USA > New Hampshire > Hillsborough County > Manchester > Semi-centennial of the city of Manchester, New Hampshire, 1896 > Part 3
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Where are the things of the spirit? What are the signs of its presence ?
The true inquirer will not look first among the things which are evident. He will not wait till Sunday to begin his search. If the spiritual has any real power, it will be able to live in the midst of the material, working in and through it all, and directing it to higher ends. The inquirer, therefore, into the spiritual life of a community will go down at once into the work of the people. He will seek to know the local standards of the professions, the business, the industries of the town, the relation between employers and employed, the spirit in which the daily task is wrought; and then he will want to know equally what becomes of the gains of work, whether expressed in income or earnings, how much of it is spent in mere luxury, or debasing pleasures, how much in an honest and generous livelihood, or a noble charity. He will follow men to their homes that he may assure himself of their purity and peace. He will go into the alleys and outskirts of the city to see whom he may find there on errands of mercy, who are watching by the sick, who are relieving the suffering. He will mingle with children in their studies and sports, and note their manners, temper, and training.
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THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE MODERN CITY.
He will go into the courts of justice, and follow out the administration of law, to determine how far it is firm, evenhanded, and consistent, a steady and sure restraint upon vice. He will take part in the recreations and amusements of the people to see if they are natural, open, clean, and fresh. And when he has made these studies he will have reached some pretty definite conclusions in his own mind about "the state of religion" before he visits the churches. And yet when he visits these he will not forget that there is a life of faith as well as of works, a life born out of penitence and forgive- ness, a life of profound and vital beliefs, of personal consecration to a personal Master and Redeemer, of devout and thankful acknowledgment of the one living and true God.
Such an inquiry as is thus suggested would bring out, I am convinced, in unexpected proportions, the spiritual life of our own and of the average modern city. It would raise some doubts, it would leave some unanswered questions, it would create not a little disappointment, it would cause some dark and painful experiences, but it would give a fine lesson in social perspective. I do not mean that we are to estimate righteous- ness in the bulk or by the majority. An unrighteous, corrupt, vile minority, however small, is a disgrace and a shame to a Christian city. But it is one way of supporting and increasing that minority to allow it to show for more than it is. If the goodness of a city could be written out as vividly as its badness, if the ninety and nine within the social fold could be made as interesting as the one who has gone astray, if the story of a virtuous and happy home had the same kind of fascination as the tale of scandal, if it would cause as much of a sensation to find one upright, courageous, wide-hearted. God fearing man, as to find a betrayer or a hypocrite, then virtue would have the same publicity which now aceompanies vice. I would not be guilty of minimizing the evil of a city, nor of making light of its materializing tendencies, but I would declare the things unpublished, unnoted, and therefore unmeasured, which stand for its spiritual life; the prevailing integrity, fidelity to the common duties, the self-denying affection of the true home, the charity which suffereth long and is kind, the courage which on occasions doubles the power of justice, the sincerity of the honest servant of his Master and worshipper of his God.
You may have read the "picture," as he terms it, which Edward Everett Hale has drawn in his own inimitable way under the title, "If Jesus Came to Boston." It is the story of a Syrian stranger, as he appears to be, who comes to the city searching for a lost brother. The search is not unnaturally long, but it is long enough to show the variety of agencies, and helpers, and friends, at work for the recovery of the lost. The sentence in which the stranger returns his thanks, when the search is over, throws off the guise in which he had appeared, and answers the half implied question of the title: "What you have been doing to the least of these my brethren and sisters, you have done it unto me."
The spiritual life of a city, as expressed in charity, stands revealed at the touch of every kind of want or suffering. It is the very complexity of that life which hides it. A single charity, one philanthropist, would be conspicuous. John Eliot preaching to the Indians at the Falls of Amoskeag seems the embodiment of the Gospel. He was, just as John Stark at Bennington was the embodiment of the spirit of the Revolution. But the Gospel which Eliot proclaimed has since gone out into all the world: and the spirit which Stark illustrated has since made a race free.
