends of the earth to stand while kingdoms tottered and civilizations changed, to survive fallen churches and crumbling creeds, there was no soil for the kingdom of God like the hearts of common men. Some who have written about this kingdom have emphasized its moral grandeur, others its universality, others its adaptation to man's needs. One great writer speaks of its prodigious originality. Another chiefly notices its success. I confess what strikes me most is the miracle of its simplicity. Men, then, are the only means God's spirit has of accomplishing his purpose. What, men? You. Is it worth doing or is it not? Is it worthwhile joining Christ's society or is it not? What do you do all day? What is your personal stake in the coming of the kingdom of Christ on earth? You are not interested in religion, you tell me. You do not care for your soul. It was not about your religion, I ventured to ask, still less about your soul. That you have no religion, that you do not care for your soul does not absolve you from caring for the world in which you live. But you do not believe in this church, you reply, or accept this doctrine or that. Christ does not, in the first instance, ask your thoughts but your work. No man has a right to postpone his life for the sake of his thoughts. Why? Because this is a real world, not a think world. Treat it as a real world, act. Think by all means, but think also of what is actual, of what the stern world is like, of how much even you, creedless and churchless, could do to make it better. The thing to be anxious about is not to be right with man, with mankind. And so far as I know, there is nothing so on all fours with mankind as Christianity. There are versions of Christianity it is true, which no self-respecting mind can do other than disown. Versions so hard, so narrow, so unreal, so super theological, so practical men can find in them neither outlet for their lives, nor resting place for their thoughts. With these we have nothing to do. With these Christ had nothing to do, except to oppose them with every word and act of his life. It too seldom occurs to those who repudiate Christianity with its narrowness, or its unpracticalness, its sanctimoniousness, or its dullness, that these were the very things which Christ strove against, and unwearedly condemned. It was the one risk of his religion being given to the common people, an inevitable risk which he took without reserve, that its infinite luster should be tarnished in the fingering of the crowd, or have its great truths narrowed into mean and unworthy molds as they passed from lip to lip. But though the crowd is the object of Christianity, it is not its custodian. Deal with the founder of this great commonwealth himself. Any man of honest purpose who will take the trouble to inquire firsthand what Christianity really is will find it a thing he cannot get away from. Without either argument or pressure, by the mere practicalness of its aims, and the pathos of its compassion, it forces its august claim upon every serious life. He who joins this society finds himself in a large place. The Kingdom of God is a society of the best men working for the best ends according to the best methods. Its membership is a multitude whom no man can number. Its methods are as various as human nature. Its field is the world. It is a commonwealth. Yet it honors a king. It is a social brotherhood, but it acknowledges the fatherhood of God. Though not a philosophy, the world turns to it for light. Though not political, it is the incubator of all great laws. It is more human than the state, for it deals with deeper needs. It is more Catholic than the church, for it includes whom the church rejects. It is a propaganda, yet it works not by agitation, but by ideals. It is a religion, yet it holds the worship of God to be mainly the service of man. Though not a scientific society, its watchword is evolution. Though not an ethic, it possesses the sermon on the mount. This mysterious society owns no wealth, but distributes fortunes. It has no minutes, for history keeps them. No member's role, for no one could make it. Its entry money is nothing. Its subscription all you have. The society never meets, and it never adjourns. Its law is one word, loyalty. Its gospel one message, love. Verily, whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. The program for the other life is not out yet. For this world, for these faculties, for his one short life, I know nothing that is offered man to compare with membership in the kingdom of God. Among the mysteries which compass the world beyond, none is greater than how there can be in store for man a work more wonderful, a life more God-like than this. If you know anything better, live for it. If not, in the name of God and of humanity, carry out Christ's plan. End of File 10 of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. File 11 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses. The third address, The City Without a Church. Section 1, The City Without a Church. And Section 2, I saw the city from The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. The City Without a Church. I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. And I saw no temple therein. And his servants shall serve him and they shall see his face and his name shall be written on their foreheads. I saw the city. Two very startling things arrest us in John's vision of the future. The first is that the likeest thing to heaven he could think of was a city. The second that there was no church in that