01.11. Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI THE DIVINE KING FROM an early day men began to speak of God as King. The race evidently began its conscious history in groups. From the notion of the gods as by some peculiarly intimate tie related to clans or tribes it is easy to advance, as civilization takes on more highly organized forms, to the notion of God as the head of a kingdom. To-day we constantly speak of the kingdom of God. Here, again, we are to summon our conceptions to the test of Christlikeness.

All that we have said about the divine responsibility could be said again in discussing God as King. One of the marvels of human history is the tightness with which the Hebrews welded together the ideas of kingly power and kingly responsibility. When we read of the despotism of the empires which were the neighbors of Israel, we ’cannot help wondering how a little people, just off the world-roads which connected Egypt and Babylon, could have attained such conviction of responsible kingship. Yet so it was, and one of the shaping instruments in the world’s religious thought was and is Israel’s doctrine that a king must be the servant of the people. It would be farfetched and artificial to discuss ancient Israel in terms of modern democracy, but the difference between the idea of kingship in Israel and that of kingship in Europe until comparatively recent times can never cease to astonish us. The divine right of kings, which for hundreds of years went without effective challenge in European history, never received more than qualified acceptance in Israel.

It may be contended that Israel was a theocracy and that the king was merely a human servant of the Divine King. All the more reason for us to marvel at the ideals which determined the thinking about the Divine King, ideals which had to do with the moral worth of the chosen people and with the moral rights of even the least of the individuals in Israel. To be sure, Israel first thought of God as in a covenant that is to say, in a moral agreement to lead the people as a nation, but nevertheless the individual had rights inconceivable in a despotism of the Oriental type.

One of the glories of the Old Testament is the assumption as commonplace that individuals with a grievance can make direct appeal to God. Centuries of Christian teaching have accustomed us to practice in prayer of direct approach, to God, but how surprising it must have been in the old days when God was thought of more exclusively as Ruler, to read that Abraham launched the challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"; that Jonah voiced to God himself his resentment at the divine kindliness with a Nineveh hostile to Israel; that Job almost defied God in attacking the ordinary theology of his day as to God’s sending suffering upon men.

Now, the Christian Church has always hailed Jesus as Lord, and has sought to rally Christian conceptions of the larger social duties around the doctrine of the kingdom of God. Central principles have been worked out concerning the divine rulership over the larger and smaller groups of men and on humanity as a whole, which we may profitably examine. The old challenge of the tribes of Israel to their king was: "Wilt thou be a king to us after the manner of a servant of the people?" The church has fastened on kingship as one of the titles of Christ. If we are to take Christianity seriously, we must ask whether we can think of the kingship of God in terms of Christliness. Inasmuch as the wisest statesmanship seldom knows how to onduct in detail the course of a small social group for any considerable length of time, we may well be excused from the attempt to block out a concrete policy for the divine kingship over the whole human race. In the region of general considerations, however, the path is open enough. To begin with, the responsibility assumed by a Christlike God is to treat kingdoms of persons as ends-in-themselves and not as instruments or means to ends. If God were an exaggerated Napoleon, the expectations might be different, for the Napoleon treats the group as the end, and the individuals merely as nation-stuff, or cannonfodder. So with all philosophies of the state which erect the state into a superpersonality, or even into an ideal to be made real at the cost of the persons composing the state. The only substantial realities in a group are the individuals who compose the group. There is no soul in the group apart from the souls of the individuals. We may well admit that a race grasped as a unity, with organ adjusted to organ, would be a spectacle inspiring even to the Divine King himself, but even such a race would have its significance only for the persons who gazed upon it.

Let us remind ourselves of the need of keeping close grasp on the significance of personality in our estimates of social values. There is, as we all know, widespread denial at all times of the existence of the substantial self. We recognize how this denial comes about. The self gets loosened into thoughts or feelings, and drops out of ’its primacy. If abstract thought becomes the underlying power and thinkers are lost sight of, it is easy to arrive at the notion of a group over-soul beyond the individuals of the group. The current talk, too, about merging oneself into other selves tends in a like direction. One of the most serious obstacles to setting persons forth as the end of all worthy effort is, of course, a doubt as to the substantial reality of persons. Does not my contention, however, imply extreme individualism, with persons taken separately as the ends toward which the Divine King works? I do not think so. There is no use of speaking of a kingdom unless persons are taken in what we call their togetherness. The individual would not even be an individual if he were not set in society. The greatest instrument the individual can employ for the development of distinctiveness is language, and language is a social product. The central aim of man’s duty as laid upon us in the gospel is that of aiding our fellow men. That aid, however, results in the uplift of the helper himself toward the good and the true and the beautiful. An individual taken by himself is not what he is in a group.