Many of us recall a man, as lie was in his prime, a tall and alert figure, a gracious presence on our streets, who for more than forty years fulfilled amongst us the office of a Christian minister, and the no less responsible office of a Christian citizen. £
I suppose that no name is more closely identified with the religious history of Manchester, or more representative of its earlier moral tone and character, than the name of Cyrus Wallace. It is an honor to his memory, as it has been to our advantage. that his pastorate and his citizenship covered so many years of honorable life, of eloquent
CATHEDRAL,
EPISCOPAL,
CONGREGATIONAL ANO 2METHODISTS
> UNITARIANIS
FIRST BAPTIST.
REPRESENTATIVE MANCHESTER CHURCHES.
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THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE MODERN CITY.
speech, and of sustained influence. And yet during the past fifty years scores of men from various pulpits, and with differing views, have uttered the fundamental truths of the common Christianity, and thousands upon thousands of our citizens have deelared in their daily lives, by speech, at the polls, everywhere and by all means the principles of social and political righteousness. The plain fact is that the spiritual life of a city cannot be summed up in any one man or in many men, in any one church or in many churches, in any one institution or in many institutions. It is a diffused and distributed life, and though of far less signifieance than might be desired or even expected, it is, as I have affirmed, a reality and a growing power in the modern city.
I have been speaking thus far in general terms. What now shall we say is the actual working of the spiritual life of the city under the action of Christianity upon the city, and of the city upon Christianity? It is impossible that two such forces should act upon one another without producing some peculiar and distinct result. Christianity cannot use precisely the same means or do precisely the same work, or mean precisely the same thing, apart from its eentral truth, within the city and without. The modern city creates conditions, to which Christianity must conform, if it would save or even help the city.
There are several aspects in which the actual working of Christianity in the spiritual life of the city comes before us. One aspect,-it is perhaps the most evident and the most striking,-is the amount of energy which must be directed to the work of recovery. The city wastes. It is prodigal of life. It is actively wasteful. It exhausts, it wears out, in some cases it devitalizes and destroys. No corporation which uses machinery is obliged to maintain such extensive repair shops as the modern city. These are its reformatories, its hospitals, and, for that matter, its churches.
Consider in this connection the peculiar funetion of the pulpit of the modern eity: how much of its effort must be directed to the restoration of spiritual force, or the reinvigoration of faith. The same men and women appear before the preacher Sunday by Sunday, upon whose lives every day of the week has made its serious draft. There is scarcely one among them who has not passed through some experience which has tended to reduce the love to man, or faith in God. It is one great office of the preacher to reeover the lost faith or love, to heal the hurt of the world. The message which he brings may take on such language as it may please him to give, but it must be full of spiritual health, it must be charged with spiritual life. The gospel which he utters may or may not be shaped in philosophieal thought, it may or may not be touched with emotion, it must have power to invigorate. If I were asked to name the one distinctive thing for which the pulpit of the modern city must stand, I should say at once, inspiration.
See, too, in like manner how much of the Christianized charity of the city is directed to the recovery of spiritual as well as physical losses. The poverty of the city is of its own type. There is nothing quite like it to be found elsewhere. The poverty of the country, or of the frontier, is by contrast little more than hardship, the absence of comfort, the endurance at times of want. It was the poverty of Lincoln and Garfield. How different the poverty of the city, the old Roman poverty, the poverty of enfeeble- ment, or of profligacy, the decay, as we say, of fortune or of family. The ministry to the poor of the city is for the most part a ministry to the weak and worn. Its objeet is not to restore their fortune: they may never have had any: it is to recover them. In many cases this is impossible. Nothing remains but to fulfill the Apostolie injunction- "We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." Herein lies the patience of the true charity of the eity.