city. Almost nothing more revolutionary could be said even to the modern world in the name of religion. No church. That is the defiance of religion. A city. That is the antipodes of heaven. Yet John combines these contradictions in one daring image to the world, the picture of a city without a church as his ideal of the heavenly life. By far the most original thing here is the simple conception of heaven as a city. The idea of religion without a church I saw no temple therein is anomalous enough. But the association of the blessed life of a city. The one place in the world from which heaven seems most far away is something wholly new in religious thought. No other religion which has a heaven ever had a heaven like this. The Greek, if he looked forward at all, awaited the Elysian fields. The eastern sought nirvana. Dreamlands, passivities, more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves, heaven is a siesta, not a city. It remained for John to go straight through to the other extreme and select the citadel of the world's fever, the ganglion of its unrest, the heart of its toil, as the framework for his ideal of the blessed life. The heaven of Christianity is different from all other heavens because the religion of Christianity is different from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. It spheres the street, the marketplace, the life of the world. And what interests one for the present in John's vision is not so much what it reveals of a heaven beyond but what it suggests of the nature of the heavenly life in this present world. Find out what a man's heaven is no matter whether it be a dream or a reality. No matter whether it refer to an actual heaven or to a kingdom of God to be realized on Earth and you pass by an easy discovery to what his religion is. And herein lies one value at least of this allegory. It is a touch-tone for Christianity, a test for the solidity or the insipidity of one's religion for the wholesomeness or the flatuousness of one's faith for the usefulness or the futility of one's life. For this vision of the city marks off in lines which no eye can mistake the true area in which the religion of Christ is meant to inhabit and announces for all time the real nature of the saintly life. City life and human life at its intensest man in his most real relations and the nearer one draws to reality the nearer one draws to the working sphere of religion. Wherever real life is there Christ goes and he goes there not only because the great need lies there but also to speak the raw material with which Christianity works the life of man. To do something with this to infuse something into this to save and inspire and sanctify this the actual working life of the world is what he came for. Without human life to act upon of men with one another of master with servant of husband with wife buyer with seller creditor with debtor there is no such thing as Christianity with actual things with humanity in its everyday dress with the traffic of the streets with gates and houses with work and wages with sin and poverty with these things and all the things and all the relations and all the people of the city Christianity has to do and has more to do than with anything else. To conceive of the Christian religion as itself a thing a something which can exist apart from life to think of it as something added on to being something kept in a separate compartment called the soul as an extra accomplishment like music or a special talent like art is totally to misapprehend its nature it is that which fills all compartments it is that which makes the whole life music and every separate action a work of art take away action and it is not take away people houses streets character and it ceases to be without these there may be sentiment or rapture or adoration or superstition there may even be religion but there can never be the religion of the son of man if heaven were a siesta religion might be conceived of as a reverie if the future life were to be mainly spent in a temple the present life might be mainly spent in church but if heaven be a city the life of those who are going there must be a real life the man who would enter John's heaven no matter what piety may profess must be a real man Christ's gift to men was life a rich and abundant life and life is meant for living an abundant life does not show itself in abundant dreaming but in abundant living in abundant living among real and tangible objects and to actual and practical purposes his servants John tells us shall serve in this vision of the city he confronts us with a new definition of a Christian man the perfect saint is the perfect citizen to make cities that is what we are here for to make good cities that is for the present hour the main work of Christianity for the city is strategic it makes the towns the towns make the villages the villages make the country he who makes the city makes the world after all though men make cities it is cities which make men whether our national life is great or mean whether our social virtues are mature or stunted whether our son are moral or vicious whether religion is possible or impossible depends upon the city when Christianity shall take upon itself in full responsibility the burden and care of the cities the kingdom of God will openly come on earth what Christianity waits for also this final apologetic and justification to the world is the founding of a city which shall be invisible reality a city of God people do not dispute that religion is in the church what is now wanted is to