There are fine powers of the soul which may get their chance only in solitude, but there are other fine powers which indubitably unfold only hi the social relationship. It is these social powers which we have in mind in speaking of the kingdom of God. We seek the utilization of all the social relationships for the development of the individuals. Not that the persons are finally to be set off by themselves. The Kingdom is to endure forever, if Christ means anything, as a kingdom in these social relationships. Of course the Kingdom itself is to be a spectacle enchaining the rapt gaze of all intelligences of the skies, from the Divine King down to the least man, but the significance of the spectacle is in the value of the persons thus knit together. The purpose of the kingdom must be to build men up into Christlikeness. Naturally, only the King himself can know what such an aim involves. We are hearing much today about democracy, and are even speaking of the democratic God. An age which can thus speak has traveled a long, long journey from the sovereignty of God conceived of as autocracy. Three or four hundred years ago the sovereignty of God was a thoroughly intelligible conception. If it pleased God to call some persons to eternal life and some other persons to eternal death by sovereign decree, well and good. No human being had any right to file objection. The practical outcome was that in too many cases those who thought themselves called to eternal life and those presumably indicated for eternal doom could have changed places without much upset to the theory, since it was all a matter of decree. We are far, far beyond that.

We are so far that some talk as if we ought almost to have an elected God, which absurd saying does suggest that God ought so to deal with men that by the sanction of their lives they will continually ratify his purposes. As thus understood the modern phrasing points toward an ideal, but there is, of course, involved the .consideration that it is the people themselves who must advance more and more toward the realization of the teaching of Christ. The dogma that the voice of the people is the voice of God has a fraction of truth, but only a fraction. Admittedly, in the great general controversies which concern the mass of men, the conviction of the people is likely to gravitate toward the larger human values, and the people are likely so to seize these values as to attain an approximately substantial justice and righteousness. It would be folly, however, to affirm, that this is always so. Moreover, when we decide as to moral issues that cannot be disposed of by a "yes" or "no" we ought not yield to public opinion as some of the democratic doctrinaires would have us. This holds of all issues where the range of knowledge required is beyond the people’s reach. We have to rely upon those who know. The trend of the time is to select popular rulers who can be trusted to keep the interests of the people to the front, and then to hold the rulers responsible for the best they can do. In any government the actual procedure is loose and ramshackle enough, but the procedure may be the best available.

Now, there is no expedient for deposing or recalling the divine Ruler of the universe, and no method of proving that he will act according to human interests. If, however, we are to accept him as like unto Christ, we have a right to believe that he orders the affairs of men with the ideal of a truly Christly kingdom before him. To come back to the word "democrat," we are discerning more and more that the best democrat is not necessarily the leader most quickly responsive to a popular vote. If, indeed, a ruler has been put in power to carry out a policy, and then has refused to carry out that policy, the only honorable course is for the leader to resign. The situation, however, is not often quite as simple as this. Leaders are given power to do their best for the people. To do this they must be trusted to disregard a popular mood or behest if to their large judgment such a disregard seems wise. In the old days when the doctrine of the divine right of kings was new, a great deal could be said for it. It was not by any means the absurdity it seems now. We require only a superficial recollection of history to recognize that the doctrine took its start in protest against the pretensions of a church scheming toward world-wide ecclesiastical despotism. No doubt it was to the church leaders blasphemy to hint that any other institution than the church could legitimately claim for itself divinity. The church assumed divine right because she thought of herself as holding a supernatural commission. She was the vicegerent of God on earth, no matter what she might actually do. The divinity rested in the commission. Now, when this doctrine began to work itself out into disregard of social justice and righteousness, men began to remark that divinity must show itself in results, and that a king striving for the welfare of his people was fundamentally more divine than a pope claiming supernatural authority while acting with most unnatural selfishness. The divine right of kings was at bottom better for society than the divine right of popes, for the king could not fall back upon a supernatural commission, but could only justify his divinity by human results. In time kingship showed its weakness. A movement toward secular kingly control which at first promised much went to pieces on the frailty of men when trusted with power without check. If a king could have been found who could have been trusted to work only for the largest and best welfare of his people, that king would have been a democrat in the finest sense. It is interesting to note that when men attempt to justify the career of a despot like Napoleon Bonaparte, they try to make out that the despot was democratic. In a character like that of Napoleon the argument seems humorous, but often it has pertinence in that supreme care for the highest and best good of the masses of men is of the essence of the democratic temper. In defending Napoleon, or any dictator who pays as little heed to what the people say as did Napoleon, it is customary to argue that perhaps without their realizing their own discernment, such despots sense the policies which make for the largest good of the greatest number, that in spite of their selfishness they are, after a rough fashion, incarnations of a popular mood, that they set out upon courses which are dictated by an instinct toward national greatness, that their power is in the last analysis due to this seizure of the deep-moving public mood. Such men have often known what the people have needed, and have known also how to meet the need. When they have thus understood the need, and have had the skilled expertness to meet it, they have won the popular approval which in the end has to be granted to experts. What are experts, anyhow, but kings in their several realms? There are kings in science, in art, in industry. The divineness of the right of these kings to rule is always to be found in their betterment of human conditions. If an all-wise, all-devoted king should appear, he might well be allowed to reign as long as he remained all-wise and all-devoted. Now, when some of the present-day writers talk about a democratic God, this ideal of devotion to and responsibility for the welfare of men is what they seem to have in mind, together with the further realization that the highest society of which we can conceive would be one in which the will of God would be continually ratified by men. This double conception would seem to meet all the legitimate demands of those who talk of the democracy of the kingdom of God.

