In Defence of the Faith
The Sermon on the Mount in 1929
• [Canon E. S. Woods, the writer of this article, is well known for his lucid exposition of "Every-day Religion." lie is now Vicar of Croydon.] FOR an age which is said to be irreligious there is to-day a curious amount of • interest shown in Jesus Christ. Judging from the books about Him which continue to pour from the Press, the general public never, tires of being reminded of the main features of The ordinary man (I am not thinking at the moment of the emancipated highbrow who merely sneers at the Christian ethic as a back number)—the ordinary man has a real admiration for Jesus and what He did, and he knows quite well that Jesus told men to -love one another. This precept he admires even if he doesn't follow it, and is conscious that life would be very different if people paid any heed to it. But he-feels, rather wistfully sometimes, that the thing is sadly impracticable ; that it is an ideal teaching for a very- unideal world. Is he right ?
In trying to answer that question it may be well to consider again, so far as that is possible within the limits of this brief article, what it really was that Jesus urged men to do. Ask any educated man what he knows about the "Sermon on the Mount" and he 'will probably quote to you the injunction, "Turn . the other cheek" or "Love your enemies," with a shrug of the shoulders at an idea, beautiful indeed but palpably impracticable. But nobody can dispose of the question of the practica- bility or otherwise of- Jesus' teaching by quoting a few tags. I doubt if one man in a thousand has ever taken the trouble to try and find out what Jesus really .said, let alone what He meant. To take any of the discourses of Jesus, such as that collection of His sayings brought together by the author of the first Gospel and usually known as "The Sermon on the Mount," and read them steadily- through in a modern translation (such as that by Dr. Moffatt), or better still in a- good paraphrase, is an eye-opening and mind-opening experience. "I will tell you," said Jesus, "the secret of happiness in life. It is with the men who have a deep sense of something missed : of a life which their spirits need ; -theirs is the world as God meant it to be." That, or something like it, is what lies behind the familiar, the deadeningly familiar words-, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
He has a good deal to say in His talks about" values" :— " Don't hoard things. Material possessions will perish even whilst they are attired." . . . "Invest your all in God's new world. There neither moth nor rust can spoil it : there no thief can rifle your store. More than this, your affection and interest will centre round the concern in which all-you have is invested."
He does His utmost to get men to think, and, above all, to think and rethink their' religion. Much of the" Sermon" is concerned with replacing older and unworthy religious conceptions by His own teaching about the Father God and His Kingdom of love. He always seeks to tear pretences aside and to get men to face realities. In all His teaching about God, about love and trust and neigh- bourliness, about anger and hatred and lust, about almsgiving and -prayer, He says, in effect, "Get at ,the facts, go for what is true, try and live in the real world, God's world, .and not just in your own little world of make-believe." And, above all, He urges, as the only hopeful way in, the inextricably tangled web of human relationships :—Apply the family idea to life; God is Father, who cares for all men no matter how badly they treat Him, and gives sunshine and rain to all, bad and good men alike. Why not treat one another on that basis ? Why not treat folk as you would like them to treat you?' That attitude of mind which is: willing. to go the "second mile" has an amazing power -in healing damaged human relationships. Above all, why not try friendliness as a substitute for force ?
Indeed the more you consider what He taught (and, after all, He lived it out Himself—it was no mere theorizing), the more it strikes you, not as mere impractical idealism, but as magnificent conunon sense. But then perhaps the truest idealism and the most sensible common sense are not really opposite but identical ?
There is one point about Jesus' precept and practice which is often missed, and to which reference must be made. Men sometimes say to-day, as indeed they have often said in times past, "Why can we not have, and try to carry- out., the *plain ethics of Jesus without all this ereed 'and dogma, and imeneumbeied by all the apparatut of organized religion ? " Now while freely adniitting that there may be some " Christian " dogma* and some " Christian " organizations which have very little to do With Christ, it is nevertheless true that, for Jesus, morality and religion were never sundered. For Him morality is . not the root of religion, 'it is its fruit. He never suggested' that men could' accept His ethical teaching and reject His teaching about God. Indeed, He insisted on the opposite. For -Him the trite corporate human life, the life in fellowship and brotherhood, depends absolutely On men knowing themselves and-each other to be Children of the one Father God; and therefore committed to the family relationship. To reproduce -.Testis' way Of living, fired by a similar faith in God and faith in man, has always been the professed, if not invariably the successful aim of His friends and disciples, the" Church." For the first hundred years after the Crucifixion the idea operated with such dynamic force that the Church did turn the world upside down, with immense consequences for subsequent history. Since that time the moral witness of the Christian Society to the principles of its Founder has ebbed and flowed ; and -while it has unquestionably inspired much that is . good in our civilization, it cannot be said to have ever really coptured . the :Common life of man, or even any considerable part of it. Is there. any likelihood of its proceeding to do so now ?.. Is the Sermon on the Mount a spent force, or are we at the beginning of an era when, at long last, men are going to "try Christianity: and Jesus will come, into . His own ? .
