THE PAPERS IN THIS VOLUME WERE READ AT THE FIFTH GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION ASSOCIATION HELD AT WASHINGTON, D. C., FEBRUARY 11-13, 1908. These papers were selected from the large number presented at this Convention as being those most directly related to the theme of the Convention, "The Relation of Moral and Religious Education to the Life of the Nation." Other papers less directly related to this theme and treating of the interests and work of the Depart- ments of the Association are published in the Journal of the Asso- ENLARGING IDEALS IN MORALS AND RE LIGION.* HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D. D., L.L. D. PRESIDENT OBERLIN COLLEGE, OBERLIN, OHIO. The Religious Education Association was born out of a profound conviction, on the part of many, of the national need of a deeper and steadily deepening moral and religious life, if the nation was to be either great or permanent. Lowell's words, spoken at the 250th Anniversary of Harvard University, might have been taken as the Association's motto: "The measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope and consolation of mankind. There is no other, let our candidates flatter us as they may." To this ideal of the national greatness, this Association is committed. Moved, thus, by the abiding spiritual convictions of the race, and seeking the coöperation of all the moral and spiritual forces of the nation, the Association faces our national need. For we need a nation great enough to rise above its own lesser achievements, great enough to conquer its own inner dangers, great enough, therefore, to face its unavoidable national and world duties in the strength of a great faith, a great hope, and great ideals. In a degree true of no other nation, all the world has come to us. It is not only that all foreign doors are open to us, but that all foreign nations are at our own doors. We cannot escape our problem; it is forced upon us. The question, then, is not merely whether *The President's annual address. we are willing to share our life, whether we are willing to give ourselves; but rather, what kind of life are we to share? what kind of selves are we to give? If, therefore, we are to be equal to our inescapable world-task, we must be great enough to rise above our lesser achievements, and to conquer our inner dangers. No merely negative method can possibly be adequate. Only ideals and enterprises, great enough and spiritual enough to dominate the gigantic material interests and ambitions of our day and to deliver us from the perils of our own inner spirit, can save us here. Fundamentally, therefore, our national need is a religious need. If, now, girded with the hope that is born of the great convictions of religion, we turn to think of the encouraging growth in moral and religious ideals, in the midst of which we even now are, and that give promise of ability to meet our full task as a nation, we cannot better express all that this significant growth implies, than in that central sentence of the greatest religious document of the race, in which the Parliament of Religions was able to unite, and which brings together all religion and all ethics, all ambitions for all good: "Our Father, who art in heaven: Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth." For a three-fold assumption plainly underlies this petition, and each assumption is a great ground of hope; first, that there is a heavenly Father, of character like Christ's own; second, that there is a heavenly life in which God's will is already perfectly done; third, that God's will is pledged to a like heavenly life here on earth. God's will, that is, God's will, that is, backs up with its infinite resources every such petition, and every corresponding endeavor. And the religious aim must seek the reign of God in the individual and social life of all God's children, in heaven and on earth the bringing of heaven to earth, and the training on earth for the great goals of the heavenly life. For this single prayer that humanity needs to make at once confronts and challenges and transcends all those wavering and inadequate conceptions of the religious life that have marked the progress of the centuries, and indicates the trend of our growing religious ideals which are at the same time moral ideals. For, in briefest contrast, it means that religion is no mere matter of ceremony; no merely beautiful thing for æsthetic admiration; no mere seeking of mystical experiences; no mere practise of ascetic self-mortification; no mere idle longing for heaven, or an awaiting of some miraculous deliverance from heaven; no bare adoption either, of abstract principles; nor anything arbitrary laid upon man from without, external and foreign to him; no mere negative aim of any kind; but that positive will of God, laid down in the very structure of our being that means the kindling of great new enthusiasms, great devotions, and great causes. The prayer, "Thy will be done," is, then, no cringing cry; it is no slave's submission to superior strength; it is no plaintive wail; it is no outcry of an enfeebled, broken will, as we may be sometimes tempted to think. Rather is it the highest reach of a will superbly disciplined to a world's task, enlightened by a reason that can think the thoughts of God, inspired by an imagination that sees the ultimate consummation, warmed by a heart that feels the needs of men and glows with the greatness of the Father's purpose for them. In exact line, now, as it seems to me, with Christ's own thought, we men of the modern time must enlarge and deepen our conception of the will of God, if our moral and religious ideals are to continue to grow and to meet the real demands of our day. For certain great convictions have been forcing themselves in upon the minds of men in this modern age. We live in a world enlarged for our thought quite beyond the possibility of conception by earlier ages; enlarged in the infinite spaces of the revelations of astronomy; enlarged in the mighty reaches of time, measured not only by geological, but by physical research; enlarged in perception of inner, endless energy, microscopic as well as telescopic, and compelling our admission even far beyond all possibility of vision. We find ourselves, not less, in a vastly larger social environment-wide as the earth, every part of it tributary to every other, every part sharing in the life of every other. There can be finally no exclusions. A man cannot help asking himself in such a world, "Is thy God adequate to this enlarged universe?" And we live in a unified world; unified, too, beyond all possible earlier conception; unified in the thought of the universal forces of gravity and magnetism; unified in the principle of the conservation of energy;-a world that acts as one world, as though permeated with one will. It is so permeated. For our time, as for no other, the thought of unity dominates. The world is one, past our denial. Man is one, in spite of his seeming duality. Man and the world are akin, and man is the microcosmos in a deeper sense than the old Greek philosopher could guess. Man and man are one in great central likenesses, back of all racial differences. And man and God, too, are akin; and our key to the understanding of God is to be found within, not without. No age so certainly as ours should be able to say of man, with the Psalmist, "Thou hast made him but little lower than God, and crownest him with glory and honor." Is thy God adequate to this unified world? And whatever changes come in the great conception of evolution, mankind will never escape again from the idea of an evolving world. Physics, biology, embryology, psychology, sociology, make it impossible |