CANON FAIMAR ON THE SALVATION ARMY.
CANON FARRAR'S sermon, published in last week's Guardian, on the Salvation Army and its doings, is full of good-sense and Christian tact,—is, indeed, a very remarkable sermon, not merely for that force and fulness of phrase of which Canon Farm is always a master, but for the happy mingling of sympathy with severity towards the well-meant and very successful run of spiritual melodrama which is taking London by storm. But admirable as it is, it rather needs a concise in- terpretation or commentary, for it leaves some minds a little puzzled. Canon Farrar explains that if there had been any attempt to persecute the Salvation Army, if they had not had it all their own way, if the Clergy had not almost vied with each other in giving it a certain measure of support, he would not have seized the opportunity to criticise its faults ; but that as it is in the full tide of success, and is boasting of its multi- plying victories, he feels it his duty to point out where its vital flaws are, and how much they stand in need of prompt cor- rection. And then he goes on to show that if the leaders of the Salvation Army do but recognise these vital flaws ade- quately, they must radically reform their whole method of pro- cedure, so as to remain no longer what they now are. That haves the mind a little puzzled. One asks oneself why all this sympathy with what they are doing, if one would give them a great deal more sympathy, on condition that they practically ceased from doing it altogether P Or, to put it the other way, one asks how can you justify this strong disapproval of the most char- acteristic and distinctive element in the whole plan of operations, if it is right to help its leaders with money and to lend them good sites for their operations P We suppose that Canon Farrar might reply to these questions something in this fashion. ' You may sympathise with and even aid those who are going in the right direction, so long as they are going in the right direction, even though you recognise clearly that if they do not take a tarn soon, they will then be going in the wrong direction. There is, perhaps, a stage in which mere spiritual pantomime,—so long as it is spiritual pantomime and succeeds to nnspiritual pantomime, — may do good. As a matter of fact, the Salvation Army appears to wean a great many people who would otherwise drink and fight, and sin in a hundred other ways, from their vices. This is good for them, but their present discipline as soldiers of the Salvation Army cannot remain good for any long time. Unless it leads them to a, less ostentatious, more humble, more penitent, and more inward type of Christianity, it cannot even be the beginning of the Christian life. What we aid them for is the utility of this first transition. The usefulness of a Salvation Army may last, even if it continuos in its present shrieking stage. But unless all its elements change, unless those who now belong to it get sick of its pantomime, and give up their places to others who have not yet learned that Christianity is inward, and not a beating of big drums, it cannot possibly end in making those who join it true Christians ; while it may very likely end in making them false actors. What we approve, then, is the transition stage, on condition that it proves a transition stage to something better for those who join it,— that it passes them on to something more genuine, and less showy. As affording a durable faith to any human being whatever, it is dangerous and absurd.' This, or something like this, we take to be Canon Farrar's real drift ; and if so, we heartily agree with it. We have always held that Christ's ap- parently opposite teaching, " He that is not against us is for us ;" " He that is not with sue is against me, and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth," are, if taken in their several contexts, not only consistent, but explanatory of each other. The former saying was addressed to St. John, who had found "one casting out devils in thy name," and had forbidden him, "because he followeth not with ns." This was the censure of a pro- ceeding very like that of the Salvation Army, as Canon Farrar aptly observes; and the censure was itself censured, for our Lord replied, " Forbid him not, for he that is not against us is for us." In other words, any real warfare against a spirit of evil, in Christ's name, whether conceived absolutely in Christ's spirit or not, is calculated to turn the attention of men to the Christ thus invoked, and to lead their thoughts to his life and teaching. The warfare with evil carried on in his name could not but tend to a still greater reliance on his power. On the other band, " He that is not with me is against me ; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth," was addressed to those who maintained that it was by the help of evil that Christ subdued evil, that it was the Prince of evil to whom he trusted for the subjugation of evil. To these he replied that any one who, knowing him and watching his work, could fail in personal loyalty, must necessarily be disloyal, and must weaken the loyalty of others by the very fact of not strengthening it, must throw cold water on the concentrated affection of his disciples by the very fact of not deepening and intensifying it. The two sayings, then, are not only perfectly consistent, but are both of them applicable to vehement sensational proceedings like those of the Salvation Army; these proceedi.p.gs