Part 4

Contrasted with this peculiar burden of the city, there is the country church and the adaptation needed to maintain it in any degree of effectiveness, when its very life blood has been drained for the city. It has made untold contributions of ministers, missionaries, church officers and members to the cities and distant fields, leaving the mother church childless and weak in its advancing years.

Changes that leave almost none of its former constituency confront the country church.

Old farms and village stores pass into the hands of aliens--in many instances Hebrews--summer boarders claim the attention of the faithful women of the congregation for the most favorable months of the year. Sunday sports engage the interests of the indifferent, and there are many other disintegrating elements.

In a land where progress calls to progress, where the results of hasty development create a large share of its problem--a land where the need of Christian effort is paramount, and where such effort is so vital to the world, the decadence of the country church is of far-reaching significance. Home Missions is called to direct its energizing, constructive ability to the solution of this baffling and discouraging feature of its problem to a greater degree than ever before.

Home Missions at this time also confronts a new opportunity and obligation--to make its voice heard, its influence felt, for international peace.

These winter days of 1914, in which the world has apparently lost its soul in the fury of slaughter, speak very loudly to the heart of Christianity.

No force for the upbuilding of the Christ power on earth can ignore the significance and solemnity of this time.

Has Christianity failed in these warring lands, or have they who are controlled by Christian standards and ethics in other relations, failed to apprehend that the Christ test--His principles--must be brought to bear upon all of life--upon personal, individual, national and international relations?

The fruition of Christianity must at last bring in the day when the conscience of Christian nations will hold true to the Master's teaching. "What ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," must be wrought into national consciousness and practiced as an international principle. With the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man is the very heart of the Gospel message.

Home Missions must take account of the moral reactions of such carnage as is now taking place.

"Death meets those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling passions--their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved, searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty, fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. The thing to fear is not pain, but trespass; not suffering, but sin--the peculiar sin of war is that it corrupts while it consumes, that it demoralizes whilst it destroys. It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned by the religious consciousness. The damage that it inflicts upon the persons and property of men is trifling beside the damage it inflicts upon morals; and it is this that is exciting in thoughtful minds a fresh interest in the whole military conception. The ominous thing is not the body prostrate on the battlefield, but the brute rampant in the mother-land; the general lowering of ideal, the blatant materialism and defiant selfishness." [Footnote: Walter Walsh--The Moral Damage of War.]

Home Missions must consider the responsibility of our Christian nation toward the attitude of world thought that made possible this war. It was John Hay in his instructions to our American delegates to the First Hague Conference who said: "Next to the great fact of a nation's independence is the great fact of its interdependence." [Footnote: William I. Hull--The New Peace Movement.]

Through travel, cultural influences, commerce, the rapid circulation of news, the cultivation of sympathy, there is a recognized oneness of the world to-day; a solidarity which, notwithstanding all the differences arising from remoteness, race, legislation, and religion, binds together the world as never before.

The world is realizing to-day, as one of the results of this conflict, that in the largest sense its interests are one, and that all nations are interdependent.

"America must remember that the military idea and the ideal of democracy are absolutely opposed."

Dr. Josiah Strong, in a powerful presentation of the effects of the war says: "Evidently the increasing interdependence of the nations is creating new international rights and duties, but there is no world legislature to recognize and legalize them, there is no world judiciary to interpret and apply them, and there is no world executive to enforce and vitalize them.

"The economic and industrial organization of the world has far outgrown the political organization of the world." [Footnote: The Gospel of the Kingdom, January, 1915.]

Some new world organization is needed and must come to supply this deficiency.

Home Missions must use its influence to build up a Christian sentiment for the adjustment of international disagreements other than by bloodshed and slaughter.

"The following facts are significant. The European war is said to cost over one hundred million dollars a day in money, stoppage of industry, and destruction of property.

"The United States has spent in preparedness for war during the past ten years a sum six times the cost of the Panama Canal." [Footnote: New York Peace Society Leaflet.]

The European war says:

"That a world that prepares for war will get it sooner or later.

That militarism has revealed itself as an enemy to civilization and must be destroyed.

That autocrat rulers with power to make war have no rightful place in the modern world. That no more attempts at world domination are wanted, no matter by what nation or race.

That nationality and national boundaries must be respected, territories being enlarged only by the free consent of the population to be annexed, and colonization taking place only by peaceable commercial and industrial methods.

That, while military preparedness cannot preserve peace, preparedness against attack is essential.

That a league or federation of the peaceably inclined nations for mutual protection and for the preservation of international law and order has become a necessity of the immediate future.