let them see it in the city one Christian city one city in any part of the earth from the greatest to the humblest lived in the spirit of Christ where religion had overflowed from the churches and passed into the streets inundating every house and workshop and permeating the whole social and commercial life one such Christian city would seal the redemption of the world some such city surely is what John saw in his dream whatever reference we may find there to a world to come is it not equally lawful to seek the scene upon this present world John saw his city descending out of heaven it was moreover no strange apparition but a city which he knew it was Jerusalem a new Jerusalem the significance of that name has been altered for most of us by religious poetry we spell it with a capital and speak of the new Jerusalem as a synonym for heaven yet why not take it simply as it stands as a new Jerusalem try to restore the natural force of the expression suppose John to have lived today and to have said London I saw a new London Jerusalem was John's London all the grave and sad suggestion that the word London brings up today to the modern reformer the word Jerusalem recalled to him what in his deepest hours he longed for and prayed for was a new Jerusalem a reformed Jerusalem and just as it is given to the man in modern England who is a prophet the man who believes in God and in the moral order of the world to discern a new London shaping itself through all the sin and chaos of the city so was it given to John to see a new Jerusalem rise from the ruins of the old we have no concern we are contrary to critical method to press the allegory in detail what we take from it looked at in this slide is the broad conception of a transformed city the great Christian thought that the very cities where we live with all their suffering and sin shall one day by the gradual action of the forces of Christianity turned into heavens on earth this is a spectacle which profoundly concerns the world to the reformer the philanthropist the economist the politician this vision of the city is the great classic of social literature what John saw we may barely take it was the future of all cities it was the dawn of a new social order a regenerate humanity a purified society an actual transformation of the cities of the world into cities of God this city then which John saw is none other than your city the place where you live as it might be and as you are to help to make it in New York Paris Melbourne Calcutta these as they might be and in some infinitesimal degree as they have already begun to be in each of these and in every city throughout the world today there is a city descending out of heaven from God each one of us is daily building up this city helping to keep it back its walls rise slowly but as we believe in God the building can never cease for the might of those who built be they few or many is so surely greater than the might of those who retard that no day's sun sets over any city in the land that does not see some stone of the invisible city laid to believe this is faith to live for this is Christianity the project is delirious yes to atheism to John it was the most obvious thing in the world nay knowing all he knew its realization was inevitable we forget when the thing strikes us as strange that John knew Christ Christ was the light of the world the light of the world this is all that he meant by his vision that Christ is the light of the world this light John saw would fall everywhere especially upon cities it was irresistible and inextinguishable no darkness could stand before it one by one the cities of the world would give up their night room by room house by house street by street they would be changed whatsoever work at the abomination would disappear sin, pain, sorrow would silently pass away one day the walls of the city would be jasper the very streets would be paved with gold then the kings of the earth would bring their glory and honor into it in the midst of the streets there should be a tree of life and its leaves would go forth for the healing of the nations survey the cities of the world today survey your own city town, village, home and prophesy God's kingdom is surely to come in this world God's will is surely to be done on earth as it is in heaven is not this one predictable way of realizing it when a prophet speaks of something that is to be that coming event is usually brought about by no unrelated cause or sudden shock but in the ordered course of the world's drama with Christianity as the supreme actor in the world's drama the future of its cities is even now quite clear project the lines of Christian and social progress to their still far off goal and see even now that heaven must come to earth end of file 11 of the greatest thing in the world and other addresses file 12 of the LibriVox recording of the greatest thing in the world and other addresses by Henry Drummond this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the greatest thing in the world and other addresses by Henry Drummond the third address the city without a church section 2 his servants shall serve if anyone wishes to know what he can do to help on the work of God in the world let him make a city or a street or a house of a city men complain of the indefiniteness of religion there are thousands ready in their humble measure to offer some personal service for the good of men but they do not know where to begin let me tell you where to begin where Christ told his disciples to begin at the nearest city I promise you