Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/132

 104 HISTORY OF THE PARLIAMENT. to do a like work, and does it not force us to see good even in those that our ancestors thought enemies ? Our political evolution has had the same lesson for us. It has taught us to borrow ideas with equal impartiality from sources apparently oppo- site. We have borrowed the federal idea from you ; the parliament, the cabinet, the judicial system from Britain ; and, unitmg both, we think we have found a constitution better than that which either the mother country or the older daughter enjoys. At any rate we made it ourselves and it fits us ; and this very political evolution has taught us that ideas belong to no one country, that they are the common property of mankind, and so we act together, trying to borrow new ideas from every country that has found by experiment that the ideas will work well. Our religious evolution has taught us the same thing. And so we have been enabled to accomplish a measure of religious unification greater than either the mother-land or the United States. Eighteen years ago, for instance, all the Presbyterian denominations united into one church in the Dominion of Canada. Immediately thereafter all the Methodist churches took the same step, and now all the Protestant churches have appointed committees to see whether it is not possible to have a larger union, and all the young life of Canada says "Amen" to the proposal. Now it is easy for a people with such an environment to understand that where men differ they must be in error, that truth is that which unites, that every age has its problems to solve, that it is the glory of the human mind to solve them, and that no church has a monopoly of the truth or of the Spirit of the living God. It seems to me that we should begin this Parliament of Religions, not with the consciousness that we are doing a great thing, but with an humble and lowly confession of sin and failure. Why have not the inhabitants of the world fallen before the truth ? The fault is ours. The Apostle Paul, looking back on centuries of marvelous God-guided history, saw as the key to all its maxims this : that Jehovah had stretched out his hands all day long to a disobedient and gainsaying people ; that although there was always a remnant of the righteous, Israel as a nation did not understand Jehovah and therefore failed to understand Jier own marvelous mission. If St. Paul were here to-day would he not utter the same sad con- fession with regard to the nineteen centuries of Christendom? Would he not have to say that we have been proud of our Christianity instead of allowing our Christianity to humble and crucify us ; that we have boasted of Christianity as something we possessed instead of allowing it to possess us; that we have divorced it from the moral and spiritual order of the world instead of seeing that it is that which interpenetrates, interprets, com- pletes and verifies that order, and that so we have hidden its glories and obscured its power ? "All day long," our Saviour has been saying, " I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people."