Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
City Without a
Church
By:
Henry Drummond
Two
very startling things arrest us
in John’s vision of the
future. The first is that the
likest thing to Heaven he could
think of was a City; the second,
that there was no Church in that
City.
Almost
nothing more revolutionary could
be said, even to the modern
world, in the name of religion.
No Church—that is the
defiance of religion; a
City—that is the antipodes
of Heaven. Yet John combines
these contradictions in one
daring image, and holds up to the
world the picture of a City
without a Church as his ideal of
the heavenly life.
By far the
most original thing here is the
simple conception of Heaven as a
City. The idea of religion
without a Church— “I
saw no Temple
therein”—is anomalous
enough; but the association of
the blessed life with
aCity—the one place in the
world from which Heaven seems
most far away— is something
wholly new in religious thought.
No other religion which has a
Heaven ever had a Heaven like
this. The Greek, if he looked
forward at all, awaited the
Elysian Fields; the Eastern
sought Nirvana. All other Heavens
have been Gardens,
Dreamlands—passivities more
or less aimless. Even to the
majority among ourselves Heaven
is a siesta and not a City. It
remained for John to go straight
to the other extreme and select
the citadel of the world’s
fever, the ganglion of its
unrest, the heart and focus of
its most strenuous toil, as the
framework for his ideal of the
blessed life.
The Heaven
of Christianity is different from
all other Heavens, because the
religion of Christianity is
different from all other
religions. Christianity is the
religion of Cities. It moves
among real things. Its sphere is
the street, the market-place, the
working-life of the
world.
And what
interests one for the present in
John’s vision is not so much
what it reveals of a Heaven
beyond, but what it suggests of
the nature of the heavenly life
in this present world. Find out
what a man’s Heaven is—
no matter whether it be a dream
or a reality, no matter whether
it refer to an actual Heaven or
to a Kingdom of God to be
realized on earth—and you
pass by an easy discovery to what
his religion is; And herein lies
one value at least of
thisallegory. It is a touchstone
for Christianity, a test for the
solidity or the insipidity of
one’s religion, for the
wholesomeness or the fatuousness
of one’s faith, for the
usefulness or the futility of
one’s life. For this vision
of the City marks off in lines
which no eye can mistake the true
area which the religion of Christ
is meant to inhabit, and
announces for all time the real
nature of the saintly
life.
City life
is human life at its intensest,
man in his most real relations.
And the nearer one draws to
reality, the nearer one draws to
the working sphere of religion.
Wherever real life is, there
Christ goes. And He goes there,
not only because the great need
lies there, but because there is
found, so to speak, the raw
material with which Christianity
works—the life of man. To do
something with this, to infuse
something into this, to save and
inspire and sanctify this, the
actual working life of the world,
is what He came for. Without
human life to act upon, without
the relations of men with one
another, of master with servant,
husband with wife, buyer with
seller, creditor with debtor,
there is no such thing as
Christianity. With actual things,
with Humanity in its everyday
dress, with the traffic of the
streets, with gates and houses,
with work and wages, with sin and
poverty, with these things, and
all the things and all the
relations and all the people of
the City, Christianity has to do
and has more to do than with
anything else.
To conceive
of the Christian religion as
itself a thing—a something
which can exist apart from life;
to think of it as something added
on to being, something kept in a
separate compartment called the
soul, as an extra accomplishment
like music, or a special talent
like art, is totally to
misapprehend its nature. It is
that which fills all
compartments. It is that which
makes the whole life music and
every separate action a work of
art. Take away action and it is
not. Take away people, houses,
streets, character, and it ceases
to be. Without these there may be
sentiment, or rapture, or
adoration, or superstition; there
may even be religion, but there
can never be the religion of the
Son of Man.
If Heaven
were a siesta, religion might be
conceived of as a reverie. If the
future life were to be mainly
spent in a Temple, the present
life might be mainly spent in
Church. But if Heaven be a City,
the life of those who are going
there must be a real life. The
man who would enter John’s
Heaven, no matter what piety or
what faith he may profess, must
be a real man. Christ’s gift
to men was life, a rich and
abundant life. And life is meant
for living. An abundant life does
not show itself in abundant
dreaming, but in abundant
living—in abundant living
among real and tangible objects
and to actual and practical
purposes. “His
servants,” John tells us,
“shall serve.” In this
vision of the City he confronts
us with a new definition of a
Christian man— the perfect
saint is the perfect
citizen.
To make
Cities—that is what we are
here for. To make good
Cities—that is for the
present hour the main work of
Christianity. For the City is
strategic. It makes the towns:
the towns make the villages; the
villages make the country. He who
makes the City makes the world.
