The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine online

XI SOME METHODS OF EXPRESSION

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But in either case, we men and women of Christendom, to be a Christian is not only to be good, but to be good for something. According to the teachings of the Master true religion is not only personal salvation, but it is giving one's self through all of one's best efforts to actualise the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. The finding of the Kingdom is not only personal but social and world-affirming--and in the degree that it becomes fully and vitally personal will it become so.

A man who is not right with his fellow-men is not right and cannot be right with God. This is coming to be the clear-cut realisation of all progressive religious thought today. Since men are free from the trammels of an enervating dogma that through fear made them seek, or rather that made them contented with religion as primarily a system of rewards and punishments, they are now awakening to the fact that the logical carrying out of Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom is the establishing here on this earth of an order of life and hence of a society where greater love and cooperation and justice prevail. Our rapidly growing present-day conception of Christianity makes it not world-renouncing, but world-affirming.

This modern conception of the function of a true and vital Christianity makes it the task of the immediate future to apply Christianity to trade, to commerce, to labour relations, to all social relations, to international relations. "And, in the wider field of religious thought," says a writer in a great international religious paper, "what truer service can we render than to strip theology of all that is unreal or needlessly perplexing, and make it speak plainly and humanly to people who have their duty to do and their battle to fight?" It makes intelligent, sympathetic, and helpful living take the place of the tooth and the claw, the growl and the deadly hiss of the jungle--all right in their places, but with no place in human living.

The growing realisation of the interdependence of all life is giving a new standard of action and attainment, and a new standard of estimate. Jesus' criterion is coming into more universal appreciation: He that is greatest among you shall be as he who serves. Through this fundamental law of life there are responsibilities that cannot be evaded or shirked--and of him to whom much is given much is required.

It was President Wilson who recently said: "It is to be hoped that these obvious truths will come to more general acceptance; that honest business will quit thinking that it is attacked when loaded-dice business is attacked; that the mutuality of interest between employer and employee will receive ungrudging admission; and, finally, that men of affairs will lend themselves more patriotically to the work of making democracy an efficient instrument for the promotion of human welfare. It cannot be said that they have done so in the past.... As a consequence, many necessary things have been done less perfectly without their assistance that could have been done more perfectly with their expert aid." He is by no means alone in recognising this fact. Nor is he at all blind to the great change that is already taking place.

In a recent public address in New York, the head of one of the largest plants in the world, and who starting with nothing has accumulated a fortune of many millions, said: "The only thing I am proud of--prouder of than that I have amassed a great fortune--is that I established the first manual training school in Pennsylvania. The greatest delight of my life is to see the advancement of the young men who have come up about me."

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