CHAPTER I

Consciousness of the Larger Self

Indissolubly knit together are myself, other folks, and God. This triangular relationship is characterized by a very real solidarity. To this living, vital, interpenetrating organism is given the name, the larger self. Now a consciousness of this interrelatedness and interdependence of life is one essential for a great new constructive era. Let us first consider this truth in the form of an ancient analogy.

DAILY READINGS

First Week, First Day: The Family of God

He made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said,

For we are also his offspring.-Acts 17:26-28.

In these verses is made one of the great generalizations with reference to mankind. However, long before this declaration of the essential unity of the human race in one great family or household, we find that occasional prophetic minds were thinking in terms of humanity. It is worth while to read right through the thirty-two verses of names and peoples found in the tenth chapter of Genesis in order to come from this to the first verse of the next chapter. (The religious value of that long list of names is in the realization that all races of the earth belong to the same great family and are really kinsmen. There is one family of God—not many.)

Have we ever seriously considered the obligation arising from this great truth? It involves an international community of interests and responsibilities, an international fellowship in gain and loss, in honor and dishonor. When men say with

Meredith Townsend that "something radical, something unalterable and indestructible, divides the Asiatic from the European, . . . they are fenced off from each other by an invisible, impalpable, but impassable wall as rigid and inflexible as that which divides the master from his dog," they are forming the background in thought for racial war. It is the denial of the implications of mankind's unity in one family that makes nationalism dangerous. On the other hand, the thorough-going acceptance of those implications would crowd out selfish suspicion and aggression, while dignifying and ennobling national individuality and attainment. Success in the acceptance of the truth may be tested by the mutual att tudes between peoples.

It is a growing realization of this truth that is causing a gradual disuse of the word “foreign” in connection with missions. With one blood, one human family, there can be no sharp line between obligation to community, to nation, and to the world. It is that larger outreach, however, which we have known as foreign missions, that preeminently makes its great heroic venture on the fundamental soundness of the postulate of today's teaching. Foreign missionaries act on the conviction that the solidarity of the human race in God's family is true; they thereby become the most powerful agents for creating the realization of that truth.)

The intelligent assimilation of the truth as to the essential unity of the human race on the part of any individual or group, is a real attainment. When can it be said of us, as of Jesus: "He is not ashamed to call them brethren"? (Heb. 2:11). Or when will we join with him in saying: "Behold my mother and my brethren! Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. . . . My Father, and your Father"? (Matt. 12:49, 50; John 20:17).

First Week, Second Day: Still Struggling for Monotheism

Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him,

I am Jehovah, and there is none else; besides me there is no God. I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and 1" Asia and Europe," pp. 50 and 150.

from the west, that there is none besides me: I am Jehovah, and there is none else.—Isa. 45: 1, 5, 6.

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as also ye were called in one hope of your calling .. one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all.-Eph. 4:4, 6.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek: for the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon him.-Rom. 10:12.

We shall never attain the democracy of God until we have a common, vital, monotheistic faith at the spiritual basis of our lives. There was a time when tribal gods were commonly worshiped. This was true amongst all neighboring peoples in Isaiah's time. Even Yahweh, himself, had been honored as the exclusively national God of Israel. With magnificent insight, however, the prophets declared Yahweh to be the controller of the whole world. Isaiah believed that even the foreigner, Cyrus, could be considered an anointed servant of Jehovah. Amos must have astounded the people of his day by declaring that God does not love the Israelites more than the Negroes (Amos 9:7). And a beautiful Syriac rendering of Isaiah 9:7 says that "Great is his kingdom and of his dominion is there no frontier." Hebrew prophecy was the interpretation of history in terms of God's purpose, and increasingly was it perceived that this purpose was utilizing other nations along with Israel.

Signs are not wanting, however, that even in modern times many have been worshiping tribal gods. The aspirations and petitions of many a prayer during the War revealed an unconscious survival of belief in one's deity as limited to one's area. Are we willing to believe that some non-Christian monarch or people may be chosen agents in the hand of our God? Do we really acknowledge to ourselves that the Alaskan and the Burman, the Korean and the African are just as dear to God as we? Let us with warmth of conviction exclaim: "God's in the Occident-God's in the Orient."

First Week, Third Day: The Essential Condition for the Larger Unity

There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus.-Gal. 3:28.

Where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all.-Col. 3:11.

In yesterday's reading we saw the fundamental basis for the larger self; in today's, Paul shows us the essential condition for its attainment. Distinctions of race, of social position, even of sex, become relatively unimportant in Christ— that is, in our becoming Christian. When God's Spirit dwells in us, a life is possible that is superior to these differences. They are not non-existent, but they seem superficial compared with that sense of deeper unity which comes from realities disclosed in Christ.

That any two human beings are coequally children of their Father is a vastly more significant truth than that one is a Jew and the other a Greek. Once catch a vision of man's common relationship to the one source, God, and we see that the realm in which we share is vastly larger than the realm in which we differ.) In all the mystery of our origin, in all the vastness of our resources, in all the hope for life ahead, we are conjoined with every other human being. What in comparison is the differing social status of master or slave? If woman must be born again in the form of man in order to be saved, as is held in popular Hinduism, if she is a distinctly lower order of being as in Africa, then of course the distinction of male and female is enormously and farreachingly significant. But if through Christ we see the reality of the spiritual oneness of man and woman, and contemplate their common privilege of living the eternal life in time under the care and by the power of God, this common dignity overshadows and ennobles every other thing.

Sometimes a catastrophe brings about this consciousness of simple humanity. When Robinson Crusoe first saw the man Friday, the fact that they were fellow-humans was more dominating than color or creed. When the earth's crust shakes and terror drives people from their homes, the members of the heterogeneous company huddled in a place of refuge are more conscious of their common human frailty before this mighty force than they are of old distinctions that loomed so large in days of safety when they forgot their God.

But what the earthquake can do for a night, Christ can make an abiding attitude. Fellowship with him gives a spiritual perspective that is vital for all time. The world must catch

from him the overwhelmingly greater significance of what unites rather than of what separates mankind. Those individuals and those nations who really try to follow him will find amongst themselves an identity of interest and of aim that will command attention, to the exclusion or correction of the things which now divide.

Here, then, is a practical test for every Christian. Amid race prejudice and national rivalry, does the deeper unity stand out for us? Do we feel closer to a Chinese or an African who is trying to be a Christian than we do to a fellow-countryman who is making no such effort? Can we ever have a league of nations without a deep sense of our underlying unity?

Paul does not underestimate the magnitude of this change in point of view. To him it is a moral change that can be likened only to a new life, the putting on of a new man. Paul never would have tolerated two classes, Christian and world Christian. Becoming a Christian meant to him something deep and thoroughgoing. In these two epistles he testifies to a wonderful change in attitude. I ask myself two questions: Has there ever been such a change in my mental attitude? If so, would I consider it, as Paul did, so great an evidence of God's working in me that I would write it to my friends as "good news"?

First Week, Fourth Day: The Interrelation of Peoples

But speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ; from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.-Eph. 4:15, 16.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.-1 Cor. 12:25, 26.

For none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself.-Rom. 14:7.

That apart from us they should not be made perfect.-Heb. 11:40.