that before one week's work is over you will never again be haunted by the problem of the indefiniteness of Christianity you will see so much to do so many actual things to set right so many merely material conditions to alter so much striving with employers of labour and city councils and trade agitators and boards and vestries and committees with pure, unreleaved uninspiring hard work that you will begin to wonder whether in all this naked realism you are on holy ground at all do not be afraid of missing heaven in seeking a better earth the distinction between secular and sacred is a confusion and not a contrast and it is only because the secular is so intensely sacred that so many eyes are blind before it the really secular thing in life is the spirit that despises under that name what is but part of the everywhere present work and will of God be sure that down to the last and pettiest detail all that concerns a better world is the direct concern of Christ I make this then in all seriousness as a definite practical proposal you wish you say to be a religious man well, be one there is your city begin but what are you to believe believe in your city what else in Jesus Christ what about him that he wants to make your city better that is what he would be doing if he lived there what else believe in yourself that you even you can do some of the work which he would like done and unless you do it it will remain undone how are you to begin as Christ did he first looked at the city then he wept over it then he died for it where are you to begin begin where you are make that one corner room, house, office as like heaven as you can begin begin with the paper on the walls make that beautiful with the air keep it fresh with the very drains make them sweet with the furniture see that it be honest abolish whatsoever work at the abomination in food, in drink in luxury, in books in art whatsoever make it a lie in conversation in social intercourse in correspondence in domestic life this done you have arranged for a heaven but you have not got it heaven lies within in kindness in humbleness in unselfishness in faith, in love in service to get these in get Christ in teach all in the house about Christ what he did and what he said and how he lived and how he died and how he dwells in them and how he makes all one teach it not as a doctrine but as a discovery as your own discovery live your own discovery then pass out into the city do all to it that you have done at home beautify it ventilate it let nothing enter it that can defile the streets the stage the newspaper offices the booksellers counters nothing that make it a lie in its warehouses its manufactures its shops its art galleries its advertisements use it church it christianize capital dignify labor join councils and committees provide for the poor the sick and the widow so will you serve the city if you ask me which of all these things is the most important I reply that among them there is only one thing of superlative importance and that is yourself by far the greatest thing a man can do for his city is to be a good man simply to live there as a good man as a christian man of action and practical citizen is the first and highest contribution anyone can make to its salvation let a city be a sodom or a gamora and if there be but ten righteous men in it it will be saved it is here that the older the more individual conception of christianity did such mighty work for the world it produced good men it is goodness that tells goodness first and goodness last good men even with small views are immeasurably more important to the world than small men with great views but given good men such men as were produced even by the self centered theology of an older generation and add that wider outlook and social ideal which are coming to be the characteristics of the religion of this age and christianity has the equipment for the reconstruction of the world before which nothing can stand such good men will not merely content themselves with being good men they will be forces according to their measure public forces they will take the city in hand some a house some a street some the whole of set purpose not ostentatiously but silently in ways varied as human nature and many as life's opportunities they will minister to it's good to help the people also to be good people good fathers and mothers and sons and citizens is worth all else rolled into one arrange the government city as you may perfect all it's philanthropic machinery make righteous it's relations great and small equip it with galleries and parks and libraries and music and carry out the whole program of social reform and the one thing needful is still without the gates the gospel of material blessedness the gospel a great and Christian part but when held up as the whole gospel for the people it is as hollow as the void of life whose circumference even it fails to touch there are countries in the world new countries where the people rising to the rights of government have already secured almost all that reformers for the lot of the working man there is all but perfect his wages are high his leisure is great his home worthy yet in tens of thousands of cases the secret life is unknown it is idle to talk of christ as a social reformer if by that is meant that his first concern was to improve the organization or provide the world with better laws these were among his objects but his first was to provide the world with better men the one need of every cause and every community still is for better men if