should not be treated as evil, because they are certainly attacking evil and overcoming evil, and while they continue to do this, they cannot be against, and must, therefore, be favourable to the work of Christian redemption. On the other hand, so soon as the Salvation Army begins, in any mind whatever, to make deeper and truer Christianity seem tame and poor and uninteresting,—so soon as it begins to retard the inward life, to make the kingdom of God seem more.showy and less searching than it really is, so soon it comes under the condemnation passed upon those who, not being with Christ, are against him, since they are slackening the control of his spirit, and rendering looser the bonds of his influence. The whole question seems to us to be one of the direction in which this sort of sen- sational influence in the case of any one person tends. And it is clear that however indefinite the supply of persons to whom its methods are at first suited, it cannot long keep a healthy influence over any one mind in its present noisy and pre- tentious state. The man who is prepared to go on from year to year enjoying the "great exhibition of Hallelujah Lasses," " Hallelujah gallops," " tremendous Free and Easies," "great charges on the Devil," and so forth, is not becoming a better Christian, and will soon cease to be a Christian in tendency at all. It is only because these sensational proceedings catch hold of the drinker, the profligate, the swindler, the brute, and make a change in the right direction, in the direction of producing Christian feeling in him, that they can be called in any souse Christian. It is obvious enough that true humility, the awful sense of the lurking evil in the highest natures, the thirst for the life that is hid with Christ in God, cannot possibly be fostered by means of "shouting, dancing, handkerchief-waving, flag-fly- ing, shouts of laughter, volley-firing," and so on. So far as this sort of religion is good at all, it is good only to those whom it draws away from something worse, and pushes on to something better. We may honestly say that to any one who has the least glimmer of what Christianity really is to the inward life, this sort of thing is a mere vulgar vexation, absolutely and radically inconsistent with it. But it does not follow in the least that it is a vulgar vexation to those who, if they had not been with the Salvation Army, would have been in a prize-fight or a gin tavern, or breaking all the laws of God and man. The real difficulty is as to the effect produced upon the organising and leading minds in this Army,—minds which must be often aware of the miserable character of the pantomimic devices by which they gild the homeliness and disguise the painfulness of true religious discipline. After all, put it how you will, you cannot be contrite, you cannot be pushing down towards something deeper, while you are screaming at the top of your voice and waving flags or pocket-handkerchiefs. You cannot be learning "the secret of Jesus," the secret of surrendering your own weak will to a higher will, while you are enjoying to the full the bright- ness, pomp, and folly of a mad excitement. As a great pageant is not the place to learn what the kingdom within you means, so the middle of a shrieking crowd of religious fanatics is not the place where any soul can catch the breathings of a spirit which it is bard to detect even in. silence and meditation. What- ever may be said for excited beginnings, those are not true re- ligious movements which end as noisily as they begin. Admirably does Canon Farrar say :—" When I look at the history of many a past religious movement, in every respect as sincere as this, and at first as successful, I find in them all a recurrence of the same genuine fervour plunging at last into the disaster of dam- gprous fanaticism. In the Flagellants, in the fourteenth century ; in the victims of many religious epidemics of the middle ages ; in the Boy Crusades and Child Pilgrimages ; in the Convulsionnotire8 of France; in the Jumpers; in the Ranters; in the Methodists at Redruth ; in the Presbyterians at Cam- buslang ; in the Revivalists of Maryville, Tennessee ; —we find the same religious views—the same phrases—the same impulse of imitation, which is so vulnerable a part of human nature—the same overstrained bigotry—the same prominence of women and children—the same wild hymns and tunes—the same indiffer- ence to the regular Clergy and to the Sacraments—the same morbid exaltation of religious feeling—the same physical excite- ment—the same incessant repetitions of sacred words—the same triumphant shouts that they arc forgiven—the same dwelling, on the image of fountains of blood—the same ultimate and disastrous collapse."
To our minds, the Salvation Army is good only for recruits from the Damnation Army, and to them only while they remain raw recruits. We can hardly imagine it possible for even those good persons who feel most profoundly and most disinterestedly the infinite joy of rescuing the apparently hopeless victims of evil from its toils, and who realise that by these coarse methods, and by these coarse methods only, can the rescue be achieved, to find in themselves anything but disgust at the social harle- quinry of all these gymnastics of the soul, at the intolerable buffoonery of these mock surrenders to the spirit of him who, because he himself was "meek and lowly of heart," spoke of his yoke as being easy, and his burden as being light.
Previous page