Next we encounter the criticism of those who avow that such argument introduces paternalism into God’s relation to human society. Men in groups have a right to selfdetermination. They must be allowed to make their own mistakes. All of which I grant, and indeed insist upon, but let us get this point as to paternalism straight. What men resent in paternalism is the condescending and patronizing spirit. A God like unto the Christ who never patronized anybody is not likely to found a kingdom on condescension. For the rest, paternalism is sometimes confused with service rendered out of superior knowledge. Nobody in his sound mind objects to helpful treatment from one who knows.

Still, the objector insists that men must be allowed to make social mistakes themselves. This looks promising until we begin to reflect upon the closeness with which men in groups are knitted together, with the innocent suffering from the rashness of experimenters in selfdetermination. Moreover, actual observation seems to indicate that men in social relations have always made mistakes in plenty. A decade which has seen wrong national policies bring civilization to the verge of disaster cannot say much about modern society’s having too little chance for experiment in self-determination.

If any charge at all is to be brought against the divine government over society, it is more plausible to ask if groups have not had too much freedom. There come moments, indeed, of glorious cooperation among great nations when some common peril threatens society, to give us foretastes and gleams of what the ideal cooperative society may be when men master and obey the laws of God. The havoc which men wreak by the wrong use of social powers is at least suggestive of the good which they may achieve by a right use. Up to date, however, the historic outcome seems dubious, when the whole story of the whole race is taken into sweep of examination. The social policies of nations have not been such as to suggest that men are morally equal to greater freedom than they have had. Take the predicament of the nations to-day, with the most important peoples racing with each other for new instruments of war, with war prepared for as struggles not between armies, but between the peoples themselves, the avowed intention of war being through economic and psychological pressure to break down the will of an opposing nation. This is not all. Through the physical losses of nations in war, and through the physical changes which war brings about, the scientific gains in knowledge of the means for the betterment of human conditions won through a hundred years of patient experiment can be off-set and neutralized in one brief span of a few months. When nations employ their liberties to forge chains of new slaveries, we may well pause with the query as to whether the nations have not received too much liberty.

I have not been hesitant about facing the question as to the responsibility of God, and that for the reason that Christianity is a religion of faith. There is no path to mental peace through ignoring the divine responsibility; and yet I urge that the mistakes which groups national groups especially make in the use of freedom are a hint by contrast of what might be done if the liberty were directed toward a nobler purpose. God is, indeed, responsible for the freedom of the national groups, but is it to be doubted that many of the mistakes of that freedom come out of the deliberate choices of the groups? For example, there is a cult of nationalism abroad to-day which purposely seeks to make the idea of God serve a nationalistic purpose working directly toward ends which are the denial of Christlikeness. The nationalism to which I refer is comparatively new. It sets up as the object of group-endeavor so-called "cultural" aims which are to have right-ofway over all other aims whatsoever, either inside or outside of a nation. Up to a few years ago Germany was the foremost exponent of such policy. The German thought and feeling and practice of life were looked upon by Germans as superior to all other cultures. Acceptance of the German ideals was not conceived of as incumbent merely upon Germans. Free choice was even more important than birth, but whether by free choice or by compulsion the peoples of the world were to be brought to acknowledge and accept the superiority of the Germanic civilization. The feature to which I wish to call especial attention was the function of the ideal of God in all this. I do not intend to cast reflection upon the millions of devout Christians in Germany previous to the World War, but so far as official Germany was concerned, God was conceived of as of a German type. There was practical repudiation of the Christlike in God. I say "practical" repudiation, for I am speaking of attitudes and gestures in actual policies.

