Introduction

A “best-seller” in late nineteenth century America began as a promotional and fundraising piece for a national Protestant agency. In the early 1880s the American Home Missionary Society asked its representative in Ohio to “lay before the intelligent Christian people of our country facts and arguments, showing the imperative need of Home Missionary work for the evangelization of the land.”[1] Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis was published in 1885 and eventually became one of the most popular books to appear in print since Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Today, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains in print and continues to interest students of American literature, while Our Country has been largely forgotten. Josiah Strong's work often strikes some contemporary readers as an embarrassing relic out of a bygone era. In a time when the shorthand phrase, WASP, has become a derisive term, it is hard to understand another time and mood – not many years ago, as a matter of fact – in which Protestant leaders urged Anglo-Saxon Americans to embrace their destiny. Strong was foremost among those in his generation who issued that call to responsibility. Let us christianize this country, they proclaimed, so that America could fulfill its destiny by christianizing the world. That message speaks of a world long ago and far away from our country in the early twenty-first century.

Yet it is still important to study Our Country. It represents a halfway point in the story unfolding in this anthology. In the following reading one can discern strands of thought that stretch back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and other themes that anticipate fashions in Protestant understanding of giving well into the middle decades of the twentieth century. 

Resource 4.10, “Money and the Kingdom,” was the climatic chapter of Our Country. It came after Strong had delineated the seven “perils” facing America –“immigration,” “Romanism,” “Mormonism,” “intemperance,” “socialism,” “wealth” and the “cities.” The way forward was clear. There was never any doubt in his mind about the end in sight or the means of reaching that goal. There was, in fact, only one problem. The Protestant strategy of “evangelization” would overcome the seven plagues if there were sufficient funds to recruit, feed and support an army of modern missionaries to America. That big “if” brought him to his last chapter and the biggest challenge of all–the creation of a vision of giving adequate to this crisis. 

The echoes of the past can be heard in “Money and the Kingdom.” His argument, for instance, immediately reminds one of Lyman Beecher 1827 sermon. Whether or not Strong ever read Beecher's sermon is, for the moment at least, irrelevant. What matters is the striking convergence of their appeals. Both portrayed America as living through a great moment of decision. Both believed that what happens in our country shapes the destiny of the world. And both were confident that America was on the edge of history's greatest opportunity. But “this great national crisis and world emergency” is now, not tomorrow.

The common themes of millennial expectations and America's distinctiveness as a nation provided an extraordinary context in givers confronted the greatest opportunity any generation has ever known for shaping the course of history. Like Abel Stevens, Strong believed that nineteenth century Christians were privileged to be living through the third and perhaps greatest of all the reformations – the dawning of an age of unprecedented philanthropy.

Most important, he shared with most of his predecessors a staunch conviction about the relation between vision and money. Without offering a vision of the future, so he believed, Protestant leaders could not hope to raise money. It was no accident, therefore, that the title of this chapter was “Money and the Kingdom.”

Just as Strong's rhetoric contained echoes of the past, so it also suggested the shape of an argument for giving that would dominate the Protestant literature for decades to come. Though only mentioned once, the notion of stewardship or its equivalent – the steward as the “trustee,” the “manager” – is right at the center of this document. All that the steward possesses belongs to the Lord – not just a tenth. In such a “radical” doctrine of property, God is the “owner” and we are only tenants. The themes about God as “owner” and humankind as “tenants,” repeated endlessly in the sixty years after the publication of Our Country, also figured prominently in Protestant teachings about giving well into the first half of the twentieth century. 

Josiah Strong (1847-1916) lived far enough into the twentieth century to see some of these motifs become deeply implanted in the teachings of every major Protestant denomination. Shortly after the publication of Our Country, he became secretary of the American Evangelical Alliance, a post that gave him a “bully pulpit” for twelve years. Throughout the rest of his career he proved to be one of the more popular speakers and writers about Social Gospel issues. Though a prominent leader in his later years, he never quite duplicated the astonishing success that he enjoyed in writing his first book and one of the most popular books out of late nineteenth century Protestantism – Our Country.

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Source: Selections from Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Bible House for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885).

Money and the Kingdom

Property is one of the cardinal facts of our civilization. It is the great object of endeavor, the great spring of power, the great occasion of discontent, and one of the great sources of danger. For Christians to apprehend their true relations to money, and the relations of money to the kingdom of Christ and its progress in the world, is to find the key to many of the great problems now pressing for solution.

