02.03. The Gospel and Social Progress

LECTURE III THE GOSPEL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS OUR last lecture started with the propo sition that the dominant influence in the intellectual and practical activity of the modern age is man s scientific mas tery over life. This present lecture consid ers one of the consequences of this primary fact: namely, the humanitarian desire to take advantage of this scientific control of life so to change social conditions that man kind may be relieved from crushing handi caps which now oppress it. For the growth of scientific knowledge and control has been coincident with a growth of humanitarian sentiment. This movement for human re lief and social reform, in the midst of which we live, is one of the chief influences of our time. It has claimed the allegiance of many of the noblest folk among us. Its idealism, its call to sacrifice, the concreteness of the tasks which it undertakes and of the gains which it achieves, have attracted alike the fine spirits and the practical abilities of our generation. What attitude shall the Chris tian Church take toward this challenging en deavour to save society? How shall she re gard this passionate belief in the possibility of social betterment and this enthusiastic determination to achieve it? The question is one of crucial importance and the Church is far from united on its answer. Some Christians claim the w r hole movement as the child of the Church, born of her spirit and expressing her central purpose ; others dis claim the whole movement as evil and teach that the world must grow increasingly worse until some divine cataclysm shall bring its hopeless corruption to an end; others treat the movement as useful but of minor import, while they try to save men by belief in dogmatic creeds or by carefully engineered emotional experiences. Mean while, no words can exaggerate the fidelity, the vigour, the hopefulness, and the ele vated spirit with which many of our best young men and women throw themselves into this campaign for better conditions of living. Surely, the intelligent portion of the Church would better think as clearly as pos sible about a matter of such crucial import. At first sight, the devotee of social Chris tianity is inclined impatiently to brush aside as mere ignorant bigotry on the Church s part all cautious suspicion of the social movement. But there is one real difficulty which the thoughtful Christian must per ceive when he compares the characteristic approach to the human problem made by the social campaign, on the one side, and by religion, on the other. Much of the mod ern social movement seems to proceed upon the supposition that we can save mankind by the manipulation of outward circum stance. There are societies to change every thing that can be changed and, because the most obvious and easy subjects of trans formation are the external arrangements of human life, men set themselves first and chiefly to change those. We are always trying to improve the play by shifting the scenery. But no person of insight ever be lieved that the manipulation of circumstance alone can solve man s problems. Said Emer son, " No change of circumstances can re pair a defect of character." Said Herbert Spencer, " No philosopher s stone of a con stitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts." Said James Anthony Froude, " Human improvement is from within outwards." Said Carlyle, " Fool ! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of." Said Mrs. Browning:

" It takes a soul, To move a body : it takes a high-souled man To move the masses even to a cleaner stye :

Ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within."

