PREFACE HE substance of these discourses was given ten THE years ago in another form to the students of the University of Michigan, and, according to the terms of the Slocum Lectureship, should have been published soon afterwards. But at the time I was in weak health, and before the manuscript could be made ready for publication my health broke utterly, and I became a hopeless invalid. Six years afterwards, and when Markham's thunderous poem was still reverberant, I rallied enough to undertake a course of sermons on the socialistic fallacies which that poem had set to stormful music. I admired the music, as did every one who had an eye in his ear for "the long reaches of the peaks of song." But the peaks looked too cloudlike to have any mountains of reality beneath them. I began to study their formation. No matter how lofty the song, I did not think it could be great unless it contained great truth, and I analyzed the poem line by line to discover, if possible, what ascent of soul had set it in the world's sky. I was disappointed. I could not discover one true idea in all its Sierra-like sweep of sound. I saw, however, sufficient reason for its popularity. It was the Marseillaise of the Labor Union, the battle-hymn of a new religion. For, whether socialism believes in God and immortality or not, it has all the credulity and enthusiasm of a cult. It reasons with its wishes. It substitutes sentiment for conscience. It promises an earthly heaven to every species of discontent. The heaven is not of a very high sort, but makes up for lack of height by equality. When no one is higher than another, each is highest, and a sink-hole may seem a summit. Indeed, the equality of this sink-hole summit makes it seem to green-eyed longing more ethical, because more just and fair, than any peaks of exceptional attainment. Hence preachers, who are sentimentalists by vocation, are most apt to be misled by its false promise. In my own denomination not a few are preaching it with denunciation of capital, interest, private property, and all distinctions of wage or reward or honor for work or worth. They do not hesitate to vilify historic Christianity as an apostasy from the mind of Christ, and Christian civilization as a curse. It is because one of these latterday Lollards had thus fumed to my own people during my absence that I was stirred, on my return to work, to deliver the present series of discourses as an avowal of my faith in the actual world as God's world with divine Reason in its history and divine Order in its institutions. Printed in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat as they were preached, the discourses evoked much discussion, and so far proved their timeliness. I therefore asked the trustees of the Slocum Lectureship to accept them in place of my former and more academic statement of the same thought in the lectures before the University. The trustees kindly consented. |