After all, though men make
Cities, it is Cities which make
men. Whether our national life is
great or mean, whether our social
virtues are mature or stunted,
whether our sons are moral or
vicious, whether religion is
possible or impossible, depends
upon the City. When Christianity
shall take upon itself in full
responsibility the burden and
care of Cities the Kingdom of God
will openly come on earth.
What
Christianity waits for also, as
its final apologetic and
justification to the world, is
the founding of a City which
shall be in visible reality a
City of God. People do not
dispute that religion is in the
Church. What is now wanted is to
let them see it in the City. One
Christian City, one City in any
part of the earth, whose citizens
from the greatest to the humblest
lived in the spirit of Christ,
where religion had overflowed the
Churches and passed into the
streets, inundating every house
and workshop, and permeating the
whole social and commercial
life—one such Christian City
would seal the redemption of the
world.
Some such
City, surely, was what John saw
in his dream. Whatever reference
we may find there to a world to
come, is it not equally lawful to
seek the scene upon this present
world? John saw his City
descending out of Heaven. It was,
moreover, no strange apparition,
but a City which he knew. It was
Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem. The
significance of that name has
been altered for most of us by
religious poetry; we spell it
with a capital and speak of the
New Jerusalem as a synonym for
Heaven.
Yet why not
take it simply as it stands, as a
new Jerusalem? Try to restore the
natural force of the
expression—suppose John to
have lived to-day and to have
said London? “I saw a new
London?” Jerusalem was
John’s London. All the grave
and sad suggestion that the word
London brings up to-day to the
modern reformer, the word
Jerusalem recalled to him. What
in his deepest hours he longed
and prayed for was a new
Jerusalem, a reformed Jerusalem.
And just as it is given to the
man in modern England who is a
prophet, to the man who believes
in God and in the moral order of
the world, to discern a new
London shaping itself through all
the sin and chaos of the City, so
was it given to Johnto see a new
Jerusalem rise from the ruins of
the old.
We have no
concern—it were contrary to
critical method—to press the
allegory in detail. Whatwe take
from it, looked at in this light,
is the broad conception of a
transformed City, the great
Christian thought that the very
Cities where we live, with all
their suffering and sin, shall
one day, by the gradual action of
the forces of Christianity, be
turned into Heavens on earth.
This is a spectacle which
profoundly concerns the world. To
the reformer, the philanthropist,
the economist, the politician,
this Vision of the City is the
great classic of social
literature. What John saw, we may
fairly take it, was the future of
all Cities. It was the dawn of a
new social order, a regenerate
humanity, a purified society, an
actual transformation of the
Cities of the world into Cities
of God.
This City,
then, which John saw is none
other than your City, the place
where you live—as it might
be, and as you are to help to
make it. It is London, Berlin,
New York, Paris, Melbourne,
Calcutta—these as they might
be, and in some infinitesimal
degree as they have already begun
to be. In each of these, and in
every City throughout the world
to-day, there is a City
descending out of Heaven from
God. Each one of us is daily
building up this City or helping
to keep it back. Its walls rise
slowly, but, as we believe in
God, the building can never
cease. For the might of those who
build, be they few or many, is so
surely greater than the might of
those who retard, that no
day’s sun sets over any City
in the land that does not see
some stone of the invisible City
laid. To believe this is faith.
To live for this is
Christianity.
The project
is delirious? Yes—to
atheism. To John it was the most
obvious thing in the world. Nay,
knowing all he knew, its
realization was inevitable. We
forget, when the thing strikes us
as strange, that John knew
Christ. Christ was the Light of
the World—the Light of the
World. This is all that he meant
by his Vision, that Christ is the
Light of the World. This Light,
John saw, would fall
everywhere—especially upon
Cities. It was irresistible and
inextinguishable. No darkness
could stand before it.
One by one
the Cities of the world would
give up their night. Room by
room, house by house, street by
street, they would be changed.
Whatsoever worketh abomination or
maketh a lie would disappear.
Sin, pain, sorrow, would silently
pass away. One day the walls of
the City would be jasper; the
very streets would be paved with
gold. Then the kings of the earth
would bring their glory and
honour into it. In the midst of
the streets there should be a
tree of Life. And its leaves
would go forth for the healing of
the nations.
Survey the
Cities of the world today, survey
your own City—town, village,
home —and prophesy.
God’s kingdom is surely to
come in this world. God’s
will is surely to be done on
earth as it is done in Heaven. Is
not this one practicable way of
realizing it? When a prophet
speaks of something that is to
be, that coming event is usually
brought about by no unrelated
cause or sudden shock, but in the
ordered course of the
world’s drama.
With
Christianity as the supreme actor
in the world’s drama, the
future of its Cities is even now
quite clear. Project the lines of
Christian and social progress to
their still far off goal, and see
even now that Heaven must come to
earth.
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