Now, religion s characteristic approach to the human problem is represented by this conviction that " life develops from within." So far from expecting to save mankind by the manipulation of outward circumstance, it habitually has treated outward circum stance as of inferior moment in comparison with the inner attitudes and resources of the spirit. Economic affluence, for exam ple, has not seemed to Christianity in any of its historic forms indispensable to man s well-being; rather, economic affluence has been regarded as a danger to be escaped or else to be resolutely handled as one would handle fire useful if well managed but des perately perilous if uncontrolled. Nor can it be said that Christianity has consistently maintained this attitude without having in actual experience much ground for holding it. The possession of economic comfort has never yet guaranteed a decent life, much less a spiritually satisfactory one. The morals of Fifth Avenue are not such that it can look down on Third Avenue, nor is it pos sible anywhere to discern gradation of char acter on the basis of relative economic standing. It is undoubtedly true that folks and families often have their moral stamina weakened and their personalities debauched by sinking into discouraging poverty, but it is an open question whether more folks and families have not lost their souls by rising into wealth. Still, after all these centuries, the " rich fool," with his overflowing barns and his soul that sought to feed itself on corn, is a familiar figure; still it is as easy for a camel to go through a needle s eye as for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When, therefore, the Christian, approaching the human problem, not from without in, but from within out, runs upon this modern social movement endeavour ing to save mankind by the manipulation of outward circumstance, his cautious and qualified consent may be neither so igno rant nor so unreasonable as it at first appears. As an example of manipulated circum stance in which we are asked to trust, con sider the new international arrangements upon which the world leans so heavily for its hopes of peace. Surely, he would be a poor Christian who did not rejoice in every reasonable expectation which new forms of co-operative organization can fulfil. But he would be a thoughtless Christian, too, if he did not see that all good forms of interna tional organization are trellises to give the vines of human relationship a fairer chance to grow; but if the vines themselves main tain their old acid quality, bringing out of their own inward nature from roots of bit terness grapes that set the people s teeth on edge, then no external trellises will solve the problem. It is this Christian approach to life, from within out, which causes the common misunderstanding between the social movement and the Church. The first thinks mainly of the importance of the trellis; the second thinks chiefly about the quality of the vine. The more deep and transforming a man s own religious experience has been, the more he will insist upon the importance of this in ward approach. Here is a man who has had a profound evangelical experience. He has gone down into the valley of the shadow with a deep sense of spiritual need; he has found in Christ a Saviour who has lifted him up into spiritual freedom and victory; he has gone out to live with a sense of unpay able indebtedness to him. He has had, in a word, a typical religious experience at its best with three elements at the heart of it: a great need, a great salvation, a great grati tude. When such a man considers the mod ern social movement, however beautiful its spirit or admirable its concrete gains, it seems to him superficial if it presents itself as a panacea. It does not go deep enough to reach the soul s real problems. The continual misunderstanding between the Church and the social movement has, then, this explanation: the characteristic ap proach of the Christian Gospel to the human problem is from within out; the character istic approach of much of the modern social movement is from without in.

II

If, therefore, the Christian Gospel is go ing to be true to itself, it must carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social enthusiasms certain fundamental em phases which are characteristic of its genius.

It must stress the possibility and the neces sity of the inward transformation of the lives of men. We know now that a thorny cactus does not have to stay a thorny cactus; Burbank can change it. We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree; it can be grafted and become an astrakhan. We know that a malarial swamp does not have to stay a ma larial swamp; it can be drained and become a health resort. We know that a desert does not have to stay a desert; it can be irrigated and become a garden. But while all these possibilities of transformation are opening up in the world outside of us, the most important in the series concerns the world within us. The primary question is whether human nature is thus transform able, so that men can be turned about, hat ing what formerly they loved and loving what once they hated. Said Tolstoy, whose early life had been confessedly vile: "Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the doctrine of Jesus, and my whole life underwent a sudden transformation. What I had once wished for I wished for no longer, and I began to desire w r hat I had never desired before. What had once ap peared to me right now became wrong, and the wrong of the past I beheld as right." * So indispensable to the welfare of the world is this experience, that we Christians need to break loose from our too narrow conceptions of it and to set it in a large horizon. We have been too often tempted to make of conversion a routine emotional experience. Even Jonathan Edwards was worried about himself in this regard. He wrote once in his diary: "The chief thing that now makes me in any measure question my good estate is my not having experi enced conversion in those particular steps wherein the people of New England, and anciently the dissenters of old England, used to experience it." Poor Jonathan ! How many have been so distraught ! But the supreme folly of any man s spiritual life is to try thus to run himself into the mold of any other man s experience. There is no regular routine in spiritual transformation. Some men come in on a high tide of feeling, like Billy Bray, the drunken miner, who, re leased from his debasing slavery and reborn into a vigorous life, cried, " If they were to put me into a barrel I would shout glory out through the bunghole! Praise the N. Tolstoi: My Religion, Introduction, p. ix.

