SOME TENDENCIES TOWARD UNITY IN RELIGION
BY ALFRED W. MARTIN
IT must be obvious to even the most casual observer that the old denominational lines separating the sects are fast losing all intellectual meaning. It is no longer possible to differentiate Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, as it was at the close of the nineteenth century. Many an orthodox clergyman today entertains religious beliefs that make such eminent Unitarians as Channing and Martineau appear exceedingly conservative. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick delights to speak of himself as “a Nondescript.” Dr. Joseph Fort Newton has been a Congregationalist preacher at the City Temple in London, a [Page 158]
Universalist minister in New York, and now he is an Episcopalian clergyman at Overbrook, Pa., yet the successive transitions have been made with no friction whatsoever, so easy has the passage been made from one Christian communion to another.
During the last decade it has happened again and again that when two churches had forgotten why they ever separated, and neither of them was able to pay a minister a living wage, they bethought themselves “how good and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,”—and promptly a merger ensued. Thus one of the immediate and spontaneous results of economic conditions and of the breakdown of sectarian boundary-lines is the revival of a demand for union, for the consolidation of religious forces analogous to that which has already been consummated in the industrial world.
The most recent of these mergers is that known as The United Church of Canada. After twenty years of agitation and negotiation we find that the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Congregationalists have agreed to ignore their differences and their sectional separations for ever. This is what happened: First, the governing assemblies of these three sectarian groups endorsed the merger. Next, the individual churches voted for it by large majorities, the Canadian parliament then sanctioned it, and the Canadian courts legalized it. As a result the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches as such have disappeared, and in their place stands The United Church of Canada, with an inclusive membership of two and a half million, representing thirty per cent of the total population of the Dominion.
The nearest approach to such a merger within the limits of the United States, but signalizing no less the tendency to unity, is what is known as The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. This was organized in 1908, and bands together twenty-eight Protestant denominations. From the latest official document of this Federal Council we learn that during sixteen years of service it has conclusively proved that “the ideal of religious unity in service is practical.”
The Federal Council, through the Commission on Social Service “carries on a steady program of helping local churches to work out any proposal for building a better community life.” Inter-racial conferences, “bringing together leaders of the white and negro people in a program of co-operative effort, have already been held in many of the leading cities.” The campaign “to create public opinion for the entrance of the United States into the permanent Court of International Justice has been pursued with such vigor that it is generally agreed that the churches are the greatest single factor in bringing this about.”
The Federal Council has established a Department of Research and Education, “in order to secure and publish the necessary data from which a correct moral judgment on contemporary issues can be formed.” Universalist leaders are just now making fresh attempts at uniting their denomination with the Unitarian, proposing a new basis upon which a consolidation may be successfully consummated. Our Episcopalian brethren have been actively engaged for the past fifteen years in laying the foundations for a worldwide fellowship of all “who accept the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior.” At the General Convention in 1910, it was unanimously voted to invite all churches which accept this doctrine to attend a “World Conference on Faith and Order,” to the end that it might culminate in a fellowship “absolutely unprecedented in Christian history.” The plan was[Page 159]
financially supported by a gift of one hundred thousand dollars by the late J. Pierpont Morgan. The plan was officially endorsed by sixty distinct commissions representing all the leading branches of the Christian church throughout the world. In the official statement published by the original commission we read:
“A disunited Christendom cannot effectually achieve the work of the Christian Church. So long as we are disunited controversy and rivalry will continue, and these things cannot but make charity more difficult and bitterness more prevalent. Every effort to secure Christian unity will prove disruptive and futile if vital convictions are compromised or Christian consciences stultified; rather must the aim be the frank recognition of the things in which Christians differ as well as those in which they agree. The fact is that Christians are not agreed as to what is essential in Christianity, and the sense of stewardship of the essential truth is not peculiar to any single Christian communion, but is felt in each of the sundered parts of Christendom. Therefore we need to confer together, in a spirit of loving candor to discern what is true and vital in the position of each communion in the hope of attaining to a common mind, in which everything that is precious shall be treasured, and be given its just and proportionate value.”
Surely such a project, narrowly restricted in scope as it is, yet animated by a most noble spirit is certain to produce permanent, beneficial results. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the “world conference” may be (the date set for it is 1927) it is certain to result in an increase of mutual charity, mutual understanding, mutual tolerance and teachableness. It will mark another milestone on the road to that ideal religious fellowship which is the much desired goal ere a divine civilization can be established. For assuredly it is not enough that we be brothers and sisters in Christ, we must be brothers and sisters in Humanity, with all the rest of mankind, that is what an ideal fellowship stands for and nothing less can ever fully satisfy. At Benares in India plans have been consummated for the erection of a “Hall of all Religions” at which the study of comparative religion is to be pursued under the broadest and most catholic auspices ever known. Lectures are to be delivered on the great religions by authorities drawn from all the historic faiths; a library is to be constructed and stocked with the best literature in all tongues on comparative religion; a dormitory is to be erected for the benefit of the resident student-body. An appropriation of about $5,000,000 has been set aside for the fulfilment of the plan as agreed upon by a board of trustees including representatives of all of the seven extant great religions. Thus in India and other parts of the world there will be demonstrations of an organic fellowship of faiths—as there has already been in Persia—that ideal religious unity of Bahá’u’lláh—and the goal of all Bahá’í religious endeavor.