every workshop held a workman like him who worked in the carpenter's shop at Nazareth the labor problem all other workman's problems would soon be solved if every street had a home or two like Mary's home in Bethany the domestic life of the city would be transformed in three generations external reforms education civilization public schemes and public charities have each their part to play any experiment that can benefit by one hair breath any single human life is a thousand times worth trying there is no effort in any single one of these directions but must as Christianity advances be pressed by Christian men to ever further and fuller issues but those whose hands have tried the ways the work of leavening men one by one with the spirit of Jesus Christ the thought that the future that any day may see some new and mighty enterprise of redemption some new departure in religion which shall change everything with a breath and make all that is crooked straight is not at all likely to be realized there is nothing wrong in the lines on which redemption runs at present except the want of faith to believe in them and the want of men to use them the kingdom of God is like leaven and the leaven is with us now the quantity at work in the world may increase but that is all nothing can ever be higher than the spirit of Christ or more potent the regenerating power on the lives of men do not charge me with throwing away my brief because I return to this old old plea for the individual soul I do not forget that my plea is for the city but I plead for good men because good men are good leaven if their goodness stops short of that if the leaven does not mix with that which is unleavened it does not do the work of leaven that is to raise something it is not the leaven of Christ the question for good men to ask themselves is is my goodness helping others is it a private luxury or is it telling upon the city is it bringing a single human soul ever happiness or righteousness if you ask what particular scheme you shall take up I cannot answer Christianity has no set schemes it makes no choice between conflicting philanthropies decides nothing between competing churches favors no particular public policy organizes no one line of private charity it is not essential even for all of us to take any public or formal line Christianity is not at all carried on by committees and the kingdom of God has other ways of coming than through municipal reforms most of the stones for the building of the city of God and all the best of them are made by mothers but whether or no you shall work through public channels or only serve Christ along the quieter paths of home no man can determine but yourself there is an almost awful freedom about Christ's religion I do not call you servants he said for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth I have called you friends as Christ's friends his followers are supposed to know what he wants done and for the same reason they will try to do it this is the whole working basis of Christianity surely next to its love for the chief of sinners the most touching thing about the religion of Christ is its amazing trust of saints here is the mightiest enterprise ever launched upon this earth mightier ever than its creation for it is its recreation and the carrying of it out is left so to speak to haphazard to individual loyalty to free enthousiasms to uncoerced activities to compelled response to the pressures of God's spirit Christ sets his followers no tasks he appoints no hours he allots no sphere he himself simply went about and did good he did not stop life to do some special thing that should be called religious his life was his religion each day as it came brought round in the ordinary course its natural ministry each village along the highway had someone waiting to be helped his pulpit was the hillside his congregation a woman at a well the poor wherever he met them were his clients the sick as often as he found them his opportunity his work was everywhere his workshop was the world ones associations of Christ are all of the wayside we never think of him in connection with a church we cannot picture him in the garb of a priest or belonging to any of the classes who specialize religion his service was of a universal human order he was the son of man the citizen this remember was the highest life ever lived this informal citizen life so simple a thing it was so natural so human that those who saw it at first did not know it was religion and Christ did not pass among them as a very religious man nay it is certain and it is an infinitely significant thought that the religious people of his time not only refused to accept this type of religion as any kind of religion at all but repudiated and denounced him as its bitter enemy inability to discern what true religion is not confined to the Pharisees multitude still who profess to belong to the religion of Christ scarcely know it when they see it the truth is men will hold to almost anything in the name of Christianity believe anything do anything except its common and obvious tasks great is the mystery of what has passed in this world for religion end of file 12 file 13 of the LibriVox recording of the greatest thing in the world and other addresses by Henry Drummond this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the greatest thing in the world by Henry Drummond the third address city without a church the third section I saw no temple there I saw no church there said John nor is there any note of surprise as he marks the omission