Lord! " Some men come in like Bushnell, the New England scholar and preacher, who, when he was an unbelieving tutor at Yale, fell on his knees in the quiet of his study and said, " O God, I believe there is an eternal difference between right and wrong and I hereby give myself up to do the right and to refrain from the wrong." Some men break up into the new life suddenly like the Oxford graduate who, having lived a dis solute life until six years after his graduation from the university in 1880, picked up in his room one day Drummond s " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," and, lo! the light broke suddenly " I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty-four hours." Some come slowly, like old John Livingstone, who said, " I do not remember any particular time of conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up." Spiritual transformation is infinitely various because it is so infinitely vital; but behind all the special forms of experience stands the colos sal fact that men can be transformed by the Spirit of God. That this experience of inward enlight enment and transformation should ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as within. John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy of Spenser s poems. He never had known be fore what his life was meant to be. He found out that day. Like a voice from heaven his call came in the stately measures of Spenser s glorious verse. He knew that he was meant to be a poet. Upon this mas ter fact that men can be inwardly trans formed Christ laid his hand and put it at the very center of his gospel. All through the New Testament there is a throb of joy which, traced back, brings one to the assur ance that no man need stay the way he is. Among the gladdest, solemnest words in the records of our race are such passages in the New Testament as this: Fornicators, adul terers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revel ers, extortioners, such were some of you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. One cannot find in the New Testa ment anything stiff and stilted about this experience. Paul s change came suddenly; Peter s came slowly. They did not even have, as we have come to have, a settled word to describe the experience. Ask James what it is and, practical-minded man that he is, he calls it conversion being- turned around. Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old benighted con dition, he cries that it is like coming out of the darkness into a marvelous light. Ask Paul what it is and, with his love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like being dead and being raised again with a great resurrection. Ask John what it is and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is being born again. See the variety that comes from vitality no stiff methods, no stiff routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good news of an illuminating, liberating, trans forming experience that can make men new ! It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reforma tion because it is so indispensable to social reformation. Wherever a new social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one argument against the hope which always rises. You cannot do that men say human nature is against it; hu man nature has always acted another way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly. As one listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull mass that resists all transformation. The very man who says that may be an engineer. He may be speak ing in the next breath with high enthusiasm about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as goldenrod in a New England field. But while about physical nature he is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he thinks nothing can be done. From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal. It can be brutalized beneath the brutes ; it can rise into compan ionship with angels. Our primitive fore fathers, as our fairy tales still reveal, be lieved that men and women could be changed into anything into trees, rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites. One of the most prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these stories are a poetic portraiture of some thing which eternally is true. Men can be transformed. That is a basic fact, and it is one of the central emphases of the Christian Gospel. Of all days in which that emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are thinking about social reformation.

Ill

It is only a clear recognition of the crucial importance of man s inward transformation which can prepare us for a proper appreci ation of the social movement s meaning. For one point of contact between religion s approach to the human problem from within out and reformation s approach from with out in lies here: to change social environ ments which oppress and dwarf and defile the lives of men is one way of giving the transforming Spirit a fair chance to reach and redeem them. All too slowly does the truth lay hold upon the Church that our very personalities themselves are social products, that we are born out of society and live in it and are molded by it, that without society we should not be human at all, and that the influences which play upon our lives, whether redeeming or degrading, are socially mediated. A man who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human per sonalities and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family relationships, better health, better economic resources, better recre ations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the souls of men as he says he does. An illuminating illustration of this fact is to be seen in the expanding ideals of mis sionary work. When the missionaries first went to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one. They went out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic motive. They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits out of the wreck of a per ishing world; they were not thinking pri marily of building a kingdom of social right eousness in the earth. Consider, then, the fascinating story of the way the mission aries, whatever may have been the motives with which they started, have become social reformers. If the missionaries were to take the Gospel to the people, they had to get to the people. So they became the explorers of the world. It was the missionaries who opened up Asia and Africa. Was there ever a more stirring story of adventure than is given us in the life of David Livingstone? Then when the missionaries had reached the people to give them the Gospel, they had to give them the Bible. So they became the philologists and translators of the world. They built the lexicons and grammars. They translated the Bible into more than a hundred languages on the continent of Africa alone. Carey and his followers did the same for over a score of languages in India. The Bible to-day is available in over six hundred living languages. Everywhere this prodigious literary labour has been breaking dow r n the barriers of speech and thought between the peoples. If ever we do get a decent internationalism, how much of it \vill rest back upon this pioneer spade work of the missionaries, digging through the barricades of language that separate the minds of men ! When, then, the mission aries had books to give the people, the people had to learn to read. So the mis sionaries became educators, and wherever you find the church you find the school. But what is the use of educating people who do not understand how to be sanitary, who live in filth and disease and die needlessly, and how can you take away old supersti tions and not put new science in their places, or deprive the people of witch doctors without offering them substitutes? So the missionaries became physicians, and one of the most beneficent enterprises that history records is medical missions. What is the use, however, of helping people to get well when their economic condition is such, their standards of life so low, that they con tinue to fall sick again in spite of you? So the missionaries are becoming industrial re formers, agriculturalists, chemists, physi cists, engineers, rebuilding wherever they can the economic life and comfort of their people. The missionary cause itself has been compelled, whether it would or not, to grow socially-minded. As Dan Crawford says about the work in Africa : " Here, then, is Africa s challenge to its Missionaries. Will they allow a whole continent to live like beasts in such hovels, millions of negroes cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease? No doubt it is our diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul. But God s equilateral triangle of body, soul, and spirit must never be ignored. Is not the body wholly ensouled, and is not the soul wholly embodied? ... In other words, in Africa the only true fulfilling of your heav enly calling is the doing of earthly things in a heavenly manner." *

