Article November 25, 1911 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from C. P. Anderson, W. B. Selbie, R. J. Campbell, Harold Begbie, Grant Wallace

[Congregationalist and Christian World.]

Our greatest concern must be for the simple, the commonplace, the undramatic, the seemingly unheroic, and yet, as the world is ordered, the absolutely indispensable. There is no great cause which is not being halted in its onward sweep by the dearth of lesser fidelities. Men who would die for their country will not go to the polls, or if they do as much as that, they will not exercise themselves to affect the counsels of their parties, the making of slates, the policies and platforms. Our churches are halted not by the want of the great, but by the want of the small. We are told that the church has lost her power because she has ceased to be an heroic and sacrificial church. We must kindle again, it is declared, upon altars smothered by the commonplace the old fire of sacrificial devotion. All this is true enough, but there are perils in it. God does not always open the doors of the heroic for men, and when they begin to open them themselves without fitting call, we are likely to achieve not the heroic, but the mock-heroic. You cannot kindle the high and exceptional fires of life except upon high and exceptional occasions.

No, we are not to displace the commonplace, we are to exalt it. Our salvation lies in new conceptions of the significance of the simple—in a new vision of the value of the lesser service. The scientists themselves are discarding the cataclysmic and are exalting long-continued creative methods in which, by processes wholly akin to those which reign in our serene and ordered world, the mountains themselves were lifted and the beams of the chambers of God laid in the waters. True enough the kingdom of God has from time to time advanced with the tumult and movement of changing armies, but more often it has waited upon simple fidelities and widened with the extension of undramatic duties and unnoted qualities.

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