Money is power in the concrete. It commands learning, skill, experience, wisdom, talent, influence, and numbers. It represents the school, the college, the church, the printing press, and all evangelizing machinery. It confers on the wise man a sort of omnipresence. By means of it, the same man may, at the same moment, be founding an academy among the Mormons, teaching the New Mexicans, building a home missionary church in Dakota, translating the Scriptures in Africa, preaching the gospel in China, and uttering the precepts of ten thousand Bibles in India. It is the modern miracle worker; it has a wonderful multiplying and transforming power. Sarah Hosmer, of Lowell, though a poor woman, supported a student in the Nestorian Seminary, who became a preacher of Christ. Five times she gave fifty dollars, earning the money in a factory, and sent out five native pastors to Christian work. When more than sixty years old, she longed to furnish Nestoria with one more preacher of Christ; and, living in an attic, she took in sewing until she had accomplished her cherished purpose. In the hands of this consecrated woman, money transformed the factory girl and the seamstress into a missionary of the Cross, and then multiplied her six-fold. God forbid that I should attribute to money power which belongs only to faith, love, and the Holy Spirit. In the problem of Christian work, money is like the cipher, worthless alone, but multiplying many fold the value and effectiveness of other factors.

In the preceding chapter has been set forth the wonderful opportunity enjoyed by this generation in the United States. It lays on us a commensurate obligation. We have also seen (Chap. IX) that our wealth is stupendous. If our responsibility is without a precedent, the plenitude of our power is likewise without a parallel. Is not the lesson which God would have us learn so plain that he who runs may read it? Has not God given us this matchless power that it may be applied to doing this matchless work?

The kingdoms of this world will not have become the kingdoms of our Lord until the money power has been Christianized. “Talent has been Christianized already on a large scale. The political power of states and kingdoms has been long assumed to be, and now at least really is, as far as it becomes their accepted office to maintain personal security and liberty. Architecture, arts, constitutions, schools, and learning have been largely Christianized. But the money power, which is one of the most operative and grandest of all, is only beginning to be; though with promising tokens of a finally complete reduction to Christ and the uses of His Kingdom. . .. That day, when it comes, is the morning, so to speak, of the new creation.” [Horace Bushnell–“Sermons on Living Subjects”] Is it not time for that day to dawn? If we would Christianize our Anglo-Saxon civilization, which is to spread itself over the earth, has not the hour come for the church to teach and live the doctrines of God's Word touching possessions? Their general acceptance on the part of the church would involve a reformation scarcely less important in its results than the great reformation of the sixteenth century. What is needed is not simply an increased giving, an enlarged estimate of the “Lord's share,” but a radically different conception, of our relations to our possessions. Most Christian men need to discover that they are not proprietors, apportioning their own, but simply trustees or managers of God's property. All Christians would admit that there is a sense in which their all belongs to God, but deem it a very poetical sense, wholly unpractical and practically unreal. The great majority treat their possessions exactly as they would treat property, use their substance exactly as if it were their own.

Christians generally hold that God has a thoroughly real claim on some portion of their income, possibly a tenth, more likely no definite proportion; but some small part, they acknowledge, belongs to him, and they hold themselves in duty bound to use it for him. This low and unchristian view has sprung apparently from a misconception of the Old Testament doctrine of tithes. God did not, for the surrender of a part, renounce all claims to the remainder. The Jew was taught, in language most explicit and oft repeated, that he and all he had belonged absolutely to God. “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lords, thy God, and the earth also, with all that therein is.” (Deut. 10:14). “The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” (Ps. 25:1). “The silver is mine and the gold is mine, saith the Lord.” (Hag. 2:8). “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine.” (Ezek. 18:4). When the priest was consecrated, the blood of the ram was put upon the right ear, the thumb of the right hand, and the great toe of the right foot, to indicate that he should come and go, use his hands and powers of mind, in short, his entire self, in the service of God. These parts of the body were selected as representative of the whole man. The tithe was likewise representative. “For, if the first fruit be holy, the lump is also holy.” (Rom. 11:16) Tithes were devoted to certain uses, specified by God, in recognition of the fact that all belonged to him.