Indeed, if any one is tempted to espouse a narrowly individualistic gospel of regener ation, let him go to the Far East and take note of Buddhism. Buddhism in wide areas of its life is doing precisely what the indi vidualists recommend. It is a religion of personal comfort and redemption. It is not mastered by a vigorous hope of social refor mation. In many ways it is extraordinarily like medieval Christianity. Consider this definition of his religion that was given by one Buddhist teacher: "Religion," he said, " is a device to bring peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are." Condi tions as they are settle down in them; be comfortable about them; do not try to change them; let no prayer for the King dom of God on earth disturb them; and there seek for yourselves " peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are."

ID. Crawford : Thinking Black, pp. 444-445. And the Buddhist teacher added, " My re ligion is pure religion." But is there any such thing as really caring about the souls of men and not caring about social habits, moral conditions, popular recreations, eco nomic handicaps that in every way affect them? Of all deplorable and degenerate conceptions of religion can anything be worse than to think of it as a " device to bring peace of mind in the midst of con ditions as they are?" Yet one finds plenty of Church members in America whose idea of the " simple Gospel " comes perilously near that Buddhist s idea of " pure religion." The utter futility of endeavouring to care about the inward transformation of men s lives while not caring about their social en vironment is evident when one thinks of our international relationships and their recurrent issue in war. War surely cannot be thought of any longer as a school for virtue. We used to think it was. We half believed the German war party when they told us about the disciplinary value of their gigantic establishment, and when Lord Rob erts assured us that war was tonic for the souls of peoples we were inclined to think that he was right. When, in answer to our nation s call, our men went out to fight and all our people were bound up in a fellowship of devotion to a common cause, so stimu lated were we that we almost were con vinced that out of such an experience there might come a renaissance of spiritual qual ity and life. Is there anybody who can blind his eyes to the facts now? Every competent witness in Europe and America has had to say that we are on a far lower moral level than we were before the war. Crimes of sex, crimes of violence, have been unprecedented. Large areas of Europe are to-day in a chaos so complete that not one man in a thousand in America even dimly imagines it, with a break-down of all the normal, sustaining relationships and privi leges of civilized life, and with an accom panying collapse of character unprecedented in Christendom since the days of the Black Plague. If we are wise we will never again go down into hell expecting to come up with spirits redeemed. To be sure, there are many individuals of such moral stamina that they have come out of this experience personally the better, not the worse. There are people who would build into the fiber of their character any experience that earth could offer them. But if we are thinking of the moral stability and progress of mankind, surely there is nothing in the processes of war, as we have seen them, or the results of war, as they now lie about us, that would lead us to trust to them for help. War takes a splendid youth willing to serve the will of God in his gen eration before he falls on sleep and teaches him the skilful trick of twisting a bayonet into the abdomen of an enemy. War takes a loyal-spirited man who is not afraid of anything under heaven and teaches him to drop bombs on undefended towns, to kill perchance the baby suckled at her mother s breast. The father of one of our young men, back from France, finding that his son, like many others, would not talk, rebuked him for his silence. " Just one thing I will tell you," the son answered. " One night I was on patrol in No Man s Land, and sud denly I came face to face with a German about my own age. It was a question of his life or mine. We fought like wild beasts. When I came back that night I was covered from head to foot with the blood and brains of that German. We had nothing person ally against each other. He did not want to kill me any more than I wanted to kill him. That is war. I did my duty in it, but for God s sake do not ask me to talk about it ! I want to forget it." That is war, and no more damning influence can be thrown around the characters of people in general or around the victims of military discipline and experience in particular than that sup plied by war. How then could inconsistency be made more extreme than by saying that Christianity is concerned about the souls of men but is not concerned about in ternational good-will and co-operation? After all, the approaches to the human prob lem from without in and from within out are not antithetical, but supplementary. This tunnel must be dug from both ends and until the Church thoroughly grasps that fact she will lead an incomplete and ineffectual life.

