Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

ought to repent as one. When they speak of their nation as a virgin, as a city, as a vine, they are attempting by these figures of speech to express this organic and corporate social life. In this respect they anticipated a modern conception which now underlies our scientific comprehension of social development and onwhich modcrn historical studies are based. We shall see that it was only when the national lire of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual lire and lost the large horizon of public life. The prophets were public men and their interest was in public affairs. Some of them were statesmen of the highest type. Ail of them interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the conviction that God rules with righteousness in the affairs of nations, and that only what is just, and hot what is expedient and profitable, shall endure. Samuel was the creator of tvo dynasties. Nathan and Gad were the political advisers of David. Nathan determined the succession of Solomon. The seed of revolutionary aspirations against the dynasty of David was dropped into the heart of Jeroboam by the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh. Some of the prophets would get short shrift in a European State as religious demagogues. The overthrow of the dynasty of Omri in the Northern Kingdom was the result of a conspiracy between the prophetic party under Elisha and General Jchu, and resulted in a massacre so fearful that it staggered even the Oriental political consience. On the other hand the insight of Isaiah into the international situation of his day saved his people for a long rime from being embroiled in the destructive upheavals that buried other peoples, and gave it thirty years of peace amid almost universal war. The sufferings of Jeremiah came upon him chiefly because he took the unpopular side in national politics. If he and others had confined themselves to "religion," they could have said what they liked. Out modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is hot easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations. Out philosophical and economic individualism has affected out religious thought so deeply that we hardly comprehend the prophetic views of an organic national life and of national sin and salvation. We usually conceive of the community as a loose sand-heap of individuals and this difference in the fundamental point of view distots the utterances of the prophets as soon as we handle them. For instance, one of out most beautiful revival texts is the invitation: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." The words are part of the first chapter of Isaiah, to which reference has been ruade. The prophet throughout the chapter deals with the national condition of the kingdom of Judah and its capital. He describes its devastation; he ridicules the attempts to appease the national God by redoubled sacrifices; he urges instead the abolition o social oppression and injustice as the only way of regaining God's fayot for the nation. If they would vindicate the cause of the helpless and oppressed, then he would freely pardon; then their scarlet and crimson guilt would be washed away. The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity, and the threat of continued war: "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword." Of course the text is nobly true when it is ruade to express God's willingness to pardon the repentant individual, but that was not the thought in the mind of the writer. He offered a new start to his nation on condition that it righted social wrongs. We offer free pardon to individuals and rarely mention social wrongs. We have seen that the prophets demanded right moral conduct as the sole test and fruit of religion, and that the morality which they had in mind was not the private morality of detached pious souls but the social morality of the nation. This they preached, and they backed their preaching by active participation in public action and discussion.

We advance another step in our study when we emphasize that the sympathy of the prophets, even of the most aristocratic among them, was entirely on the side of the poorer classes. Professor Kautzsch says: "Since Amos it was the alpha and omega of prophetic preaching to insist on right and justice, to warn against the oppression of the poor and helpless." t The edge of their invectives was turned against the land-hunger of the landed aristocracy who "joined house to bouse and laid field to field," till a country of sturdy peasants was turned into a series of great estates; 2 against the capitalistic ruthlessness that "sold the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes," thrusting the poor free-man into slavery to collect a trifling debt; 3 against the venality of the judges who took bribes and had a double standard of law for the rich and the poor. 1 This dominant trait of their moral feeling reacted on their theology, so that it became one of the fundamental attributes of their God that he was the husband of the widow, the father of the orphan, and the protector of the stranger. The widows and the fatherless were those who had no concrete power to back their claires, no "influence," no "fmancial interest," no "pull" with the police judges and aldermen of that time. The "stranger" was the immigrant who had no part in the blood-kinship of the clan, and hence no share in the land and no voice in the common affairs of the village. His modem brother is the proletarian immigrant of our cities, who also has no share in the modern means of production and no political power to protect his interests. When the prophets conceived Jehovah as the special vindicator of these voiceless classes, it was another way of saying that it is the chief duty in religious morality to stand for the rights of the helpless. A man's sympathy is a more decisive fact in his activity than his judo-rnent. One man to-day may disapprove of a given action of a railway or of a coal-combine, but his instinctive sympathy is always with "property" and "the vested interests." Another man may lainent and condenm a foolish strike or headlong violence, but he will dwell on the extenuating circumstances and hold to the fundamental justice of "the cause of labor." This division of sympathy is now coming to be the real line of cleavage in out public affairs. There is no question on which side the sympathy of the prophets was enlisted. Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is aimost i j. F. McCurdy, "I-Iistory, Prophecy, and the Monuments," II» 2o6- 2I 3.