The Principle Stated

God's claim to the whole rests on exactly the same ground as his claim to a part. As the Creator, he must have an absolute ownership in all his creatures; and, if an absolute claim could be strengthened, it would be by the fact that he who gave us life sustains it, and with his own life redeemed it. “Ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price.” (1Cor. 6:19-20). Manifestly, if God has absolute ownership in us, we can have absolute ownership in nothing whatever. If we cannot lay claim to our own selves, how much less to that which we find in our hands. When we say that no man is the absolute owner of property to the value of one penny, we do not take the socialistic position that private property is theft. Because of our individual trusts, for which we are held personally responsible, we have individual rights touching property, and may have claims one against another; but, between God and the soul, the distinction of thine and mine is a snare. Does one-tenth belong to God? Then ten-tenths are his. He did not one-tenth create us and we nine-tenths create ourselves. He did not one-tenth redeem us and we nine-tenths redeem ourselves. If his claim to a part is good, his claim to the whole is equally good. His ownership in us is no joint affair. We are not in partnership with him. All that we are and have is utterly his, and his only.

When the Scriptures and reason speak of God's ownership in us they use the word in no accommodated sense. It means all that it can mean in a court of law. It means that God has a right to the service of his own. It means that, since our possessions are his property, they should be used in his service – not a fraction of them, but the whole. When the lord returned from the far country, to reckon with his servants to whom he had entrusted his goods, he demanded not simply a small portion of the increase, but held his servants accountable for both principal and interest – “mine own with usury.” Every dollar that belongs to God must serve him. And it is not enough that we make a good use of our means. We are under exactly the same obligations to make the best use of our money that we are to make a good use of it; and to make any use of it other than the best is a maladministration of trust. Here, then, is the principle always applicable, that of our entire possessions every dollar, every cent, is to be employed in the way that will best honor God.

The Principle Applied

The statement of this principle at once suggests difficulties in its application. Let us glance at some of them.

1. An attempt to regulate personal expenditures by this principle affords opportunity for fanaticism on the one hand and for self-deception on the other; but an honest and intelligent application of it will avoid both.

Surely, it is right to supply our necessities. But what are necessities? Advancing civilization multiplies them. Friction matches were a luxury once, a necessity now. And may we allow ourselves nothing for the comforts and luxuries of life? Where shall we draw the line between justifiable and unjustifiable expenditure?

The Christian has given himself to God, or, rather, has recognized and accepted the divine ownership in him. He is under obligations to apply every power, whether of mind, body, or possessions, to God's service. He is bound to make that service as effective as possible. Certain expenditures upon himself are necessary to his highest growth and greatest usefulness, and are, therefore, not only permissible, but obligatory. All the money which will yield a larger return of usefulness in the world, of greater good to the kingdom, by being spent on ourselves or families than by being applied otherwise, is used for the glory of God, and is better spent than it would have been if given to missions. And whatever money is spent on self that would have yielded larger returns of usefulness, if applied otherwise, is misapplied; and, if it has been done intelligently, it is a case of embezzlement.

A narrow view at this point is likely to lead us into fanaticism. We must look at life in its wide relations, and remember that character is its supreme end. Character is the one thing in the universe, so far as we know, which is of absolute worth, and therefore beyond all price. The glory of the Infinite is all of it the glory of character. Every expenditure which serves to broaden and beautify and upbuild character is worthy. The one question ever to be kept in mind is whether it is the wisest application of means to the desired end. Will this particular application of power in money produce the largest results in character?

But what of the beautiful? How far may we gratify our love of it? A delicate and difficult question to answer, especially to the satisfaction of those living in the midst of a luxurious civilization. Our guiding principle holds here as everywhere, only its application is difficult. It is difficult to determine how useful the beautiful may be. Doubtless, at times, as Victor Hugo has said, “The beautiful is as useful as the useful; perhaps more so.” The mystery of art widens with the increasing refinement of the nervous organization. There are those to whom the beautiful is, in an important sense, a necessity. Yes; God loves the beautiful, and intended we should love it; but he does not have to economize his power; his resources are not limited. When he spreads the splendors of the rising East, it is not at the cost of bread enough to feed ten thousand starving souls. Art has an educational value in our homes and schools and parks and galleries; but how far may one who recognizes his Christian stewardship conscientiously go in the encouragement of art and the gratification of taste? If every man did his duty, gave according to ability, there would be abundant provision for all Christian and philanthropic work and substance left for the patronage of art. But not one man in a hundred is doing his duty; hence those who appreciate the necessities of Christian work must fill the breach, are not at liberty to make expenditures which would otherwise be wholly justifiable. Many expenditures are right abstractly considered. That is, would be right in an ideal condition of society. But the condition of the world is not ideal; we are surrounded by circumstances which must be recognized exactly as they are. Sin is abnormal, the world is out of joint; and such facts lay on us obligations which would not otherwise exist, make sacrifices necessary which would not otherwise be binding, forbid the gratification of tastes which are natural, and might otherwise be indulged. Thrice true is this of us who live in this great national crisis and world emergency. It is well to play the violin, but not when Rome is burning.