IV The purposes of Christianity involve so cial reform, not only, as we have said, be cause we must accomplish environmental change if we are to achieve widespread in dividual transformation, but also because we must reorganize social life and the ideas that underlie it if we are to maintain and get adequately expressed the individual s Christian spirit when once he has been transformed. Granted a man with an in wardly remotived life, sincerely desirous of living Christianly, see what a situation faces him in the present organization of our eco nomic world! Selfishness consists in facing any human relationship with the main in tent of getting from it for oneself all the pleasure and profit that one can. There are folk who use their families so. They live like parasites on the beautiful institution of family life, getting as much as possible for as little as possible. There are folk who use the nation so. To them their country is a gigantic grab-bag from which their greedy hands may snatch civic security and com mercial gain. For such we have hard and bitter names. There is, however, one rela tionship business where we take for granted this very attitude which every where else we heartily condemn. Multi tudes of folk go up to that central human relationship with the frank and unabashed confession that their primary motive is to make out of it all that they can for them selves. They never have organized their motives around the idea that the major meaning of business is public service. The fact is, however, that all around us forms of business already have developed where we count it shame for a man to be chiefly motived by a desire for private gain.

If you thought that the preacher were in love with his purse more than with his Gos pel, you would not come again to hear him, and you would be right ; if you thought that the teacher of your children cared for pay day first and for teaching second, you would find another teacher for them tomorrow, and you ought to; if you thought that your physician cared more for his fees than he did for his patients, you would discharge him to-night and seek for a man more worthy of his high profession; if you had reason to suppose that the judges of the Supreme Court in Washington cared more for their salary than they did for justice, you could not easily measure your indignation and your shame. In the development of human life few things are nobler than the growth of the professional spirit, where in wide areas of enterprise, not private gain, but fine workmanship and public service have become the major motives. If one says that a sharp line of distinction is to be drawn between what we call professions and what we call business, he does not know history. Nursing, as a gainful calling, a hundred years ago was a mercenary affair into which undesirable people went for what they could get out of it. If nursing to-day is a great profession, where pride of work manship and love of service increasingly are in control, it is because Florence Nightin gale, and a noble company after her, have insisted that nursing essentially is service and that all nurses ought to organize their motives around that idea.

What is the essential difference between professions and business? Why should the building of a schoolhouse be a carnival of private profit for labourers and contractors alike, when the teaching in it is expected to be full of the love of fine workmanship and the joy of usefulness? Why, when a war is on, must the making of munitions here be a wild debauch of private profits, but the fir ing of them " over there " be a matter of self-forgetful sacrifice? Why, in selling a food which is essential to health, should the head of a sugar corporation say with im punity, " I think it is fair to get out of the consumers all you can, consistent with the business proposition," when the physician is expected to care for the undernourished with a devoted professional spirit utterly different from the sugar magnate s words? There is no real answer to that " why." The fact is that for multitudes of people business is still in the unredeemed state in which nursing and teaching and doctoring were at the beginning, and nothing can save us from the personal and social consequence of this unhappy situation except the clear vision of the basic meaning of business in terms of service, and the courageous reor ganization of personal motive and economic institutions around that idea.

