[From "The Refashioning of English Education, a Lesson of the Great War," by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon in The Atlantic Monthly]

To quote the remarkable letter to the Prime Minister by the Master of Balliol, which serves as an introduction to the report of the Committee on Adult Education of which he was chairman: "We stand at the bar of history for judgment, and we shall be judged by the use we make of this unique opportunity. It is unique in many ways, most of all in the fact that the public not only has its conscience aroused and its heart stirred, but also has its mind open and receptive of new ideas to an unprecedented degree." This quickened conscience, stirring of heart, and liberation of mind are to be found in some degree among all the peoples, and one practical result of that is the dawning realization that the most pressing need of every nations is not battleships or guns, but education—enlightened and humane....

The chief factor in the present divorce between education and reality is the theory, long accepted, that "the process of education is the performing of compulsory hard labor, a 'grind' or 'stiffening process,' 'a gritting of the teeth' on hard substances, with the primary object not of acquiring a particular form of skill or knowledge but of giving the mind a general training and strengthening." If this theory were abandoned the whole educational problem would be made easier, and it would be possible to secure for the child a living interest and a sense of his purpose in his work. This purpose would be realized more and more fully as it came to be understood that education is not the same thing as information or discipline, or even the dealing with human knowledge divided up into so-called "subjects." True education, the "drawing out" and training of already existing faculties, is really guidance in acquiring experience.

[From "Glenn Frank: An Interview," in The Christian Register]

"Your final point about restoring the lost spirituality of politics, and your reference to politics as the supreme adventure of the race has special appeal for us liberals," I said.

"To me the spiritual element back of all these problems is the great thing," Mr. Frank replied. "I am making just as much of it as I can. I believe that we are entering on the greatest revival of religion the world has seen."

I remarked, "But it will not take the traditional evangelical trend."

"Not at all...."

It must be that Mr. Frank is right, when he declares we are on the verge of a world-wide quickening and spiritual awakening. I have had occasion to talk with a number of men and women who are real leaders and prophets—business men, progressives in the field of industry, philanthropists, authors, actors, legislators—as well as persons whose profession it is to think in terms of religious belief, and I find all of them convinced that the time is at hand to apply the philosophy of Jesus to every human undertaking. "Politics has not always been soulless," declared Mr. Frank. "One of the crying needs of the world is the restoration of that lost spirituality, and I believe that restoration is at hand."

[Gerald B. Hurst, in The Nineteenth Century]

The love of peace which dominates men's minds all over the earth to-day, and particularly in democratic countries, may be justly deemed a real step forward from the morality of the past. Since the dawn of history the struggle among nations for survival has been, both in theory and practice of international conduct, the normal process by which states have developed. Primitive society lived in violence. From antiquity down to our own age conflict has been the keynote of relations between different races. "A prince," writes Machiavelli, "is to have no other design nor thought nor study but war and the arts and disciplines of it, for indeed that is the only profession worthy of a prince." "In all times," says Hobbes, "kings and persons of sovereign authority because of their independency are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators." The Washington Conference is the symbol of a new view of the international system. War is now considered to be something horrible, abnormal—an event outside of the natural evolution of men and nations. Such a conception helps to bring the kingdom of heaven nearer to a suffering world.

[From "The Religion We Export," by Harry Emerson Fosdick in The Congregationalist]

I am not zealous about ways of thinking for their own sakes. But I am zealous that these students of China and Japan shall know Jesus Christ. Nothing will do but that. They need what Jesus Christ alone can do for them. I do not want that thing to be true which one of the missionaries said: "We are losing young Japan." But if you are going to present Jesus Christ to the eager minds of the Orient, you must do it in terms which they can comprehend. You cannot wrap him in the graveclothes of old Western literalisms, old Western theologies, old Western ecclesiastical entanglements, and present him so to be received. They cannot receive him so because they cannot see him so. "Loose him, and let him go!" If that is to be done abroad, however, we first of all must do that at home. Have we the courage to do it—to say that the twentieth century forms of thinking are just as sacred as first century forms or sixteenth century forms and just as fit to be the vehicle for presenting the living God revealed in Christ? ...

The East is borrowing everything from the inventiveness of the West; and, whether it wants it or not, slowly but surely it is borrowing Christianity. One comes home with this prayer rising in his heart: God help us, then, to make our Christianity at home more fit to borrow! Our denominational divisions, for example, seem futile enough to us. Most of us would not give a fillip of the finger for the meticulous peculiarities that distinguish our denominations. We, however, know the historical background of them; we know the service that they have rendered; we see why in the first place they came into existence; we can make excuses to ourselves for them. But to see Western sectarianism promulgated in the Far East is to stand between laughter at the ridiculous and tears over the tragic. As one missionary secretary said, "Think of seeing an American Dutch Reformed Chinese!"

