ROBERT E. SPEER Secretary Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. President Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. Author, Lecturer, World Traveler. CHAPTER IX CHRISTIANITY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ROBERT E. SPEER SOME time ago an old friend, Professor Lang, of the University of Alabama, told me a curious incident of which he had been a witness. It occurred in the city of Edinburgh, in the winter of 1909, when Professor Lang I was there taking postgraduate work in the university. One day, he said, he noticed on one of the billboards of the university the advertisement of a lecture which was to be delivered that evening in McEwen Hall, the great hall of the university, by Mr. Arthur Balfour, as he was then, on the subject, "The Moral Values Which Unite the Nations." Professor Lang said that of course he was not going to miss such an opportunity, and as early as possible he went around to the hall and got a seat in the front row of the first balcony. In the moments before the lecture began, he looked about over the audience and saw sitting immediately opposite him on the front row of the balcony on the other side a Japanese student, whom he recognized as also engaged in graduate work in the university. Mr. Balfour was introduced in due time and went through with his lecture. It was just such a masterly presentation as anyone would have anticipated from that speaker of the different ties that bind together the peoples of the world, common knowledge, common commercial interests, the intercourse of diplomatic relationship, and the bonds of human friendship. The speaker sat down amid a great outburst of applause. After the applause had died down, in the moment of silence when, after the Scotch fashion, the presiding officer had arisen to make his own little address of appreciation, Professor Lang said he saw this Japanese student stand up and lean over the balcony. Before the chairman could open his lips, the Japanese student had spoken. "But, Mr. Balfour," said he, "what about Jesus Christ?" Professor Lang said that one could have heard a pin drop in the hall. Everybody felt at once the justice of the rebuke. The leading statesman of the greatest Christian empire in the world had been dealing with the different ties that are to unite mankind and had omitted the one fundamental and essential bond. And everyone felt, too, the dramatic element in the situation, that the reminder of his forgetfulness had come to him from a Japanese student from a far-away non-Christian land. "But, Mr. Balfour, what about Jesus Christ?' Now we are to answer the Japanese student's question. There is one great affirmation of St. Paul, which, in the field of thought with which Mr. Balfour was dealing. "The head of every man is Christ." In other words, the solution of the international problem is just the same as the solution of every problem, nothing else than Jesus Christ. In St. Paul's great declaration, it seems to me we get right to the heart of the issue. Here he is setting forth the principle of human unity and the necessity to mankind of the instrumentalities through which its common life is to be expressed and by which its common work is to be done. He sets himself, of course, over against great and common opinions that govern the thought of many men in our day. We have been living for a good many years now under a conception of mechanistic nationalism, to which the idea of human unity is a very strange and alien thing, and as that rather hard and barren conception has been somewhat broken up in these last few years, it has been replaced by an equally noxious idea that applies the old evolutionary conceptions to human life in their very crudest form and conceives the history of the world to-day to be what it is alleged it has ever been, just one long, bitter jungle struggle for the survival of the fittest among the nations and the races and one unending conflict and rivalry among the environs for dominance and supremacy. Of course, one cannot reconcile these theories with the actual facts of life, for there is no such struggle as this between the races and peoples, and there is no such bitter jungle rivalry as this dominating the spirit of mankind. It is good to offer against these notions that have control of modern, practical international politics, the far richer and truer conception of St. Paul. Little by little, we are making our way into the heart of that conception. We are beginning to realize the economic solidarity of mankind, that there is no such thing as a conflicting economic interest among the nations that does not mean in the end some common loss. We realize now that no nation permanently can gain if other nations permanently have to suffer as the compensation for its gain, that human trade must be balanced and compensatory, that we cannot make money out of other nations endlessly unless they make money also and equally out of us, that we are all bound together in one great economic body. I remember how vividly the apprehension of this |