of what one half of Christendom would have considered the first essential for beside the religion he had learned from Christ the church type is an elaborate evasion what have the pomp and circumstance the fashion and the form the vestures and the postures to do with Jesus of Nazareth at a stage in personal development and for a certain type of mind such things may have a place but when mistaken for Christianity or how they aid it or in what measure they conserve it they defraud the souls of men and rob humanity of its dues it is because to large masses of people Christianity has become synonymous with the temple service that other large masses of people decline to touch it it is a mistake to suppose that the working classes of this country are opposed to Christianity no man can ever be opposed to Christianity who knows what it really is the working men would still follow Christ if he came among them as a matter of fact they do follow anyone preacher or layman in pulpit or on platform makes the least like him but what they cannot follow and must ever more live outside of is a worship which ends with the worshipper a religion expressed only in ceremony and of faith unrelated to life perhaps the most dismal fact of history is the failure of the great organized bodies of ecclesiasticism to understand the simple genius of Christ's religion whatever the best in the churches of all time may have thought of the life and religion of Christ taken as a whole they have succeeded in leaving upon the mind of a large portion of the world an impression of Christianity which is the direct opposite of the reality down to the present hour almost whole nations in Europe live, worship, and die under the belief that Christ is an ecclesiastical Christ religion, the sum of all the churches' observances and faith and adhesion to the church's creeds I do not a portion blame I simply record the fact everything that the spiritual and temporal authority of man could do has been done done in ignorance of the true nature of Christianity to dislodge the religion of Christ from its natural home in the heart of humanity in many lands the churches have literally stolen Christ from the people they have made the son of man the priest of an order they have taken Christianity from the city and imprisoned it behind altar rails they have withdrawn it from the national life and doled it out to the few who could pay to keep the unconscious deception up do not do the church the true church at least the injustice to think she does not know all this nowhere not even in the fiercest secular press is there more exposure to this danger more indignation at its continuance than in many churches of today the protest against the confusion of Christianity with the church is the most threadbare of pulpit themes before the University of Oxford from the pulpit of Saint Mary's these words were lately spoken if it is strange that the church of the darker ages should have needed so bitter a lesson the actual demolition of their churches is it not ten times stranger still that the church of the days of greater enlightenment should be found again making the chief part of its business the organizing of the modes of worship that the largest efforts which are owned as the efforts of the church are made for the establishment and maintenance of worship that our chief controversies relate to the teaching and ministry of a system designed primarily if not exclusively for worship that even the fancies and the refinements of such a system divide us that the breach between things secular and things religious grows wider instead of there being made to blend into one and that the vast and fruitful spaces of the actual life of mankind lies still so largely without the gates the old Jerusalem was all temple the medieval church was all temple but the ideal of the new Jerusalem was no temple but a god inhabited society are we not reversing this ideal in an age when the church still means in so many mouths the clergy the Christian society and when nine men are striving to get men to go to church for one who was striving to make men realize that they themselves are the church yet even with words so strong as these echoing daily from Protestant pulpits the superstition reigns in all but unbroken power and everywhere still men are found confounding the spectacular services of a church the vicarious religion of a priest and the traditional belief in a creed with the living religion of the son of man I saw no temple there the future city will be a city without a church ponder the fact and realize the temporariness of the church then go and build one do not imagine because all this has been said that I mean to depreciate the church on the contrary if it were mine to build a city a city where all life should be religious and all men destined to become members of the body of Christ the first stone I should lay there would be the foundation stone of a church why? because among other reasons the product which the church on the whole best helps to develop and in the largest quantity is that which is most needed by the city for the present and for a long time to come the manufactory of good men the nursery of the forces which are to redeem the city will in the main be found to be some more or less formal more or less imperfect Christian church here and there an unchurched soul may stir the multitudes to lofty deeds isolated men strong enough to preserve their souls apart from the church but short-sighted enough to fail to see that others cannot may set high examples and