Or think yet again how surely the work of recovery passes over into that of rescue. This means infinitely more than relief: it means deliverance, sometimes from associ- ations and surroundings, more often from habits which have become another self. Nothing shows so clearly how necessary this work is, how essential it is to the
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REV. W. C. MCALLESTER, D. D. CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.
REV. WM. H. MORRISON. PRESIDENT OF MASS MEETING.
REV. C. W. ROWLEY, PH. D. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.
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THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE MODERN CITY.
Christianity of the eity, as the fact that whenever it is neglected, whenever the existing orders of Christianity rise above it, instantly a new order is established which makes this work its special business. The latest order of Christians which has set itself to this task is the Salvation Army, which according to the generous testimony of Cardinal Manning justifies its existence by its "passion for sinners." It is only the passion for sinners which ean overeome in them the passion for sin. And the existence always. in some form, of some body of Christians, charged with this passion, shows the constant draft which the city makes upon Christianity in the work of recovery. It may be impossible to locate the responsibility for this demand. It is enough to state the fact.
Another aspect of the direct working of Christianity in the spiritual life of the city appears in the form of collective or organized righteousness. When Abraham arrested his mighty pleadings before the Lord, in behalf of the doomed city of his kinsman. with the final petition-"Peradventure there be ten righteous men. Wilt thou destroy all the city for laek of ten?"-he anticipated the absolute conditions of moral and spiritual reform. For the mere use of example one righteous man would be as good as twenty. His solitary, unshared righteousness would be awfully impressive. So, as I can conceive, Abraham himself would have towered aloft in Sodom. But if example fail in the midst of evil, then righteousness, singlehanded and alone, is powerless.
It has been said that if men were to come together today in any great numbers without a religion, they would be obliged at least to evolve the ten commandments. Society would be impossible without them. But grant the ten commandments, who will enforce them? This of course is the question in every city, for the city, in an indirect way, organizes evil; evil, that is, becomes a part of the trade and traffic of the eity. If it were merely a question of dealing with human passions, as they exist in the indi- vidual, if these passions were not utilized in the interest of gain, if they were not commercialized, society might rely chiefly upon moral means for their restraint, or eon- version into moral power. It is the trade in them which demands another treatment. It is the men, for the most part, who in themselves stand at a remove from these passions, cold-blooded, self controlled, and relentless, who defy the commandments, and, through them, society. Against such a class of men, to be found in every great city, if not the product of it, there is no sufficient opposing force save that of organized righteousness. Organization without righteousness is futile, and righteousness unorganized is equally futile. An historian writing of a certain period in English history says, "These were hard times for bad men to live in, good men were so terribly and formidably active." It is the activity of goodness, if weighted with judgment, and made firm through organization, which ensures the ends of civic righteousness.
That the increasing task of the Christians of the city lies in this direction no one can doubt. To so organize public sentiment, with such breadth of view and yet with such definiteness of aim, with such inclusiveness that no rightminded and really earnest citizen shall be left out, and with such constaney of purpose that enthusiasm and effort will survive a given campaign,-this is becoming a recognized part of the business of Christian citizenship.
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I call your special attention to the bearing of this aspect of the Christianity of the city upon the question of religious unity. I have said that the eity is acting upon Christianity, just as Christianity is acting upon the eity. This action is in some respects restrictive. The eity is at least defining the work of Christianity, if not modifying its types of character. But in this matter of religious unity the influence of the city is broad and constructive. The eity ean afford a multiplicity of denominations better than the country, but it cannot afford the denominational spirit. That is too costly a luxury for religion anywhere. So long as Christian believers and worshipers differ in the emphasis which they wish to place upon particular forms of belief or of service, there are manifest advantages from such liberty, provided it does not prevent the higher unity. The city enters the protest of its own great spiritual life, the
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SEMI-CENTENNIAL OF MANCHESTER, N. H.
moment a practical working unity is forbidden in the name of authority or in the name of liberty. It lifts its moral necessities before the separated and divided forces of righteousness, and asks if this condition must needs be.' Who creates it? Who justifies it? It passes no judgment upon questions of polity or questions of faith, it respects the sacredness of inspiration and the sacredness of institutions, but it asserts through all its pleading necessities the supremacy of righteousness.
