ADDRESS-RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

Rev. JAMES MORRIS WHITON, Ph.D., New York City, Pastor 1865-1869.

ON

N ANNIVERSARY days we naturally recall the past. As I look into your faces, above them seems to hover a vision of that utterly different congregation before which I first stood on this ground. I recall their custom of standing through the prayers, and of facing toward the door while singing the last hymn, as if the minister had said, "Arise, let us go hence."

The city I recall is scarcely a third as large as this of today; the country has more than doubled in population since then, and eight States have added their stars to our flag. The Nation, a world-power now, courted by all and fearing none, was then just emerging victorious from a struggle for its life — the President of its Confederate foes having been taken prisoner on the day I became your pastor.

Immense the contrast between then and now! Immense even in the homeliest matters.

Think of paying, as then, 50 cents a yard for cotton cloth, 50 cents a pound for butter by the firkin, $2.00 a pound for breakfast tea, and so on, out of a salary of $1800 with a United States income tax deducted.

At such a time it is the good wife on whom the burden bears heaviest. She is the savior of the situation.

Well, the Union is worth far more than all it cost us.

A great transition had then been just accomplished. The design of the framers of our National Constitution in 1787, to make "a more perfect Union," was finally realized in 1865, when discordant States had been hammered into an indissoluble Nation on the anvil of civil war. Another great transition, not political but theological, was then approaching, but we did not know it; we realize it

now.

The last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater intellectual change than any period since Luther's time. The new idea of the unvierse, which Copernicus introduced in 1543 by showing that our earth is flying through the heavens, instead of the heavens revolving round the earth, as all had supposed, was matched before this house rose from the ashes of its predecessor by the new idea that Darwin gave of man, as physically descended from ancient animal forms, instead of being created by a fiat of Almighty power 6000 years ago, according to traditional belief.

Darwin's epoch-making book was published in New York so recently as 1871. This made havoc of an important part of the current evangelical theology - the doctrine held since the fifth century, that the sin of Adam had involved all mankind in ruin. The biological doctrine of evolution was consequently denounced by theologians as "infidel" and "atheistic." The result was what happened to the bull that bore down against the locomotive. The good men who quoted Scripture against biology are now classed with the good men who quoted it against the new astronomy. When Henry Ward Beecher showed

Plymouth Church that the new science of biology required him to reject the orthodox doctrine of the poisoning of the human race, so to speak, in its cradle, certain ministers crowded him out of their fellowship in the New York and Brooklyn Association. That happened so recently as 1882; now it reads more like ancient history, so far have we gotten past that sort of thing. In fact, before 1895, the so-called New England Theology, a mitigated form of Calvinism, had "perished from off the face of the earth" - I quote the words of its sympathetic historian in a recent book.

Why was this? Because Calvinism represented God's work of redemption from sin as a reconstruction of the humanity that was was supposed to be spoiled by the sin of Adam. Accordingly it fell before the new science, which has taught us to regard divine redemption as a constructive work, carrying forward from the origin of mankind the evolution of the spiritual humanity, which in the ages to come shall exhibit in perfected man the image of his Father, God. The result to real Christianity has been as if painted stucco had been scraped off from white marble on which it had been overlaid. The real Christ in the glory of his divine humanity has been revealed to us as our Elder Brother, who saves us through our imitation of him.

In that collapse of the theology which, forty years ago, was supposed to be as enduring as the sun, other factors, of course, helped, chiefly the critical study of the Bible, but of this there is no time to speak. I only observe that the great transition from medieval to modern ideas of man

For

as related to God has been practically accomplished, at least in the Congregational churches. Sharp the contrast in the theological situation and its burning questions then and now! Nowhere is it sharper than right here. It is hard to realize now that the great question raised by the Council that examined me as to my qualifications for a pastorate here was the moral state of new-born infants. in 1865 this church was still standing, with a few others like minded, for even an older type of Calvinism than that of the now defunct New England theology. There was unwillingness to have any pulpit exchanges with Methodist neighbors. There was unwillingness to have any professors from Andover Seminary preach in the pastor's vacation, because that institution was suspected of insufficient orthodoxy. To say that a man might not be soundly orthodox as to the Trinity and yet be saved, was thought dangerous doctrine. A far cry it is to such an attitude, but that was only forty years ago.

But let us honor those who were true to the light that was in them, however dim, and live up to our own convictions as they lived up to theirs.

The church of that day used its intellectual and spiritual equipment well. During my pastorate, 1865–1869, it received nearly a hundred new members - forty-eight of them on confession of faith. The church of to-day, with the same spiritual and a better intellectual equipment, is capable of even better results.

From this backward look we turn to the forward. We have seen that the church was nearing a great transition,

and knew it not. To-day it is facing, nay, already entering another great transition period, and is more or less conscious of the fact. Only those can be unconscious of it who do not read and think.

The past transition was theological, from mediæval to modern conceptions of man as related to God. The present transition is sociological, to more fraternal conceptions of man as related to his fellow-man in society. The theological transition accomplished an intellectual reform in the readjustment of dogma to science. The sociological transition has a moral reform to accomplish in readjusting the relation of the individual to society, and especially the relation of the strong to the weak. The former issue was mainly within the church itself; the present issue is between the church and the masses outside, who cry for social justice, and watch to see what sympathy their cry

arouses.

As soon as the Civil War ended, a period of marvelous material expansion began. For many years all social interests were profligately sacrificed to individual rapacity for wealth. This is now in a fair way to be curbed by long-needed laws. But quite apart from the enormous rascality which has necessitated the general house-cleaning now going on in Federal, State, and City governments, there are grave inequities, no less iniquitous, of which our social system must be purged, or Christianity must suffer disastrous defeat.

When the laborer's wages cannot procure a sanitary home for the cradle of his babes; when his children have to be taken from school to earn their bread; when their