the prophet."* It would be valuable if we might all so far lay aside prejudices as to consider what further he has to say about the future mergence of these two conceptions. "The Catholic idea is certainly here to stay. But so is the Protestant. . . . A fundamental education in religious values alone can cause these two ideas to coalesce and point the way to their final union in the truly Catholic Church. The Protestant must come to apprehend the indispensability of the Catholic position; and the Catholic must learn to recognize the validity of the Protestant witness; and together they must mount to the higher Truth which includes them both. . . . What we need to pray for, then, is not that this or that experiment of reunion shall succeed, not that this or that plan of an interlocking Church relationship shall work out, but that these two great contrasting Church positions and ideas, each with a noble history, each with spiritual first-fruits to justify its truth, each firmly imbedded in the religious consciousness of our time and of all time, shall come to understand each other; more than this, shall come to understand that each has that to give the other without which it cannot fully realize its own true, best life."+

If anyone is able to share such a grand hope, it is indeed an added reason for finding and using all the possible good forms of the old body. If the Protestant world could freshly study the whole subject of the art of worship openmindedly, there is no question whatever but that it would produce new inventions of form. There is equally no question but that it would also revive much good psychology and much detailed material from the usages of the ancient Church. In this attempt, I mean not merely a study of artistry, superficially, but of the meanings of symbols and of sacraments, both old and new, which in a general usage of the words are comprised in the category of the art of worship.

Such a procedure would not only immensely forward

"Approaches towards Church Unity," Newman Smyth and Williston Walker, p. 86. † Ibid., pp. 87-90.

efforts toward Protestant unity, but would also place the whole of Protestantism in a most favorable position for the future possibilities of a genuinely united Christendom. Moreover, such a procedure would not discourage, but rather foster, the development of a united Church of Christ expectantly open to the newer and later lights of the Divine Spirit.

What I have been trying to say might be summed up in the remark that the mystic experience is much the same thing, whatever its mental content either theologically or morally, and that this experience is therefore the natural meeting ground of union. I have already suggested certain identities of the aesthetic and mystical life. In a later chapter is described the psychological order of the experience.

That order is the same emotionally and vitally, whatever realities or conceptions originate it or whatever ethical purposes eventuate from it. Mysticism alone has never yielded a distinctive theology, but rather a distinctive psychology. The world of the arts by itself has never yielded a distinctive morality, but rather the passion for whatever morality is carried to it. Men may differ in their beliefs and in their ethics; the inner process of the enjoyment of their faith is the same. As the conscience tells all men that they ought, but not to all men, in the same way, what they ought, to do, so worship is the same whatever its content. No category of thought, therefore, nor of ethics, can yield the same hope of union as that contained in the essential commonness of the nature of worship.

Chapter XIV: Technique and Freedom

T

HERE is no more important practical subject than that of freedom. We of the "free churches" value our liberty. Constantly we reiterate the fact and the virtues of free, spontaneous prayer and unstereotyped public worship. We are prone to consider a liturgy or a rite as a form of bondage. We claim the right of free thought unauthorized by bishop or Bible or creed. We almost wholly misconceive the nature and the source of freedom. Our conception of spiritual and ecclesiastical freedom is often as childish and wrong as many popular notions of personal, industrial, or political liberty.

Freedom is not acquired simply by release from law or sanction or authority or technique. Liberty is not negative but positive. It is derived, always, from some new and commanding principle or from some new mastery of technical processes. Freedom is not the gift of formlessness but the mastery of form.

The effect of the teaching of Jesus was to free the Christian community from the old Jewish law. What was the thing that made them free? Certainly not simply making a declaration, certainly not a mere "kicking over the traces." They did neither of these things. The thing that made them free was their own inner acceptance of the new Christian principle of love. Without this, they had far better have stayed under the holding authority of the old law.

The acquisition of a positive freedom is always harder than it appears to be. We are wrongly given to regard the release from the old tyranny as the essence of liberty. It is rather only the opportunity of liberty. Liberty must be acquired and established by some new and self-imposed regulation. The American colonies were not really free and independent states until the struggles of the Constitutional Convention had given them a new instrument of cohesion

and stability. The criminal released from prison is not really a free man until his definite devotion to a new labor has reëstablished his feet in the path of hope and progress. The scientist is not free to move with authority and precision through the mazes of his material until long toils have given him mastery over that material. The baseball pitcher is not free to place the ball exactly as he desires until long practice has given him the reward of a nearly perfect control. I am not free to paint a picture nor to play an organ because I have not acquired the necessary technique in these arts.

It is a question whether the so-called free churches are free to do anything but perish. Independency can be developed to such an extent as entirely to nullify the very freedom sought for. Premature revolution has oftentimes defeated itself. In the hurly-burly of history, more than one group of protestants has separated itself only to find that its new organization was too slight and shifting a thing to sustain itself amidst the vast complications of civilized life. During several years of travel throughout our country, I was amazed at the remarkable intellectual and civic influence of the New England and Puritan heritage in our national life. It is a grave question whether this brave and adventurous individualism, philanthropic in practice and progressive in thought, can sustain and perpetuate its own strain in the face of the competition of thicker-bodied move

ments.

There is no citizen who so misreads the meaning of freedom as the typical modern liberal. The "independent" in politics oftentimes discovers that he has no effective instrument whereby to influence the affairs of state, frequently being reduced to an obnoxious choice as between two almost equally offensive programs. Even more so, the moral and religious independent is ineffective in the deeper life of society.

There are very large numbers of men today, men of public spirit and intelligence who stand outside the organized efforts of moral education and social control. They are asserting their freedom. They think they have found a liberty of conscience and of action untrammeled by the

alleged narrowness of any ecclesiastical organization. But their freedom is a very specious thing. Instead of acquiring freedom for themselves they have thrown it away and placed it where it ought not to be. Without even a fight for it, they have given a "free hand" to the forces of conservatism or of reaction.

There is no more profound problem in sociology than just this matter of the incoherence of liberalism. Men of independent mind are by their very nature individualistic. And, unfortunately, the revolt of each is likely to be due to some slightly different cause. It is hard for liberals to agree, harder for them to accept any new partisan bondage. But without agreement and without definite organizational instruments there can be no positive freedom.

These men are, strictly speaking, not free at all to affect the life of the state as they would like. They have misinterpreted freedom. They are only free to wring their hands in futile protest. They should, rather, intelligently face the fact that a large part of the moral education of the youth of America is in the hands of religious and moral conservatives.

The liberal vainly wonders why he cannot affect the prejudiced minds of adult citizens, the same while that he allows the minds of youthful prospective citizens to be bent in wrong directions from the very start. In other words, the freeman is not free to affect the life of his time until he has acquired, perhaps at a cost that seems to limit his freedom, an instrument which he can use effectively to promote his ideals of the social welfare.

These remarks I am making for two reasons. They suggest a line of thought and a series of problems pertinent to the general point of view of this whole book, the view that the individualistic temper of the Reformation age must be modified by new forms of coöperation or cohesion which will be characteristic of the new age. The most of these problems lie outside the range of the artistic interest we are pursuing. They form, however, a line of reinforcement to the urgence for church unity. And they serve to answer some of the objections to it. The free churches will be not less, but more,