but Jeremiah
started his religious experience, not with a sense of individual need,
but with a burning, patriotic, social passion. He was concerned for
Judah. Her iniquities, long accumulating, were bringing upon her an
irretrievable disaster. He laid his soul upon her soul and sought to
breathe into her the breath of life. Then, when he saw the country he
adored, the civilization he cherished, crashing into ruin, he was
thrown back personally on God. He started with social passion; he
ended with social passion plus personal religion. Some of God's
greatest servants have come to know him so.

Henry Ward Beecher once said that a text is a small gate into a large
field where one can wander about as he pleases, and that the trouble
with most ministers is that they spend all their time swinging on the
gate. That same figure applies to the entrance which many of us made
into the Christian experience. Some of us came in by the gate of
personal religion, and we have been swinging on it ever since; and some
of us came in by the gate of social passion for the regeneration of the
world, and we have been swinging on that gate ever since. We both are
wrong. These are two gates into the same city, and it is the city of
our God. It would be one of the greatest blessings to the Christian
church both at home and on the foreign field if we could come together
on this question where separation is so needless and so foolish. If
some of us started with emphasis upon personal religion, we have no
business to stop until we understand the meaning of social
Christianity. If some of us started with emphasis upon the social
campaign, we have no business to rest until we learn the deep secrets
of personal religion. The redemption of personality is the great aim
of the Christian Gospel, and, therefore, to inspire the inner lives of
men and to lift outward burdens which impede their spiritual growth are
both alike Christian service to bring in the Kingdom.

[1] Leo M. Tolstoi: My Religion, Introduction, p. ix.

[2] D. Crawford: Thinking Black, pp. 444-445.

[3] L. C. F. Lactantius: The Divine Institutes, Book V, Chap. xv, xvi.

[4] Gregory the Great: Moralium Libri, Pars quarta, Lib. XXI, Caput
XV--"Omnes namque homines natura aequales sumus."

LECTURE IV

PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY

I

Hitherto in the development of our thought, we have been considering the
Christian Gospel as an entity set in the midst of a progre