Here is a large family of which the husband and father is a contemptible lounger (if loafers had any appreciation of the eternal fitness of things, they would die); he does simply nothing for the support of the family. Exceptional cares are, therefore, laid on the wife and mother. She must expend all her time and strength to secure the bare necessaries of life for her children; and with the utmost sacrifice on her part they go hungry and cold. If her wretched husband did his duty, she could command time and means to beautify the home and make the dress of herself and children attractive; but, under the circumstances, it would be worse than foolish for her to spend her scant earnings on vases and flowers, laces and velvets. God has laid upon Christian nations the work of evangelizing the heathen world. He has laid on us the duty of Christianizing our own heathen, and under such conditions that the obligation presses with an overwhelming urgency. If this duty were accepted by all Christians, the burden world rest lightly upon each; but great multitudes in the church are shirking all responsibility. So far as the work of missions is concerned, these members of the household of faith are loungers. The unfaithful many throw unnatural burdens on the faithful few. Under these circumstances he who would be faithful must accept sacrifices which would not otherwise be his duty. That is, the principle always and everywhere applicable, that we are under obligations to make the wisest use of every penny, binds him to use of his means which, if every Christian did his duty, would not be necessary.  Notwithstanding all the sacrifices made by some, there are vast multitudes, which the established channels of beneficence have placed within our reach, who are starving for the bread of life. As long as this is true, must not high uses of money yield to the highest? It is not enough to be sure that we are making a good use of means; for, as the Germans said, the good is a great enemy of the best. The expenditure of a large sum on a work of art may be a good use of the money, but can any one not purblind with selfishness fail to see that, when a thousand dollars actually represents the salvation of a certain number of souls, there are higher uses for the money?

3. One who believes that every dollar belongs to God, and is to be used for him, will not imagine that he has discharged all obligation by “giving a tenth to the Lord.”  One who talks about the “Lord's tenth,” probably thinks about “his own” nine-tenths. The question is not what proportion belongs to God? But, having given all to him, what proportion will best honor him by being applied to the uses of myself and family, and what proportion will best honor him by being applied to benevolent uses? Because necessities differ this proportion will differ. One man has a small income and a large family; another has a large income and no family at all. Manifestly the proportion which will best honor God by being applied to benevolence is much larger in the one case than in the other. God, therefore, requires a different proportion to be thus applied in the two cases. If men's needs varied directly as their incomes, it might, perhaps, be practicable and reasonable to fix on some definite proportion as due from all to Christian and benevolent work. But, while men's wants are quite apt to grow with their income, their needs do not. A man whose income is five hundred dollars may have the same needs as his neighbor whose income is fifty thousand.

There are multitudes in the land who, after having given one-tenth of their increase, might fare sumptuously every day, gratify every whim, and live with the most lavish expenditure. Would that fulfill the law of Christ, “If any man will come after me let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me”?

There is always a tendency to substitute form for spirit, rules for principles. It is so much easier to conform the conduct to a rule than to make a principle inform the whole life. Moses prescribed rules; Christ inculcated principles–rules for children, principles for men.

The law of tithes was given when the race was in its childhood, and the relations of money to the kingdom of God were radically different from what they are now. The Israelite was not held responsible for the conversion of the world. Money had no such spiritual equivalents then as now; it did not represent the salvation of the heathen. The Jew was required simply to make provision for his own worship; and its limited demands might appropriately be met by levying upon a certain proportion of his increase. Palestine was his world and his kindred the race; but, under the Christian dispensation, the world is our country, and the race our kindred. The needs of the world today are boundless; hence, every man's obligation to supply that need is the full measure of his ability; not one-tenth, or any other fraction of it. And no one exercises that full measure until he has sacrificed.

By all means let there be system. It is as valuable in giving as in anything else. Proportionate giving to benevolence is both reasonable and scriptural – “as God hath prospered.” It is well to fix on some proportion of income, less than which we will not give, and then bring expenses within the limit thus laid down. But when this proportion has been given – be it a tenth, or fifth, or half – it does not follow necessarily that duty has been fully done. There can be found in rules no substitute for an honest purpose and a consecrated heart.

4. The principle that every dollar is to be used in the way that will best honor God is as applicable to capital as to increase or income, and in many cases requires that a portion of capital be applied directly to benevolent uses. “But,” says one, “I must not give of my capital, because that would impair my ability to give in the future. I must not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” The objection is of weight, especially in ordinary times; but these are times wholly extraordinary; this is the world's emergency. It may be quite true that giving one dollar now out of your capital would prevent your giving five dollars fifteen years hence. But it should be remembered that, for home missionary work, one dollar now is worth ten dollars fifteen years later. This saying has become proverbial among the home missionaries of the West.