The city, in its action upon Christianity, is thus becoming one of the great unifying forces in religion. A result is being achieved under its demands for which other agencies have proved insufficient. I do not overestimate the effect of its influence. It does not accomplish, or even forecast, ecclesiastical unity. That must come, if at all, from within. It must have an inward, not an outward, compulsion. But moral and religious unity, co-operation for work, alliance for conflict, this is one contribution of the modern city to Christianity.
Among so many illustrations of this fact, I hesitate to give an example. But there is one near enough at hand, and so pertinent that I refer to it. For several years the city of Cambridge, Mass., has been able to maintain a firm, consistent, and effective position on the practical issues of temperance. This result has been brought about by the union of all the forces which make up the higher life of the city. The voice of labor, of business, of the University, and of the Church has been one and the same. The union among the churches has been especially noticeable, because natural, sustained, and complete. It has represented all polities and all faiths. Catholics and Protestants have spoken from the same platform, and have worked together at the polls .. And when recently one of the bravest and most earnest champions of the causc, the minister of a certain denomination, was called to a western city, the clergy of every faith, and the citizens of every party came together to bid him God speed. Such here and there is the present fact. Such is the growing hope for the influence of the city upon Christianity. Organized righteousness is one step, it is a long step, toward religious unity.
There is another aspect in which the actual working of Christianity in the spiritual life of the city is becoming distinctive, namely, the producton of unusual types of character. We have been accustomed to look to the country for individuality. We have said that the city makes men conventional, molds them to its own type, and so makes them alike. I believe that this distinction is still true in large degree. We have also been accustomed to look elsewhere than to the city for the more devout forms of religious life. Paul, indeed, addressed the Christians of Corinth, as called to be saints, but the response was not such as to create a precedent in favor of the saintliness of the city.
In one respect, however, the balance of religious power as between localities has changed. The prophet no longer comes from the desert. The message which he bears is not only to the city, and from within, but from the city to the country at large. The great prophetie denunciations of wrong,-the curse of slavery, the crime of corruption, -. have come from the pulpit and from the press of the city. The city is becoming the home, the moral birthplace, of the reformer.
The types of character, however, which I have in mind as I speak, are more strictly personal. They are represented by men as individuals or in groups.
The Christianity of the city is developing a type of character strong in the power of resistance. The city is a repository of trusts. Its citizens are becoming in large degree trust bearers. As such they are exposed to extraordinary temptations. Some fall before them, but the proportion is small, and out of those who stand, there are constant examples of those who stand grandly, with a magnificent resolution and tenacity. Every one who knows such men, knows that they are worthy of the title borne by one of the heroes of the war,-"The rock of Chickamauga." The tides of financial battles roll against them in vain. When the battle is over they have held their ground. They are at their post.
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THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE MODERN CITY.
Let us not underestimate the negative virtues, the virtues of the Old Testament, the virtues of men trained under the ceaseless iteration of the command, thou shalt not. They give security to our institutions. They are the safeguard of the national honor. There are times when the country rests upon the conservatism of the cities. There are national issues which the cities as such are apt to ignore or neglect, or upon which they act unintelligently. The political judgment of a city is not always up to the standard of the country at large. But when issues are at stake affecting the stability of insti- tutions, the rights of inheritance and possession, the credit of individuals and of the government, the city is not reckless. And to the charge of self interest which may be urged, the reply is sufficient, that at such a time whoever saves himself and defends his own, thereby defends every other man and saves the state.
