Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
Programme of
Christianity
By:
Henry Drummond
“WHAT
does God do all day?” once
asked a little boy. One could
wish that more grown-up people
would ask so very real a
question. Unfortunately, most of
us are not even boys in religious
intelligence, but only very
unthinking children. It no more
occurs to us that God is engaged
in any particular work in the
world than it occurs to a little
child that its father does
anything except be its father.
Its father may be a Cabinet
Minister absorbed in the
nation’s work, or an
inventor deep in schemes for the
world’s good; but to this
master-egoist he is father, and
nothing more. Childhood, whether
in the physical or moral world,
is the great self-centred period
of life; and a personal God who
satisfies personal ends is all
that for a long time many a
Christian understands.
But as
clearly as there comes to the
growing child a knowledge of its
father’s part in the world,
and a sense of what real life
means, there must come to every
Christian whose growth is true
some richer sense of the meaning
of Christianity and a larger view
of Christ’s purpose for
mankind. To miss this is to miss
the whole splendour and glory of
Christ’s religion. Next to
losing the sense of a personal
Christ, the worst evil that can
befall a Christian is to have no
sense of anything else. To grow
up in complacent belief that God
has no business in this great
groaning world of human beings
except to attend to a few saved
souls is the negation of all
religion. The first great epoch
in a Christian’s life, after
the awe and wonder of its dawn,
is when there breaks into his
mind some sense that Christ has a
purpose for mankind, a purpose
beyond him and his needs, beyond
the churches and their creeds,
beyond Heaven and its
saints—a purpose which
embraces every man and woman
born, every kindred and nation
formed, which regards not their
spiritual good alone but their
welfare in every part, their
progress, their health, their
work, their wages, their
happiness in this present
world.
What, then,
does Christ do all day? By what
further conception shall we
augment the selfish view of why
Christ lived and died?
I shall
mislead no one, I hope, if I say
—for I wish to put the
social side of Christianity in
its strongest light—that
Christ did not come into the
world to give men religion. He
never mentioned the word
religion. Religion was in the
world before Christ came, and it
lives to-day in a million souls
who have never heard His name.
What God does all day is not to
sit waiting in churches for
people to come and worship Him.
It is true that God is in
churches and in all kinds of
churches, and is found by many in
churches more immediately than
anywhere else. It is also true
that while Christ did not give
men religion He gave a new
direction to the religious
aspiration bursting forth then
and now and always from the whole
world’s heart. But it was
His purpose to enlist these
aspirations on behalf of some
definite practical good. The
religious people of those days
did nothing with their religion
except attend to its observances.
Even the priest, after he had
been to the temple, thought his
work was done; when he met the
wounded man he passed by on the
other side. Christ reversed all
this—tried to reverse it,
for He is only now beginning to
succeed. The tendency of the
religions of all time has been to
care more for religion than for
humanity; Christ cared more for
humanity than for
religion—rather His care for
humanity was the chief expression
of His religion. He was not
indifferent to observances, but
the practices of the people
bulked in
His
thoughts before the practices of
the Church. It has been pointed
out as a blemish on the immortal
allegory of Bunyan that the
Pilgrim never did anything,
anything but save his soul. The
remark is scarcely fair, for the
allegory is designedly the story
of a soul in a single relation;
and besides, he did do a little.
But the warning may well be
weighed. The Pilgrim’s one
thought, his work by day, his
dream by night, was escape. He
took little part in the world
through which he passed. He was a
Pilgrim travelling through it;
his business was to get through
safe. Whatever this is, it is not
Christianity.
Christ’s
conception of Christianity was
heavens removed from that of a
man setting out from the City of
Destruction to save his soul. It
was rather that of a man dwelling
amidst the Destructions of the
City and planning escapes for the
souls of others—escapes not
to the other world, but to purity
and peace and righteousness in
this. In reality Christ never
said “Save your soul.”
It is a mistranslation which says
that. What He said was,
“Save your life.“ And
this not because the first is
nothing, but only because it is
so very great a thing that only
the second can accomplish it. But
the new word altruism—the
translation of “love thy
neighbour as
thyself”—is slowly
finding its way into current
Christian speech. The
People’s Progress, not less
than the Pilgrim’s Progress,
is daily becoming a graver
concern to the Church.
A popular
theology with unselfishness as
part at least of its root, a
theology which appeals no longer
to fear, but to the generous
heart in man, has already dawned,
and more clearly than ever men
are beginning to see what Christ
really came into this world to
do.
What Christ
came here for was to make a
better world. The world in which
we live is an unfinished world.
It is not wise, it is not happy,
it is not pure, it is not
good—it is not even
sanitary. Humanity is little more
than raw material. Almost
everything has yet to be done to
it.
Before the
days of Geology people thought
the earth was finished. It is by
no means finished. The work of
Creation is going on. Before the
spectroscope, men thought the
universe was finished. We know
now it is just beginning. And
this teeming universe of men in
which we live has almost all its
finer colour and beauty yet to
take. Christ came to complete it.
The fires of its passions were
not yet cool; their heat had to
be transformed into finer
energies. The ideals for its
future were all to shape, the
forces to realize them were not
yet born. The poison of its sins
had met no antidote, the gloom of
its doubt no light, the weight of
its sorrow no rest. These the
Saviour of the world, the Light
of men, would do and be. This,
roughly, was His
scheme.
Now this
was a prodigious task—to
recreate the world. How was it to
be done? God’s way of making
worlds is to make them make
themselves. When He made the
earth He made a rough ball of
matter and supplied it with a
multitude of tools to mould it
into form—the rain-drop to
carve it, the glacier to smooth
it, the river to nourish it, the
flower to adorn it. God works
always with agents, and this is
our way when we want any great
thing done, and this was
Christ’s way when He
undertook the finishing of
Humanity.
He had a
vast intractable mass of matter
to deal with, and He required a
multitude of tools. Christ’s
tools were men. Hence His first
business in the world was to make
a collection of men. In other
words He founded a
Society.
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