If, then, Christianity is sincerely inter ested in the quality of human spirits, in the motives and ideals which dominate person ality, she must be interested in the economic and industrial problems of our day. To be sure, many ministers make fools of them selves when they pass judgment on ques tions which they do not understand. It is true that a church is much more peaceable and undisturbing when it tries experiments upon religious emotions with colored lights than when it makes reports upon the steel trust. Many are tempted, therefore, to give in to irritation over misdirected ministerial energy or to a desire for emotional comfort rather than an aroused conscience. One has only to listen where respectable folk most congregate to hear the cry: let the Church keep her hands off!

Let me talk for a moment directly to that group. If you mean, by your distaste for the Church s interest in a fairer economic life, that most ministers are unfitted by temperament and training to talk wisely on economic policies and programs, you are right. Do you suppose that we ministers do not know how we must appear to you when we try to discuss the details of business? While, however, you are free to say any thing you wish about the ineptitude of min isters in economic affairs (and we, from our inside information, will probably agree with you), yet as we thus put ourselves in your places and try to see the situation through; your eyes, do you also put yourselves in our places and try to see it through our eyes!

I speak, I am sure, in the name of thou sands of Christian ministers in this country endeavouring to do their duty in this trying time. We did not go into the ministry of Jesus Christ either for money or for fun. If we had wanted either one primarily, we would have done something else than preach. We went in because we believed in Jesus Christ and were assured that only he and his truth could m.edicine the sorry ills of this sick world. And now, ministers of Christ, with such a motive, we see continu ally some of the dearest things we work for, some of the fairest results that we achieve, going to pieces on the rocks of the business world.

You wish us to preach against sin, but you forget that, as one of our leading soci ologists has said, the master iniquities of our time are connected with money-making. You wish us to imbue your boys and girls with ideal standards of life, but all too often we see them, having left our schools and colleges, full of the knightly chivalry of youth, torn in the world of business between the ideal of Christlikeness and the selfish rivalry of commercial conflict. We watch them growing sordid, disillusioned, merce nary, spoiled at last and bereft of their youth s fine promise. You wish us to preach human brotherhood in Christ, and then we see that the one chief enemy of brotherhood between men and nations is economic strife, the root of class conscious ness and war. You send some of us as your representatives to the ends of the earth to proclaim the Saviour, and then these mis sionaries send back word that the non- Christian world knows all too well how far from dominant in our business life our Christian ideals are and that the non- Christian world delays accepting our Christ until we have better proved that his principles will work. Everywhere that the Christian minister turns, he finds his clearest ideals and hopes entangled in the economic life. Do you ask us then under these con ditions to keep our hands off? In God s name, you ask too much ! In the sixteenth century the great conflict in the world s life centered in the Church. The Reformation was on. All the vital questions of the day had there their spring. In the eighteenth century the great conflict of the world s life lay in politics. The American and French revolutions were afoot. Democracy had struck its tents and was on the march. All the vital questions of that day had their origin there. In the twentieth century the great conflict in the world s life is centered in economics. The most vital questions with which we deal are entangled with economic motives and institutions. As in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries great changes were in evitable, so now the economic world cannot possibly remain static. The question is not whether changes will occur, but how they will occur, under whose aegis and superin tendence, by whose guidance and direction, and how much better the world will be when they are here. Among all the interests that are vitally concerned with the nature of these changes none has more at stake than the Christian Church with her responsibility for the cure of souls.

V

Still another point of contact exists be tween the Christian purpose and social re form : the inevitable demand of religious ideals for social application. The ideal of human equality, for example, came into our civilization from two main sources the Stoic philosophy and the Christian religion and in both cases it was first of all a spir itual insight, not a social program. The Stoics and the early Christians both believed it as a sentiment, but they had no idea of changing the world to conform with it. Paul repeatedly insisted upon the equality of all men before God. In his early min istry he wrote it to the Galatians : " 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 Chfist Jesus." Later he wrote it to the Corinthi ans : " For in one Spirit were we all bap tized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free ; and were all made to drink of one Spirit." In his last imprisonment he wrote it to the Colossians: " There cannot be Greek and Jew, circum cision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scyth ian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all." Yet it never would have occurred to Paul to disturb the social custom of slav ery or to question the divine institution of imperial government.