And closely akin to this type which is characterized by the power of resistance, another, and perhaps finer, type is gradually forming. It is that of character under self-restraint, reaching at times to self-denial and sacrifice. When the old Roman emperor and saint wrote the words, "Even in a palace life may be led well," he was thinking of the temptations of the courts. These same temptations today confront young men of fortune of the city. They have the choice of self-restraint or profligacy. Some choose profligacy. These are the most serious menaces we have to the stability of democratic institutions. The mere display of wealth is aggravating to a democracy, especially if the wealth displayed can show no equivalent in some form of the public good. But the flaunting of wealth in the eyes of men, the sign of shame, is not only beastly, it has a political significance: it is destructive of every principle on which the Republic is based.
But on the other hand suppose that the man who has this open choice does not choose to be a profligate. Suppose he holds himself in restraint, and listens to higher ambitions, and gives himself and his fortune to noble ends, shall no credit be given to him commensurate with the shame which attaches to his brother? But such choices are being made constantly. The city is to be credited with the good as well as the bad choices. If it allures with its vices, it appeals through its wide and far-reaching oppor- tunities. And when the appeal is heard and obeyed, a type of character is developed which is unique. It cuts across that self-seeking type which is continually seeking and using the city for gain or advantage. It represents what the young ruler might have represented if he had given his possessions to the poor and followed Christ. The man of today obeys that injunction of the Master, not by parting company with his posses- sions, but by giving himself in and through them to the public good.
Such types of character as these are peculiar to the city. They can hardly be devel- oped elsewhere. They are the outcome of its temptations and opportunities.
The final aspect of the working of Christianity in and through the spiritual life of the city, to which I refer as being peculiar and distinctive, appears from time to time in the moral and religious enthusiasms of men in the mass. The city alone can reveal in its just proportions the enthusiasm of humanity.
The great bishop of North Africa, wearied with the distractions of the cities and sick at heart of their conventionalities, took his appeal on one occasion straight to the individual soul. "I summon thee, O Soul, not as thou art in the groves and academies. not as thou art in the marketplace, but as thou art at the cross roads, unlettered and unlearned, naked and alone." He had his authority for such an appeal in the very constitution of the human soul. It was made to stand by itself before God. "So then every one of them must give account of himself to God."
But there is an instinct in every man which craves a place in the great hunan brotherhood. At times we all long to lose ourselves in it. We want to be caught up into the higher moods and swayed by the wider passions which are the property not of men as individuals, but of humanity. The properties of water are the same in all places. The ocean alone feels the tides. Men in their individual and associated lives
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SEMI-CENTENNIAL OF MANCHESTER, N. H.
have movement and current. The tides are in humanity. And we catch something of their ebb and flow, as the local mass of which we are a part begins to be moved by a common impulse. The moral uprising of a city has in it the heave and swell of the sea.
T have heard once and again, in the graphic words of Dr. Fenn, the story of the uprising of Manchester at the fall of Sumter, when men were lifted by one common movement on the full swell of patriotism. That one event changed in a moment the moral tone and temper of the city. Men walked these streets with another bearing, they wrought their daily tasks with a more serious purpose, they talked one with another in a language which had a meaning, they prayed face to face with God. Whether they went to the field or stayed at their work, they fought the battles of the Republic in their own souls. Every city of the North was swayed by the same emotion. It was as if the foundations were broken up, and deep was calling unto deep.
The spiritual life of a city may show a yet deeper and more spiritual possession. I appeal to any man who has seen and felt the spirit of God descending upon a city, and resting upon it. A whole city, feeling at its heart the peace of God, the strife of tongues still, enmities and jealousies and hate subdued, the love of neighbor for the time as natural as the love of self, the things of the spirit as plain as the things of sense, the heart of the dull made quick to the truth, the doubts and fears and unbeliefs of men lost in the reality of faitli, and the joy of forgiveness-what was all this but the earthly realization, though for the time, of the city of God, a vision of the new Jerusalent come down from God out of Heaven .?
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