stimulate to national reforms but for the rank and file of us made of such stuff as we are made of the steady pressures of fixed institutions the regular diets of a common worship and the education of public Christian teaching are two obvious safeguards of spiritual culture to be set aside even renan declares his conviction that beyond the family and outside the state man has need of the church civil society whether it calls itself a commune, a canton a province, a state or fatherland has many duties towards the improvement of the individual but what it does is necessarily limited the family ought to do much more but often it is insufficient sometimes it is wanting altogether the association created in the name of moral principle alone can give to every man coming into the world a bond which unites him with the past duties as to the future examples to follow a heritage to receive and to transmit and a tradition of devotion to continue a part altogether from the quality of its contribution to society in mere quantity of the work it turns out it stands alone even for social purposes the church is by far the greatest employment bureau in the world and the man who seeing where it falls short withholds on that account his witness to its usefulness is a traitor to history and to fact the church as the preacher whom I have already quoted most truly adds is a society which tends to embrace to bind all their relations together by a divine sanction as such it blends naturally with the institutions of common life those institutions which because they are natural and necessary are therefore divine what it aims at is not the recognition by the nation of a worshiping body owned by the ministers of public worship which calls itself the church but that the nation and all classes in it should act upon Christian principle that laws should be made in Christ's spirit of justice that the relations of the powers of the state should be maintained on the basis of Christian equity that all public acts should be done in Christ's spirit and with mutual forbearance that the spirit of Christian charity should spread through all ranks and orders of people the church will maintain public worship as one of the greatest supports of a Christian public life but it will always remember that the true service is a life of devotion and man far more than the common utterance of prayer I have said that if it were mine to build a city the first stone I should lay there would be the foundation stone of a church but if it were mine to preach the first sermon in that church I should choose as the text I saw no church therein I should tell the people that the great use of the church is to help men to do without it as the old ecclesiastical term has it Christian services are diets of worship they are meals all who are hungry will take them and if they are wise regularly but no workman is paid for his meals he is paid for the work he does in the strength of them no Christian is paid for going to church he goes there for a meal for strength from God and from his fellow worshipers to do the work of life which is the work of Christ the church is a divine institution because it is so very human an institution as a channel of nourishment as a stimulus to holy deeds as a link with all holy lives let men use it and to the utmost of their opportunity but by all they know of Christ or care for man let them beware of mistaking its services for Christianity what church services really express is the want of Christianity and when that which is perfect in Christianity is come all this the mere passing stay and scaffolding of struggling souls must vanish away if the masses who never go to church only knew that the churches were the mute expression of a Christian's wants and not the self-advertisement of his sanctity they would have more respectful words for churches but they have never learned this and the result in their case of confounding religion with the church is even more serious than in the case of the professing Christian when they break with the church it means to them a break with all religion as things are it could scarce be otherwise with the church in constant evidence before their eyes as the acknowledged custodian of Christianity with actual stone and line in every street representing the place where religion dwells with a professional class moving out and in among them holding in their hands in and almost the keys of heaven how is it possible that those who turn their backs on all this should not feel outcast from the church's god it is not possible without a murmur yet with results to themselves most disastrous and pathetic multitudes accept this false dividing line with themselves as excommunicate from all good the masses will never return to the church till its true relation to the city is more defined and they can never have that most real life of theirs made religious so long as they rule themselves out of court on the ground that they have broken with the clasiastical forms the life of the masses is the most real of all lives it is full of religious possibilities every movement of it and every moment of it might become of supreme religious value might hold a continuous spiritual discipline might perpetuate and that in most natural ways a moral influence which should pervade all cities and all states but they must first be taught what Christianity really is and learn to distinguish between religion and the church after that if they be taught their lesson well they will return to honor both our fathers made much of this for