Nevertheless, while this idea of human equality did not at first involve a social pro gram, it meant something real. If we are to understand what the New Testament means by the equality of men before God, we must look at men from the New Testa ment point of view. Those of us who have been up in an aeroplane know that the higher we fly the less difference we see in the elevation of things upon the earth. This man s house is plainly higher than that man s when we are on the ground but, two thousand feet up, small difference can we observe. Now, the New Testament flies high. It frankly looks from a great altitude at the distinctions that seem so important on the earth. We say that racial differences are very important a great gulf between Jew and Gentile. We insist that cultural traditions make an immense distinction that to be a Scythian or to be barbarian is widely separated from being Greek. We are sure that the economic distinction be tween bondman and freeman is enormous. But all the while these superiorities and in feriorities, which we magnify, seem from Paul s vantage point not nearly so important or so real as we think they are. He is sure about this central truth, that God asks no questions about caste or colour or race or wealth or social station. All men stand alike in his presence and in the Christian fellowship must be regarded from his point of view.

It was utterly impossible, however, to keep this spiritual insight from getting ulti mately into a social program. It appealed to motives too deep and powerful to make possible its segregation as a religious senti ment. For however impractical an ideal this thought of human equality may seem in general, and however hard it may be to grant to others in particular, it is never hard for us to claim for ourselves. If ever we are condescended to, does any assertion rise more quickly in our thought than the old cry of our boyhood, " I am as good as you are "? The lad in school in ragged clothes, who sees himself outclassed by richer boys, feels it hotly rising in his boyish heart : " I am as good as you are." The poor man who, with an anxiety he cannot subdue and yet dares not disclose, is desperately trying to make both ends meet, feels it as he sees more fortunate men in luxury: "I am as good as you are." The negro who has tried himself out with his white brethren, who wears, it may be, an honour key from a great university, who is a scholar and a gentle man, and yet who is continually denied the most common courtesies of human inter course he says in his heart, although the words may not pass his lips, " I am as good as you are." Now, the New Testament took that old cry of the human heart for equality and turned it upside down. It became no longer for the Christian a bitter demand for one s rights, but a glad acknowledgment of one s duty. It did not clamour, " I am as good as you are " ; it said, " You are as good as I am." The early Christians at their best went out into the world with that cry upon their lips. The Jewish Christians said it to the Gentiles and the Gentiles to the Jews; the Scythians and barbarians said it to the Greeks and the Greeks said it in return; the bond said it to the free and the free said it to the bond. The New Testament Church in this regard was one of the most extraordinary upheavals in history, and to-day the best hopes of the world depend upon that spirit which still says to all men over all the differences of race and colour and sta tion, " You are as good as I am." To be sure, before this equalitarian ideal could be embodied in a social program it had to await the coming of the modern age with its open doors, its freer movements of thought and life, its belief in progress, its machinery of change. But even in the stag nation of the intervening centuries the old Stoic-Christian ideal never was utterly for gotten. Lactantius, a Christian writer of the fourth century, said that God, who cre ates and inspires men, " willed that all should be equal." * Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century, said that " By nature we are all equal." For ages this spiritual insight remained dissociated from any social program, but now the inevitable connection has been made. Old caste sys tems and chattel slavery have gone down before this ideal. Aristotle argued that slavery ethically was right because men iL.C.F. Lactantius: The Divine Institutes, Book V, Chap, xv, xvi.