On those questions I will _make a few observations,– I hardly dare to call them answers—before this article has to close. , One pretty _obvious thing to say, is that _the Church is unlikely to prevail on other people to practise the principles of the Sermon on the Mount until it shows more enthusiasm and more effectiveness in its own performances in that direction. There must be, I.sup_pose, somewhere. about eight or ten million professing Christians in this land, perhaps more (these figures are mere guesses and not drawn from statistics), belonging to the different Churches and Denominations. On wonders sometimes where they. 01 hide, or what they . are doing. You would think that these millions of people who believed in the Sermon on the Mount could, if they meant business, get some of these ideas really influencing affairs like peace and war, politics, industrialism, slums, busincss ethics, sex problems, sport and art, and so on. If the Communists possessed, as the Church possesses, about 30,000 buildings, -20,000 whole-time paid agents, thousands of unpaid leaders and workers, and millions of rank and file members, England would pretty soon be ringing from end to end with the Communist gospel ! With its actual present resources, and with its unlimited potential resources in the realm of the unseen, the Church could, without question, win for Christ a great deal of the life of the world, if it really wanted to.
There may be seen signs, here and there, of the dawning of a new belief in the feasibility of "The Kingdom of God "(to use another New Testament phrase which describes the way of life, and its sources, indicated in the Sermon on the Mount), and a new faith in those invisible potencies which alone could make the ideal actual.
One clear gain for thought, and therefore for action, is the recovery of the conception, originating with Christ Himself but for centuries practically lost or ignored by the Church, that His "Kingdom," His beneficent Rule, is not to be indefinitely postponed to some future state, some unreal and distant "Heaven," but, in His view, can be and should be progressively realized here and now on this earth under conditions of space and time. What this recovery has meant, of new hope and strength, for all those fighting for social righteousness and social betterment against poverty and disease, vice and war, it is impossible to exaggerate.
Again, it is beginning to dawn on men to-day, in some quarters at least, that the thing works ; there are men in the business world of to-day who are genuinely trying to apply to their affairs the Christian ideals of service and fellowship, of consideration for the needs and rights of human personality, and they are not bank- rupt, nor likely to become so. Too long He Who first taught men the better way has been regarded as a Don Quixote for the practical world, and His ideas dismissed as visionary and impracticable. At last men are beginning to see that to pay some regard to your neigh- bour's needs, and to try and understand his point, of view, is not "mere idealism" but sound common sense, and that there are problems in industry, in politics, in international relationships which, when this spirit is brought to bear on them, will not remain intractable and inSoluble.
And the way works. A Ford seeks to give his customers all they want at the cheapest possible price, and treats his employees as human beings, and the millions roll in. And on a smaller scale thousands of business men are finding similar experiences. Perhaps, after all, Jesus was right when He told men to "seek first the Kingdom of God, and these other things (which you do also need) shall be added unto you." Perhaps, too, He was right when He said that to build up the structure of human relationships on His methods, the methods of give and take, of kindliness and understanding, is to build on the rock ; whereas to rear that structure on selfishness is to build on sand and must lead to disaster.
It is no good pretending that as yet men have got very far in trying the Sermon on the Mount way. They are only just beginning, timorously and tentatively. More Christian adventurers are wanted : and it is surely the main business of the Church to create them and train them. But all who do burn their boats and make the great adventure find a reward more wonderful than they dreamed. They stumble unexpectedly on that "secret of happiness" which Jesus said always comes to those who try His way ; and having learnt to forget themselves in that trustful fellowship of giving and taking which He has taught them, they find one day that, not seeking "life," they have somehow found it, and are in fact possessed of surprising springs of vitality.
EDWARD S. Wc 0
[Next week's article—the last of the present series—will be by Prof. A. E. Taylor, of Edinburgh, on "The Substance of Faith." Previous articles in this series have been : "Philosophy and Religion," by the Archbishop of York, "The Elements of Religion," by Professor Albert A. Cock, of University College, Southampton, "Evolution and Revealed Religion," by Dr. Charles E. Raven, "The Nature of Christ," by Dr. Alfred Carrie, Principal of New College, Hampstead, and Hackney College, "The Gospels as Historical Documents," by Professor C. H. Turner, "The Miraculous Elements in the Gospels," by Dr. Gordon Selwyn, "The Ethic of Christianity," by Dr. F. R. Barry, "The Witness of the Saints," by Evelyn Underhill," The Philosophy of Prayer," by the Abbe Bremond D.Litt., Member of the French Academy, "The Meaning of Sacraments," by Canon Oliver Quick, of Carlisle, "The Spirit of Catholic Devotion," by the Rev. Martin D'Arcy, "The Spirit of Orthodox (Eastern) Devotion—I. and II.," by Professor N. Arseniev, and "What is the Catholic Church?" by the Dean of Winchester.]
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