If the World War made it any easier for the nations to turn away from force for propagandist purposes, we may as well be thankful for the net gain; but, waiving the question of force, it is enough to detect that at the present hour various nations are preaching the cult of nationalism. Insofar as this is a protest against a vague and misty internationalism which would empty out all the distinctiveness from national individuality, the cult has its justification. Justified, too, are all attempts to make the most of national peculiarities for the sake of contribution to the common stock of the world’s culture. Paradoxical as it may sound, the finest contributions to common cultures often come as individuals and groups seek to make the most of themselves. Making the most of themselves, however, means making the best of themselves, and making the best of themselves means good will toward one another.

What I started to speak of was the effect of all this nationalism on the idea of God. Critics of religion always have hugely enjoyed themselves when ridiculing the tendency of men toward anthropomorphism. One of the old Greeks made merry with the idea of God by declaring that if oxen were to theorize about God, they would picture him as with horns like themselves. Now, anthropomorphism is never more absurd or dangerous than when it conceives of God as having a partiality for this or that particular nation, ’to the disadvantage of all other nations. That is the theology that justifies the Greek criticism and gives God horns. It makes God a partner with the militarists of all nations, and lends color to the remark of a European statesman that nationalism can never do without religion, for religion must be preserved to bless nationalistic war. It would be a serious count against the character of God that he endowed men with group-freedom, when we look upon the actual slaughters of historic groups, if the more excellent way were not so obvious, though confessedly this raises the question why God gives man so much freedom and so little sense. The more excellent way of cooperation of groups on the basis of mutual respect has lain out in full view from the beginning. If men can capture and harness the forces which make for death, they can do likewise with those that make for life. Perhaps one of the most important lessons of history thus far has been the ease with which men could have found the better way if they had only opened their eyes and looked. It has been visible for a long time. So widely has it been true that groups have used their conceptions of God as weapons in social struggle that possibly we have here explanation of the growth of the idea that all that God is, in the field of history, is merely the idealization of the ambitions of the national groups. It is almost impossible to get men to fight for a selfishness which is naked and not ashamed, so that it is necessary to idealize the social policy into a defense of something sacred. There swarm upon us, then, as many different Gods as there are national ideals, though all are called by the one name. With social progress the idea of God becomes nobler and nobler, but, we are told, it never can be more than idea. The doctrine of God is not as repellent as that of tribal gods mingling in the battles beside their worshipers; it represents the best that each group can do in shaping and declaring its ideals. The shortcomings of the conception lie in the inadequacy of the conceivers. They have not yet built an idea big enough to take in the races of men imagined as a brotherhood. The notion of the larger God seems obvious as soon as we get it, but we cannot get it till we make it. Anything may be obvious enough after we have seen it, but it cannot be seen until it is there. The idea of a king over all men has not been seized earlier because it is nothing but idea, and ideas appear only as there appear idea-makers. I do not claim that this is the explanation of God offered by Durkheim and liis school, but the Durkheim exposition is measurably similar to the above.

Some object to the expression, "nothing but idea," on the ground that in the social realms, as in other realms, nothing is nobler than the pursuit of ideals for their own sake. We are told that the scholar does not need a personal embodiment of truth as the object of his devotion. He seeks truth on its own account. Why should a friend of mankind require the actual existence of a Divine King over all men, when the idealization of social purposes will perform the same function? In serving our fellow men we are not shut in to the realistic study of the actual cases of suffering men, women, and children before us. We can see each sufferer as the bearer of an ideal of humanity, and that ideal may be the compelling force with us. When men die for England or America they may not be thinking of an actual England or America at all, but of a nation that has never been, is not now, and perhaps never will be. Why, then, may we not think of God as the sum of the noblest social ideals, ever growing nobler? Is there not something more worthy in such worship than in the adoration of a personal God, even though that God be the embodiment and the realization of the highest ideals?

