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V.

INDIVIDUALISM: PARISH, MONASTERY.

SOCIAL dependence is not to be interpreted as the destruction, or even repression, of the individual. It is not each separate soul sinking down into the social order so as to lose its personal significance or reason for existence. Only through an abuse of the principle of sociality can this occur. The right use of it will be followed by exactly the opposite effect. As in the very dawn of consciousness the child's association with other minds does not hinder, but on the contrary awakens and sustains, his sense of selfhood, so is it in youth, in the years of maturity, in old age, throughout life. To grow up into a clear and commanding consciousness of oneself as a person, one must come into acquaintanceship with other persons.

No doubt it is true, what the philosophers say, that by contact with an external world we become aware of ourselves. But it is equally true that by association with fellow-beings this awareness of ourselves is still more distinctly realized. The silent daily assertion, “I am not you," clears and strengthens, through contrast, the self-assertion, "I am myself." The individual is not meant to be overcome, but on the contrary to be stimulated, by social contact

And grow a larger self by other selves.

In politics, therefore, when the citizen yields passively to the governing power, whatever kind of governing it does, or goes blindly with his party, whatever its policy, offering thus a belated example of the ancient political theory that the state is everything and the individual nothing, he is abusing, not properly using, his social instincts. He has his reward-the smiles of the demagogue whose purpose he serves. He must also endure his punishment-the enfeeblement of himself. In religion, likewise, when the Christian passively receives whatever is given by

his church, accepting its polity, its rites, its brotherhood, its teachings, with no reason save that of a drowsy, unreflecting submission, he also is chargeable with an abuse of the principle of sociality. He must react upon what he sees and hears before it becomes really his own. Association with Christian brethren is intended thus to guide him not away from but into the completest possible personal life.

I. INDIVIDUALIZING EFFECTS OF THE TEACHING AND THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS.

This undoubtedly is the testimony of the Gospels. For in them not only the social but also the personal element of religion is set forth in the very lime light of truth.

The transcendent personality of Jesus would quicken the personal powers of any open-hearted disciple. So with his teaching, both in spirit and form. He came to men, as a teacher, with truth and inspiration, not with intellectual fetters. He taught in parables, which had to be thought out by the learner. He gave life-breathing words, not groovelike formulas of outward conduct. He appealed to men's reason and conscience: "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?""1

And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,

The light of heaven from the dark of hell,
That light would want its evidence.

The dominant Greek and Roman thought subordinated the individual to the institution. Jesus declared: "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." Broadly speaking, Judaism was for the religious training of a people; Christianity for the quickening of persons into conscious sonship to God. The message of the prophets of Israel was predominantly to the nation: "O Israel, return unto Jehovah thy God, for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity." The ministry of Jesus was to the individual: "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."

'Luke xii. 57.

He showed the priceless worth of the single soul. Wakening that consciousness of worth, and putting each man for an awful moment apart from his fellows, he bade him look up and realize that his first and deepest relationship is with the Father-God. The good Shepherd goes forth to seek any one sheep that is lost. Not even the lowliest child is despised: he is an object of Divine and angelic regard. As to his disciples, Jesus would not have them follow him with a blind, mechanical subservience, as bond servants, not knowing what their Master did. He would relate them to himself, and make them sharers of his life in the far more enlightened and personal relation of friendship. "I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you."

And the Christian consciousness-is it not, whatever else it may be, the sense of personality raised to its highest power? The Christian-by what name shall he be called? In his immediate access to God, a priest; in the royalty of his will power and character, a king; in his inmost spiritual life, a son of God. Behold the egoism of the gospel!

Inasmuch, then, as Jesus emphasizes both the social and the personal element of religion, we may infer that there is no conflict between the two. And we are prepared to learn what experience teaches-that, on the contrary, they are mutually serviceful. It is an economic writer of the present day who holds that "the more the liberty of each individual grows, the more the social activity may, and ought, to grow in its turn." Similarly the stronger the personality of the individual disciples who, gathering about the Master, compose a church, the stronger the church thus constituted. And their fraternal association, in its turn, tends not to restrain but to develop in each of them this same personality. Each for himself has to choose to do the Heavenly Father's will, and in relation to this brethren to minister rather than be ministered unto. Each for himself is to become no less. aggressive than compliant. Each for himself bearing another's burden will be better prepared to bear his own. Associate life will both define and enrich individual life.

This will appear more clearly if we consider for a little while what personality is. Not that I propose to attempt a definition of it. No one has a moment's time to spend in the attempt to define an ultimate fact; and personality is an ultimate fact-incomparably the greatest that we know anything about. The "solid" earth is a trifle beside it. But perhaps we can make up something like a description of it by taking note of its most conspicuous qualities; and these are such as freedom, self-consciousness, the sense of identity, reason, will, self-possession, moral love.

It is this last quality with which we are here concerned. Personality involves the power not only of self-disposal in general, but of self-devotion in particular. Poor and meager must be its development under the régime of either the ancient or the modern Ishmael—his hand against every man and every man's hand against him. It is capable of acknowledging the law of love; and only under this law can it reach its highest development. Its very nature, therefore, calls for a social and not a selfish or merely individualistic life. The true life is lived, the true self found, the true personality perfected in a Christian response to the presence of fellow-beings.

It is not in the prison of selfishness—“himself," as Milton said of the voluptuary, "his own dungeon"-but out beneath the heavens of truth, in free and whole-hearted obedience to Christlike love, the law of his nature, that a man may hope to realize in its finest expression the great master-fact of selfhood.

2. REPRESSION OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE EARLY CHURCH. Now in the human world, as contradistinguished from all lower spheres, interest culminates in the individual; and for the reason that here the individual is not merely a creature but a person. As such he is not to be used, like a plow or even like the faithful horse that draws it, in gaining some end, but is himself a true end in which other persons may rest and be satisfied. So it is not people but persons, not societies but souls, not types or classes but personal characters and careers for which we-who our

selves are each a person, a soul, a character-chiefly care. It is not humanity but this or that man about whom we wish to hear. It is not personality, but personalities that have power over us.

The case is supposable, however, that the Church of God should so pervert its Divine idea as to become repressive of the personal quality in religion. It might come to stand for solidarity and to gain its end at the expense of individuality, which consists of one's peculiarities of intellect, temperament, or speech; or even at the expense of personality, which, according to the description of it just given, consists of the essential capacities and powers of one's being. In a word, it might create such an ecclesiastic oneness as to dishonor individualism, which may be taken as including both individuality and personality.

Not only might this be so, but it has been so. For, as a matter of fact, the Church did thus overdo the idea of solidarity in the fourth and a number of succeeding centuries. Its policy was so to impose its rites and so to exercise its authority as to bring the whole community, through external pressure rather than free, personal choice, into its membership. It laid its hand by means of baptism, which was identified with the new birth, upon every child that was born. Its public ministrations were, to a large extent, such as the unspiritual mind could receive without disturbance or offense-spectacular and priestly, not vitally moral and evangelic. Its government became autocratic and hierarchic. Through the Church's loss of spirituality, rather than through the world's regeneration, the Church and the nation, as in pagan or Mohammedan countries, became practically one. All too much were men treated as a mass of homogeneous material to be molded, through the action of ecclesiastic machinery, into a uniform religious product. They were clay for the brickmaker's hand.

But here we shall do well to pause a moment and dwell somewhat more particularly upon the causes in operation to make the Church an invader rather than a promoter of personality. In no small measure the effect was due to environment. We of the present generation are living in an age of a growing social conscience, it may be hoped, and very certainly in an age of a well

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