400 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 



of the phrase. The leader gets as well as gives. He cannot be 

 put in a separate category as a thing apart, as if he were a peculiar 

 creation, unrelated to the past and independent of the present. 

 No man could affect his age if he were not in the fullest sense the 

 fruit of the age, entering into its thought, knowing its problems, 

 feeling the pulse of its life. The great world-movements do not 

 owe their origin to one man's thought, like Minerva sprung full- 

 grown from the brain of Jove. They grow from the needs of the 

 time, the slowly gathering vital forces that must find outlet. The 

 Reformation, for example, was greater than the reformers, greater 

 than Luther, or Calvin, or Knox. In its political aspect it was the 

 breaking of bonds in Western Europe that had become intolerable. 

 In its inner aspect it was the movement of the soul of man towards 

 liberty of mind and conscience, towards a fuller knowledge, a 

 truer faith, a purer worship. But the acknowledged truth of all 

 this gives us no warrant for imagining that we have explained the 

 great man by calling him the creature of his time. If he brought 

 no free and individual force to the situation, the situation would 

 only be where it was. Granted that the Reformation would have 

 been without Luther, there would need to be some other sort of 

 Luther somewhere else, or, if you prefer it, some score of pigmy 

 Luthers to do his work. There could be no Reformation without 

 at least some kind of reformers. 



This modern tendency to ascribe historical events to vague 

 causes as opposed to personal influence needs to be checked by 

 the absolute truth that nothing has ever been or can ever be 

 accomplished in the way of progress without a distinct and definite 

 personal agency. As Dr. Harnack, the great church historian, 

 whose presence at this Congress gives even such a gathering dis- 

 tinction, says, " History tells us that no aspiration and no progress 

 have ever existed without the miraculous exertion of an individual 

 will, of a person. It was not what the person said that was new 

 and strange - - he came when the time was fulfilled and spoke what 

 the time required -- but how he said it; how it became in him 

 the strength and power of a new life; how he transmitted it to 

 his disciples. That was his secret, and that was what was new in 

 him." l 



It is a foolish way to treat history as if it were in a vacuum, the 

 whirl of impersonal forces without father or mother or any definite 

 connection. We have gotten so scientific to-day with our tenden- 

 cies and streams of influence and movements of thought, though it 

 is not easy to see how there can be spiritual tendencies without 

 spiritual beings, and moral influence without moral life, and move- 

 ments of thought without thinkers. As if there were in the world 



1 Christianity and History, p. 35. 