We have dealt with all this before. It is another instance of the cart before the horse. Abstraction is made from personal activity, the abstraction is recognized as impersonal; finally the impersonal shifts around in front of the personal, and the personal becomes an embodiment of or specification of the impersonal, possessing the weakness which we identify with the personal in the human forms which we know. It will not do. Abstraction may be a process by which we attain to a knowledge of the God who is the Ruler of all society; but if we are manipulating abstractions in themselves, we are far removed from that atmosphere of reality which clothed the teaching of Jesus.

If we are to hold to the kingship of a Christlike God over society, however, we must face all the consequences and implications of such a belief, consequences from which the impersonal conceptions seek to free us. Above all we must never slacken our grip on the divine responsibility. If the groups are free, God is responsible for the granting of a freedom which is morally justifiable only on condition that in the knowledge of all possible results of such freedom the grant is worth while. If we are to believe in a Christlike God, let us be fearless in our utilization of the belief. Christianity is in any event a poor half-way house. The only safety is in traveling the full distance. At periods throughout Christian, history there has been strong impulse to regard the social career of the race as so subject to the Divine Will that the social changes are thought to take place by divine choice alone, without regard to the attitude of groups themselves. Now and again this view is denounced as savoring of old-time apocalyptic which made the coming of the kingdom of God wholly a matter of God’s good time. Apocalyptic does, indeed, harmfully minimize the forces which are within the grasp of human freedom, but there is about Jewish apocalyptic especially an admirable facing of the responsibility of God for human history . Without at all subscribing to the concrete content of such apocalyptic, we may, in the light of our modern knowledge, admit divine responsibility in some realms where human freedom has little or no scope. For instance, the God of nature is obviously responsible for physical circumstances affecting the life of the race in those large regions where human will cannot avail at all. To take an extreme illustration, we cannot by the boldest flight of imagination fancy mankind as able to affect the orbit of the earth, or the position of the earth among planets and stars. Man might adjust himself to an ice age resulting from a lengthening of the earth’s orbit, or by the tilting of the earth’s pole though it is doubtful if any social organization yet devised could in such event stand the strain of the race’s rush toward the warmer lands but man could not affect the orbit itself. Before such a change all men could do would be to hold fast their confidence in God. This is but one illustration of conceivable circumstances in which the controlling factors would be beyond human control. A slight change in the amount of heat received by the earth from the sun, a change to either more or less, would bring about a similar crisis. So also would any extensive alteration of any features of the physical order which we consider fixed. In this dependence on the physical, faith repeats the old miracle of believing that things will stick together long enough for the working out of some moral and spiritual results, insisting that the transitoriness of the present order is no more incompatible with the seizure of eternal moral values by the race than is the decay of the individual human organism incompatible with the seizure of eternal human values by a person. The sense of moral mastery here rests down upon confidence in the responsibility of God, and that confidence is at its greatest as we catch the spirit of Christ. The divine responsibility must be our stay also before those sweeping tides of emotion which now and again carry everything before them in societies. I am not now thinking of the social disturbances brought about by propaganda, but by sentiments the outcome of mysterious subtle processes which we do not understand. We need not be tied to a doctrine of the unconscious to discern the power in individual and social life of psychical elements which seem to surge upon us from realms usually below the threshold of consciousness. Or at times whole peoples seem excitable or suggestible beyond the ability of any individuals or small groups to check the storm of feeling. Hence come crazes and delusions on the one hand, and, it may be, revivals of enthusiasm for learning an art or religion on the other. Take a historic phenomenon which is not wholly good and not wholly bad the crusades. No doubt scores of influences played into the crusades for which men were responsible as agitators and managers, though it is impossible to tell at this distance how far a Peter the Hermit or a Richard the Lion-Hearted was personally an effective cause. Make all allowance, however, for the effect of human choices it is not possible to say that the crusades were in controlling degree the expression of human freedom. Men were too much swayed by illusions over which they had no mastery. The outcome was both good and bad, speaking now of the actual consequences. With all reverence it may be said that the Divine Ruler of all has the heavy share of the responsibility. If this seems irreverent, let us ask ourselves if it is any more reverent to say that he was not responsible. The same judgment must be passed upon national and international and racial stirrings and strivings upon which so much of history depends. Let the radius of the play of the individual and social wills be ever so great, we nevertheless come to a field where the result depends upon an interlacing of factors, to which the human will is not as yet adequate. Perhaps the rarest form of human genius is superlative administrative skill, which consists in so weaving forces together as to make them cooperate toward a desired end. So far as our intelligence comprehends these larger affairs no matter how much of good will may spread among the peoples of the earth, and no matter how far international and inter-racial organization may go for as long a time as we can see ahead the social future lies beyond the reach of human administrative skill. Here God is responsible. In the light of the teaching of Christ there can be the utmost frankness and freedom in thus acknowledging the divine responsibility. In these mighty realms the control is beyond us. Our plight is similar to that in our relation to the mechanical forces of the world. We are sure that mathematical formulas rule every stir from suns to atoms, and we are sure that our minds are capable of reading the separate formulas. The interrelations and interworkings of the processes, however, we cannot master because of their intricacy and immensity. If this is true in the realm of mathematics, much more is it true elsewhere; but just as we have confidence in the sway of the mathematical principle in its own realms, so also do we have confidence in the sway of moral principle in universe-wide processes whose secrets we do not profess to be able to read.