monotonous. To the more judicial and scientific temper of our day their invective would seem overdrawn and their sympathy would seem partisanship. In Jeremiah and in the prophetic psalms the poor as a class are ruade identical with the meek and godly, and "rich" and "wicked" are almost synonymous terms. How did the championship of the oppressed corne to be so essential a part of prophetic morality? It would be hard to find a parallel to it anywhere. What other nation has a library of classics in which the spokesmen of the common people have the dominant voice? If any one cares to assert that divine inspiration alone will account for the fact, I should have no quarrel with the assertion. If the people ever corne to their own in days to corne, it may be that this trait of the Old Testament will corne to be a stronger proof of its inspiration than the arguments that have hitherto done duty in theology. But there were good historical causes for the attitude of the prophets in contemporary social movements. When the nomad tribes of Israel settled in Canaan and gradually became an aoo-ricultural people, they set out on their development toward civilization with ancient customs and rooted ideas that long protected primitive democracy and equality. Some tribes and clans claimed an aristocratic superiority of descent over others. Within the tribe there were elders and men of power to whom deference was due as a matter of course, but there was no hereditary social boundary line, no oo-raded aristocracy or caste, no distinction between blue blood and red. The idea of a mésalliance, which plays so great a part in the social lire of European nations and in the plots of their romantic literature, is wholly wanting in the

Old Testament. t When the Bible became the property of the common man in the age of the Reformation, the total absence of a feudal nobility in the divinely instituted social lire of Israel struck the people as an astonishing fact. It contrïbuted greatly to emancipate them from their feudal reverence and added force to the democratic movements of that revolutionary age. The impression of primitive democracy ruade by the Bible is expressed in the old saying on which John Ball preached to the English peasants in Wat Tyler's rebellion: —

""Vhen Adam dalf and Eve span, Where was thanne a gentilman? '

The great Alexandrian Jew Philo expressed the saine împression about the Law: "If there is any one in the world who is a praiser of equality, that man is Moses." 2 It was the decay of the primitive democracy, and the growth of luxury, tyramly, extortion, of court life and a feudal nobility, which Samuel wisely feared when the people demanded a king. 3 The ownership of the land is the fundamental economic fact in all communities. Unequal distribution of the land and an hereditary aristocracy have always been inseparable facts. Approximately equal distribution of the land is the necessary basis for political and social democracy. Like all primitive peoples, Israel set out with a large measure of communism in land. It was used in severalty, but owned by the clan. At the conquest it was distributed to the tribes and there were  Buh], "Die socialen Verhaeltnisse der Israeliten," §§ 4-9- ' Philo, "Who is an Heir of Divine Things?" § 33- Bohn's edition o| Philo, Vol. II. $ I SaIxlul 8. IO—IS.

ancient customs to prevent its alienation from the tribe. The principle was recognized that every family should ha.ve a freehold in land. In this absence of social caste and this fair distribution of the means of production, the early times of Israel were much like the early times in our own country. America too set out with an absence of hereditary aristocracy and with a fair distribution of the land among the farming population. Both the Jewish and the American people were thereby equipped with a kind of ingrained, constitutional taste for democracy which dies hard. In time Israel drifted away from this primitive fairness and simplicity, just as we are drifting away from it. A new civilization arose, based on commerce and mobile wealth. Capital controlled the food supply. Great landed estates displaced the peasantry. The poor man, without the natural footing on the land, was often pushed over the precipice of want by any special emergency of war, famine, or sickness, and was sold into slavery for debt. The cities grew in size and inaportance. Rich men built stone houses and summer villas, and feasted daily on meat and wine, which the poor man tasted perchance thrice a year at the great feasts. Wealthy women robed their persons with the wealth wrung from the poor. As everywhere, this condition, when once created, tended to perpetuate itself and to guard against any reversal. The rich controlled tlae adminis tration of the law. Priests and magistrates shared in the thirst for the most attractive of all narcotics- wealth. The rich in their well-fed optimism were lifted out of the natural human sympathy with the poor. This rapid increase in wealth, with the usual unequal distribution of it, set in during the forty years preceding Amos.

