First Noble Lecture Yesterday

Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall, D.D., h.'97, president of the Union Theological Seminary of New York, delivered the first of the William Belden Noble lectures last night on the subject of "Jesus Christ and World Sympathy."

Looking at the problem of the cultivation of world sympathy from the stand-point of a widely travelled and broadly sympathetic man like Phillips Brooks, the lecturer endeavored to point out the causes which, in modern society, tend towards and against such sympathy. "How simple it all growes as we grow older," wrote Mr. Brooks after his return from India, when his incomparable experience had finally fallen into place in the perspective of his religious thinking. "The whole of what we personally have to live and what we go out to preach is sympathy to Christ. To grow better and stronger ourselves is merely to draw nearer to Him."

But the great question is, Dr. Hall said, how can we train ourselves to adjust our sympathies and affections to the religions of alien races? Lack of knowledge, he explained, is the direct cause of localization of thought. The indifference of minds, completely absorbed in the abnormal provincialism of their own opinions is as likely to do harm as good in its charity. Such an attitude is a contradiction to the Christ in whom we pretend to believe. And the sectarian religious hatred which may follow from this is the most ugly ghost in human history.

Although the self-interest, the culture, and the social ethics of modern times are causes of the partial disappearance of brutal religious persecution, the equally powerful counter forces--passive curiosity, and contemptuous interest--are frequently met with. The former, attitude, characteristic of blase travellers in pursuit of novel experiences, is directly opposite to the spirit of the traveller St. Paul, whose benevolent sympathy yearned for the enlightenment of his brothers. The latter spirit is often found in missionaries who adopt a fashionable contempt, often disparaging and villifying the people whom they are pretending to raise. It is their narrow mindedness which causes them to apply to foreign religions the comparatively local and conventional standards of the West. We will find that in many cases the Oriental secretiveness so often complained of by our missionaries is the result of the latters' religious snobbishness. Such people should recall the utter lack of religious or political bitterness in the attitude of Christ, who believed that a passionate love of the world at large need not lessen one's love for the world at home.