How can we speak thus of the responsibility of God without seeming to encourage fatalism? If the responsibility is God’s why worry? What can we do to help or hinder? In these larger spaces probably nothing but that does not minimize the importance of freedom in the limits within which we are placed. Granted that the world in which we move has meanings and purposes beyond us, nevertheless the fact remains that we are in this world, and that we can make enough use of this world to build ourselves into increasing freedom. The conviction of the responsibility of God for the events over which we have no control ought to increase and release human energies rather than to check and slow them down. Certainly, the Christlikeness of God ought to beget that calmness of spirit without which effective labor is impossible.

Here I wish to digress long enough to say a word about the missionary as an agent in hastening the coming of the larger kingdom of God. It does not fall within my purpose to discuss the so-called secular agencies through which the Divine Huler brings men into closer relationships, but a word is perhaps in order as to the significance of the spread of the idea of the Christlikeness of God as a factor in bringing the new kingdom. One of the tragic features of existence in non-Christian lands is the prevalence of fatalism. In India the people seem to think themselves at the mercy of the gods who work through nature. In China a social spirit has stiffened the minds of the people into the notion that in the presence of the group the individual , is nothing. If Indian and Chinese peoples can be brought to a realization that a Christlike God, and not fate, is back of the forces of the world, the first step can be taken toward nation-wide and race-wide relief, for the fundamental trouble with both China and India is a wrong idea of God. There are, indeed, some forces, as we have said, which are altogether beyond human control, but there are others which for ages have seemed beyond human control but which can measurably be utilized for the betterment of human conditions. The Indian feels that famine comes because fate wills it through blowing of a dry and rainless wind, but within limits men can foresee and provide for famine. The Chinese feels that the belief of his people in the right of way of the mass over the individual is from the gods, but nevertheless the social spirit can be controlled into a different channel. So that in spite of what I have said about great natural and social forces as beyond human control, there are some such agencies which are in a degree within our control. Moreover, it is possible to make happier adjustment to the most inexorable necessities once we get the Christ-idea of God. No greater service can be rendered than the preaching of the missionary that God hath indeed made of one blood all nations of the earth, that all may dwell together in a brotherhood of peoples, with each people preserving its own distinctiveness and at the same time united to eveiy other.

It is fortunate that at the present hour the recognition of the sanctity of all varieties of national and racial life is taking the form of emphasis on the worth of the cultural systems of all peoples. There is nothing but harm in seeking to rob groups of their distinctiveness. The only union worth while rests on the basis of the diversity of the uniting factors. Saint Paul’s picture of the variety of organs and functions in the Body of Christ applies directly to an organized humanity. Still, even this important truth can be wrongly stressed. I once knew a distinguished social student who protested against teaching the Christian idea of God to a non- Christian tribe because, he said, it was important for the total culture of the world to have that tribe’s idea of God persist in its purity. That is to say, this student wished the interesting but inadequate idea of God which the tribe held, to be an instructive theme for the study of those outside the tribe, while he did not wish those inside the tribe to get a larger and better idea from outside. The selfishness of this attitude needs no comment a selfishness illustrated often enough in current exhortation not to disturb "native" customs and ideas.