Money, like corn, has a twofold power – that of ministering to want and that of reproduction. If there were a famine in the land, no matter how sore it might be, it would be folly to grind up all the seed-corn for food. But, on the other hand, suppose, in the midst of the famine, after feeding their families and doling out a handful in charity, the farmers put all the increase back into the ground, and do it year after year, while the world is starving. That would be something worse than foolish. It would be criminal. Yet that is what multitudes of men are doing. Instead of applying the power in money to the end for which it was entrusted to them, they use it almost wholly to accumulate more power. A miller might as well spend his life building his dam high and higher, and never turn the water to his wheel. Bishop Butler said to his secretary: “I should be ashamed of myself, if I could leave ten thousand pounds behind me.” Many professed Christians die disgracefully and “wickedly rich.” The shame and sin, however, lie not in the fact that the power was gathered, but that it was unwielded.

It is the duty of some men to make a great deal of money. God has given to them the money-making talent; and it is as wrong to bury that talent as to bury a talent for preaching. It is every man's duty to wield the widest possible power for righteousness; and the power in money must be gained before it can be used. But let a man beware! This power in money is something awful. It is more dangerous than dynamite. The victims of “saint-seducing gold” are numberless. If a Christian grows rich, it should be with fear and trembling, lest the “deceitfulness of riches” undo him; for Christ spoke of the salvation of a rich man as something miraculous (Luke 18:24-27).

Let no man deceive himself by saying: “I will give when I have amassed wealth. I desire money that I may do good with it; but I will not give now, that I may give the more largely in the future.” That is the pit in which many have perished. If a man is growing large in wealth, nothing but constant and generous giving can save him from growing small in soul. In determining the amount of his gifts and the question whether he should impair his capital, or to what extent, a man should never lose sight of a distinct and intelligent aim to do the greatest possible good in a lifetime. Each must decide for himself what is the wisest, the highest, use of money; and we need often to remind ourselves of the constant tendency of human nature to selfishness and self-deception.

Is it not evident that most of our church-members have failed to learn the first principles of Christian giving? And many who give most largely do not seem to have grasped fully the idea of stewardship, and to hold themselves under obligations to use every dollar in the way that will most honor God. A wealthy clergyman (!), who was a munificent giver saw, in Paris, a pin that struck his fancy, and gave $800 for it. If, in the wide world, he could find no higher use for the money, it was his duty to spend it as he did. Many give largely, and spend as lavishly on themselves; nor is it strange, in view of the instructions often given. A pastor, whose fame is in all the churches, and justly, writes: “I say not, indeed, that it is wrong for a man to take such a position in society as his riches warrant him to assume, or that there is sin in spending money on our residences, or in surrounding ourselves with the treasures of human wisdom in books, or the triumphs of human art in pictures and statuary; but I do say that our gifts to the cause of God ought to be at least abreast of our expenditure for these other things.” And a worthy secretary of one of our most honored benevolent societies says: “He shall see the travail of his soul and be satisfied – When? Not till beneficence keeps pace with luxury.” Will that satisfy him who commended her that cast into the treasury all her living, who requires of his followers daily cross-bearing, and admits no one to discipleship who has not forsaken “all that he hath”? Is the Master satisfied when a rich man, to gratify “a nice and curious palate,” spends ten thousand a year on his table, provided only beneficence keeps pace with his luxury, and he gives as much more to missions? Or, is it untrue that God requires every one to make the wisest and best use of all his money?

Many churches are never taught that the consecration of all our property to God is no more optional than the practice of justice or chastity or any other duty. Most Christians leave their giving to mere impulse; they give something or nothing, much or little, as they feel like it. They might as well attempt to live a Christian life and be honest or not, as they felt like it. The churches are not adequately instructed as to this duty. They hear too often of the “Lord's share.” The reformation must begin with the pulpit. While I would not seem censorious of my brethren, it must nevertheless be said that too many ministers have not laid hold of this truth, or, at least, it has not laid hold of them.

No, there is no lack of wealth in the churches, even in hard times. When the rod of conviction and consecration smites the flinty rock of selfishness, it will break asunder and send forth abundant streams of benefaction, which shall make glad the waste places and prove the water of life to the perishing multitudes.

Source:  Selections from Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Bible House for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885).

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[1] Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: the American Home Missionary Society, 1885), p. ii.