2 Gregory the Great: Moralium Libri, Pars quarta, Lib. XXI, Caput XV "Omnes namque homines natura aequales sumus." were essentially and unchangeably masters or slaves by nature. Somehow that would not sound plausible to us, even though the greatest mind of all antiquity did say it. Whatever may be the differences between men and races, they are not sufficient to justify the ownership of one man by an other. The ideal of equality has wrecked old aristocracies that seemed to have firm hold on permanence. If one would feel again the thrill which men felt when first the old distinctions lost their power, one should read once more the songs of Robert Burns. They often seem commonplaces to us now, but they were not commonplaces then:

" For a that and a that, Their dignities, and a that; The pith, o sense and pride o worth Are higher rank than a that !" This ideal has made equality before the law one of the maxims of our civilized govern ments, failure in which wakens our appre hension and our fear ; it has made equal suf frage a fact, although practical people only yesterday laughed at it as a dream; it has made equality in opportunity for an educa tion the underlying postulate of our public school systems, although in New York State seventy-five years ago the debate was still acute as to whether such a dream ever could come true; it is to-day lifting races, long accounted inferior, to an eminence where in creasingly their equality is acknowledged. One with difficulty restrains his scorn for the intellectual impotence of so-called wise men who think all idealists mere dreamers. Who is the dreamer the despiser or the upholder of an ideal whose upheavals al ready have burst through old caste systems, upset old slave systems, wrecked old aristoc racies, pushed obscure and forgotten masses of mankind up to rough equality in court and election booth and school, and now are rocking the foundations of old racial and in ternational and economic ideas? The prac tical applications of this ideal, as, for exam ple, to the coloured problem in America, are so full of difficulty that no one need be ashamed to confess that he does not see in detail how the principle can be made to work. Nevertheless, so deep in the essen tial nature of things is the fact of man kind s fundamental unity, that only God can foresee to what end the application of it yet may come. At any rate, it is clear that the Christian ideal of human equality before God can no longer be kept out of a social program.

VI

There is, then, no standing-ground left for a narrowly individualistic Christianity. To talk of redeeming personality while one is careless of the social environments which ruin personality; to talk of building Christ- like character while one is complacent about an economic system that is definitely organ ized about the idea of selfish profit; to praise Christian ideals while one is blind to the in evitable urgency with which they insist on getting themselves expressed in social pro grams all this is vanity. It is deplorable, therefore, that the Christian forces are tempted to draw apart, some running up the banner of personal regeneration and some rallying around the flag of social reforma tion. The division is utterly needless. Doubtless our own individual ways of com ing into the Christian life influence us deeply here. Some of us came into the Christian experience from a sense of indi vidual need alone. We needed for ourselves sins forgiven, peace restored, hope be stowed. God meant to us first of all satis faction for our deepest personal wants.

" Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee " such was our cry and such was our salva tion. If now we are socially minded, if we are concerned for economic and interna tional righteousness, that is an enlargement of our Christian outlook which has grown out of and still is rooted back in our indi vidual need and experience of God.

Some of us, however, did not come into fellowship with God by that route at all. We came in from the opposite direction. The character in the Old Testament who seems to me the worthiest exhibition of personal religion before Jesus is the prophet Jeremiah, but Jeremiah started his religious experience, not with a sense of individual need, but with a burning, patriotic, social passion. He was concerned for Judah. Her iniquities, long accumulating, were bringing upon her an irretrievable disaster. He laid his soul upon her soul and sought to breathe into her the breath of life. Then, when he saw the country he adored, the civilization he cherished, crashing into ruin, he was thrown back personally on God. He started with social passion; he ended with social passion plus personal religion. Some of God s greatest servants have come to know him so.

Henry Ward Beecher once said that a text is a small gate into a large field where one can wander about as he pleases, and that the trouble with most ministers is that they spend all their time swinging on the gate. That same figure applies to the entrance which many of us made into the Christian experience. Some of us came in by the gate of personal religion, and we have been swinging on it ever since; and some of us came in by the gate of social passion for the regeneration of the world, and we have been swinging on that gate ever since. We both are wrong. These are two gates into the same city, and it is the city of our God. It would be one of the greatest blessings to the Christian church both at home and on the foreign field if we could come together on this question where separation is so needless and so foolish. If some of us started with emphasis upon personal religion, we have no business to stop until we understand the meaning of social Christianity. If some of us started with emphasis upon the social campaign, we have no business to rest until we learn the deep secrets of personal relig ion. The redemption of personality is the great aim of the Christian Gospel, and, therefore, to inspire the inner lives of men and to lift outward burdens which impede their spiritual growth are both alike Chris tian service to bring in the Kingdom.