The very fact that we are taking our gospel to the Orient across the barriers that separate the races of mankind is a sufficient testimony to our faith that the gospel is universal. Well, then, if the gospel is universal, let us preach it as though it were, and not tangle it up with our Western provincialisms and peculiarities. Let us have the courage, not only abroad but at home, to go back behind the temporary and local elements, back to the universal and eternal elements of the gospel. And if you ask what they are, there is no great difficulty to provide a test. Nothing in the Christian gospel is universal and eternal except those things that make a real difference to character. The reason why nine-tenths of our theological controversies are an idle beating of the air is that, whichever side wins, it makes no difference to character. The reason why our denominational peculiarities are tweedledee and tweedledum is that all of them together make no deep difference to character. And character is the basic need of the world.

[From "The Road of Evolution," by Albert P. Mathews in The Yale Review]

The struggle of a man with a man, of race with race, of country with country, does not lead the human species onward and upward. It is in reality a man's struggle with environment which carries him on always to a larger life. Just in proportion as he succeeds and struggles, he wins his freedom; he becomes a man whose spirit cannot be daunted. The spirit within him becomes free. It is victory over our own flesh which is desirable, not over our fellow men. That is the lesson of evolution.... Evolution is the spirit struggling to throw off the trammels of matter. Is it not that same spirit which inspires our poets? The same spirit which exclaims, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" The goal of evolution—can it be anything else than immortality?

[From "Religion and the New Realism," by Robert Fairbairn in The Methodist Review]

There can be no discovery of truth valid for life unless men will refrain from the attempt to impose their predilections upon the universe. They must bring the whole force of their intelligent attention to bear in the endeavor to see clearly what is, and then to harmonize their thinking and activities thereto.

[From "Miss China," by Emma Sarepta Yule in Scribner's Magazine]

Chinese women are not averse to giving, but they have not practiced the real help of creating self-dependence nor been interested outside their acquaintances. The playground [managed by Chinese women] is a joy dispensed to scores of children who otherwise would know no play. No children who attend any school are admitted. But the big thing is, that Chinese women are giving help to those not of their kin; are feeling responsibility for those human beings not of their own courtyard....

Comparatively few Chinese girls are employed in any line of business, and government plums, large and small, fall into the hands of masculine Chinese. But it looks as though the day of this natural monopoly was passing. Through the concentrated efforts of women's clubs in Canton, in pressing the matter of recognizing woman's claim to a plum or two, a young woman has very recently been appointed to a government clerkship of responsibility, the first in the country, it is said. Also, the Canton-Samshui Railway and the Canton Telephone Company, yielding to the clubs' pressure, has voted to approve the employment of young women. In Peking a commercial school for girls has just been opened. The capital also boasts of a savings bank for women and girls, very new.

One index finger that points to a possible future situation, is that even at this stage of woman's emergence from her home walls, women are found managing business operations openly, not from behind a curtain. One authority states that around Canton no less than forty factories are owned and operated by women. These are not large plants; China's manufacturing is still carried on in small concerns. One knitting factory doing a business of fifty thousand a year is managed by a woman. A department store entirely under the management of a Chinese woman, trained abroad, is a recent innovation in the northern capital. In newspaper work women are coming to the fore rapidly. Miss China points with pardonable pride to Miss Cheng who attended the Peace Conference as correspondent for several Chinese newspapers. That so many are up and doing in lines of endeavor that are not materially remunerative but help in making life less a burden to many, many poor, in work for the betterment of the home and the community, is after all the best guidepost of Miss China's future.

[From "The March of Events," in The World's Work]

The best thing about the Washington Conference is that it has called for another. This fact distinguishes it, and reveals as well the principle that animated it. The distinction is, that former international conferences tried to tie the hands of the future by grappling iron bands of agreement around the status quo and resolving that it should continue static. The old diplomacy—the diplomacy of the Congress of Vienna and of Berlin—said in effect, "At last, by the verdict of war, we have got the nations into the positions in which they ought to sit, and, by heaven, henceforth they shall continue so to sit." That has been the theory of treaty-making since the dawn of history, and, despite an endless succession of new wars which demonstrated ever anew the folly of the thought, it has continued to be the theory of treaty-making down to this present. That theory rested on two false assumptions; namely, that a nation defeated in war would permanently accept the verdict of defeat, and that the course of future events could be controlled by agreements regarding present conditions. The whole thing left out of consideration both human nature and the ceaseless activity of life. Hence human history presents a picture of statesmen time after time building a dam of treaties across the roaring torrent of human progress, only to witness an inevitable recurrence of a veritable Johnstown flood of war, breaking down this artificial barrier and allowing human aspirations to find natural channels for their onward march. Herein lies the new principle exemplified at the Washington Conference. The Americans who called it recognized the fluid character of events. They did not hope to congeal human relationships into permanent shapes. They did not try to fix a line across the stream of human events and say, "Beyond this point cease flowing." ... It is really a revolution in human conduct. It has been thought before, but it has never been done before—certainly not on a worldwide scale.