heaven by prayer and fasting by self examination and meditation they sought to fit themselves for the inheritance of the saints in light important beyond measure in their fitting place are these exercises of the soul but whether alone they fit men for the inheritance of the saints depends on what a saint is if a saint is a devotee and not a citizen if heaven is a cathedral and not a city then these things do fit for heaven but if life means action and heaven service if spiritual graces are acquired for use and not for ornament then devotional forms have a deeper function the Puritan preachers were want to tell their people to practice dying yes but what is dying it is going to a city and what is required of those who would go to a city the practice of citizenship the due employment of the unselfish talents the development of public spirit the payment of the full tax to the great brotherhood the subordination of personal aims to the common good and where are these to be learned here in cities here there is no other way to learn them there is no heaven to those who have not learned them no church however holy however priest however earnest no book however sacred can transfer to any human character the capacities of citizenship those capacities which in the very nature of things are necessities to those who would live in the kingdom of God the only preparation which multitudes seem to make for heaven what will they do in its streets what have they learned of citizenship what have they practiced of love how like are they to its lord to practice dying is to practice living earth is the rehearsal for heaven the eternal beyond is the eternal here the street life the home life the business life the city life in all the varied range of its activity are an apprenticeship for the city of God there is no other apprenticeship for it to know how to serve christ in these is to practice dying to move among the people in street to meet them in the marketplace on equal terms to live among them not as saint or monk but as brother man with brother man to serve God not with form or ritual but in the free impulse of a soul to bear the burdens of society and relieve its needs to carry on the multitude of the city social, commercial political, philanthropic in christ's spirit and for his ends this is the religion of the son of man and the only meatness for heaven which has much reality in it no, the church with all its splendid equipment the cloister with all its holy opportunity not the final instruments for fitting men for heaven the city in many of its functions is a greater church than the church it is amid the whir of its machinery and in the discipline of it's life that the souls of men are really made how great it's opportunity is we are few of us aware of such slow work getting there the daily round is so very common our ideas of a heavenly life are so unreal and so mystical that even when the highest heaven lies all around us when we might touch it and dwell in it every day we live we almost fail to see that it is there the heaven of our childhood the spectacular heaven the heaven which is a place so dominates thought even in our mature years that we are slow to learn the fuller truth that heaven is a state but john who is responsible before all other teachers for the dramatic view of heaven has not failed in this very allegory to explain the further lesson having brought all his scenery upon the stage and pictured a material heaven of almost unimaginable splendor the seer turns aside before he closes for a revelation of a profounder kind within the heavenly city he opens the gate of an inner heaven it is the spiritual heaven the heaven of those who serve with two flashes of his pen he tells the citizens of God all that they will ever need or care to know as to what heaven really means his servants shall serve him and they shall see his face and his character shall be written on their characters they shall see his face where in the city when in eternity no tomorrow those who serve in any city cannot help continually seeing Christ he is there with them he is there before them they cannot but meet no gentle word is ever spoken that Christ's voice does not also speak no meek deed is ever done that the unsummoned vision does not there and then appear whoso in whatsoever place receiveth a little child in my name receiveth me this is how men get to know God by doing his will and there is no other way and this is how men become like God how God's character becomes written upon men's characters acts react upon souls good acts make men good just acts just men kind acts kind men divine men and there is no other way of becoming good just kind divine and there is no heaven for those who have not become these for these are heaven when John's heaven faded from his sight and the prophet woke to the desert waste of Patmos did he grudge the exchange of the heaven of his dreams for the common tasks around him was he not glad to be alive and there and would he not straight way go to the city to whatever struggling multitude his prison rock held if so be that he might prove his dream and among them see his face traveler to God's last city be glad that you are alive be thankful for the city at your door and for the chance to build its walls a little nearer heaven before you go pray for yet a little while to redeem the wasted years and week by week as you go forth from worship and day by day as you awake to this great needy world learn to seek a city there and in the surface of its neediest citizen find heaven end of file 13