THE GOSPEL FOR WAR TIMES

REV. W. B. RILEY, D.D.

Mr. Moderator and Brethren of the Ministry: I have elected to speak to you to-day on the wargospel, and I ask your thought to Matt. 24:14: "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all the nations; and then shall the end come."

The question of whether there be a "gospel for war times" is one too important to be despised and too insistent to be dismissed. The minister of the present moment cannot be indifferent to the crisis into which the world has come, and the consequent demands being made upon the church of God. Prof. T. G. Soares says: "There are two immediately possible attitudes for the minister to-day. One is to preach the old gospel, and the other is to curse the Kaiser. One is to go on in the performance of one's pulpit duty as if nothing was happening; and the other is to become a patriot orator. In one case you say that religion is more important than any changing human interest; and you will lead men to a salvation that is unaffected by the tragedy of the hour. In the other case you say that winning the war is the supreme interest to which everything, including religion, must give way." In his judgment,

"either of these courses is an abdication of the pulpit"!

If "preaching the old gospel," then, becomes an abdication of the pulpit, some of us would not hesitate to pay the price for that privilege, preferring a dry goods box on a street corner with that gospel to a carpeted pulpit in a sanctuary without it. But, at the same time, we insist that the old gospel is not inadequate to the crisis to which we have come; and that its true exponents and veritable prophets have a definite and needful message for a sinful world, weltering in the blood of its slain.

The declarations of Scripture are never best interpreted by an utter detachment from all context. When Jesus anticipated the very hour to which we have come, of "wars and rumors of wars"; when He saw "nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom"; when, with prophetic vision, He sat in the midst of "famine and pestilence and earthquake," and realized that all of these were but "the beginning of sorrows"; when He remembered the agony to which His own brethren in the flesh-the Jews-and many of His own faithful followers, were to come; when He saw the hatred that would one day be engendered and the destroying one of another that would be accomplished; when He reminded Himself that these things would take place on a day when "false prophets" would be multiplied, and multitudes of plain people would be "deceived" by other gospels, that were not other; when He looked to

the beginning of the twentieth century, where iniquity should conquer and "the love of most should grow cold"-having it all fall upon His vision, He then said, "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all the nations; and then shall the end come."

To three things He definitely refers in that text -The War-Gospel; the Age-Witness; and the Age-Windup. Within the limitations of our time, I may get through with only one of these:

THE WAR GOSPEL

In the judgment of many of us, there is a specific gospel for this special hour. Yesterday, when the world was at peace, the gospel of grace -whether it received it or not-deserved the ascendency; to-day, when the kingdoms of this world are in the clash of battle and the confusion of bloodshed, when their future is as uncertain as their merits are unstable, it is the time to preach "the gospel of the kingdom." The definition of "the gospel of the kingdom" we defer till later; but certain characteristics of the same deserve to be set in order. Certain characteristics of the old gospel are needed now as never before. To three of these we call attention.

It is a gospel that exalts the divine Christ rather than human culture. For something like fifty years the drift of the age has been in the wrong direction; and for twenty-five years past, the influence of Darwinism has been increasingly

felt, and the result has been an ever increasing laudation of Adam-the sinful man-and a corresponding depreciation of Christ-the saving Man. In no country in the world have these counter-philosophies marked such progress as in Germany! There Darwinism has found its most ardent followers; "kultur" its most capable exponents and defenders; and there the claims of Christ have been most seriously called into question, and the "faith once for all delivered" most effectually de-vitalized. Dr. Shields, of Toronto, remarks: "It will be generally conceded that no nation in the world has surpassed Germany in her educational zeal. As an illustration of the thoroughness of her system, I may tell you that in 1901, of more than one-quarter million recruits, only 131, or less than one-half of one per cent, were found to be illiterate. No nation has given more attention to higher education than Germany. She has more than twenty universities, and in the winter of 1907-8 there were in these nearly 47,000 students," and that number later increased. For a full century her one objective has been "kultur"! That she has realized that objective is now painfully evident to the entire world. Within recent years certain Americans have been "daffy" over one word "Efficiency." For its full meaning we may look to the constitution of the German army, and as the culture of the Jewish scribe and the effectiveness of the Roman soldier once combined to nail Christ to the cross, so Modernism-the intellectual boast of the centuries-and Militarism

-the acme of mechanical accomplishment-have alike triumphed in Germany, and have combined to strike Christianity the most deadly blow it has received since the day when Augustine united a sick church with a stinking State.

Prof. Herbert Williams, of Oxford, declares that Friedrich Nietzsche was perhaps "the one European thinker who has carried the evolution principles and ethics to their logical conclusion." And he names him as the most orthodox exponent of Darwinian ideas the world has known. But Prof. Williams reminds us also that Nietzsche saw clearly that, to be successful, evolution ethics must involve "the transvaluation of all values and the demoralization of all ordinary morality," and he says that Nietzsche "accepted frankly the glorification of brute strength, superior cunning, and all the qualities necessary for success in the struggle for existence." Multitudes of men in America, England, and other parts of the civilized world, crazed with the desire to be counted "cultured," have received Nietzsche's philosophy and become its apostles. They do not even now see that Bernhardi, when he contends that, "since Germany is the most civilized nation in the world, she is the only one fitted for leadership and entitled to supremacy, is but taking the logical step of putting that philosophy into practice and bringing into the world again the philosophy that once embruted men, de-virtued women, and destroyed nations; namely, that "Might is right," or "the survival of the fittest."