The old democratic instinct of the people angrily resented this upstart tyranny. It is a popular fallacy that long-continued oppression and misery cause revolutionary impatience. On the contrary, it is while the bit is new in the mustang's mouth that it rears and plunges. When a well-fed and independent people, with fresh memories of better days, are forced under the yoke, they are sure to protest. To the fellahin of Egypt poverty and exploitation seem as inevitable as the fall of night and the coming of death. In the United States the reaction against injustice is setting in swiftly and unanimously, though our working people are still in a condition that would seem paradise to the poor of other nations. So it "cas in Israel, and in that deeply religious age the protest was made in the naine of God and by his spokesmen, the prophets. Amos, the first of the great social prophets, was a herdsman of Tekoa. He uttered the message of God, but he also expressed the feelings of the agrarian class to which he belonged. Abraham Lincoln in the contest against the slave-holding power, Henry George and Father McG1)Tm in their protest against the alienation of the land, revived the earlier democracy of the Declaration of Independence and taught once more that all men are created free and equal, and are endowed with the inalienable right to lire, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Similarly the championship of the poor by the prophets was not due to the inflow of novel social ideals, but to the survival of nobler conceptions to which they clung in the face of the distorted social conditions created by the new commercialism. They were the voice of an untainted popular conscience, made bold by religious faith. We have an excellent illustration of this in the story of

Ahab and Naboth's vineyard. Ahab knew the tenacity with which the Israelite clung to his freehold, and the sanctity which attached to the ancestral inheritance, and hence, when Naboth refused to sell, the king could only fume helplessly at the failure of his pretty plans for a private park. His wife was from Tyre, where royal power was older and accustomed to move rough-shod over the fancied rights of the common herd. She sneered at his feeble grip and gave him a lesson in handling the judiciary. But the judicial murder of Naboth brought Elijah out to face the king, a grim incarnation of justice and of the divine rights of the people. Ahab had collided with the primitive land-system of Israel and the prophetic sense of justice, and it cost his dynasty the throne and Jezebel her life. 1 Another cause for the keen interest of the prophets in social justice deserves mention. The belief in a future lire and future reward and punishment was almost absent in Hebrew religion. To live to an honored old age, to see his children and children's children, to enjoy the fruit of his labor in peace under his own vine and fig-tree- that was all the heaven to which the pious Israelite looked forward. If social oppression robbed him of that, it robbed him of all. It even cheated him of his faith in the justice of God. On the supposition of a future life we can adjourn the manifest inequities of this life to the hereafter and trust that good and evil will yet be balanced justly when time and eternity are put together. In early Hebrew theology there were no such adjourned assizes for the individual. God must prove his justice here or never. If the wicked waxed fat and the pious were robbed with impunity, the moral order of the universe i  Kings 2L was under indictment. In Christianity, faith in the future lire has to some extent subdued the demand for social justice, as we shall see later. The absence of this belief in Hebrew religion served to make the desire for earthly prosperity more direct and impatient, and b«lief in the divine justice lent religious sanction to the demand for economic justice. The full strenh of the humane social conceptions prevailing in Israel can be gauged only if we draw the Law into our discussion. We do not turn away from the prophets when we turn to the Law. According to the old interpretation, the entire Law contained in the Pentateuch was given by Jehovah to/V[oses and thus from the birth of the nation formed the foundation on which its whole lire rested. In that case the prophets drew their ideals from the Law and their preaching was but a summons to the people to obey it. According to the modern critical interpretation only a small part of the Law was of very ancient origin. The Book of Deuteronomy was the outgrowth of prophetic ideas and agitation in the seventh century before Christ. The other portions of the Law did not originate till the Exile or after it, when the life of Judah had been long and deeply saturated with the teaching of the prophets. Thus on the one hypothesis the Law created the prophets; on the other hypothesis the prophets created the Law. In either case the relation is very close and causal. For any thorough discussion of the social ideals ëmbodied in the Law it would be necessary to decide between these two hypotheses. For our purpose it is sufficient to point out that the Law and the prophets are a deposit of the sarne strong current of historical life, related to each other as cause and effect.

The Law, of course, recognized such fundamental customs and institutions of primitive Oriental civilization as slavery, polygamy, and blood-revenge. In so far as it gives formal sanction to these institutions, it drops below the conceptions of human rights to which we have now attained. But its general drift and purpose, its regard for the rights of the poor, and its tenderness even for their finer feelings of self-respect are so noble and humane that one cannot study the social features of the Hebrew Law without a thrill of sympathy and admiration. By swift moral intuition, by the instinct of human fellow-feeling under the impulse of religious faith, regulations were conceived tbere which anticipated and outran the rudimentary protective legislation of our day. We shall glance ai a few points only. The land belonged to Jeho'ah, the national god. That is only another way of saying that it belonged to the community. It was not individual property, but clan and family property. There were various provigions to protect the fight of the family toits ancestral holding and to prevent any permanent alienation. If land was sold under stress of need, it could be purchased back under favorable terres. In an agricultural community and before the introduction of machinery in farming the land is by far the most important means of production. It is one of the highest problems of statesmanship how to plant and root the people evenly and wisely in the land. If the land is owned by the men who till:_t, there is social health and strength. If itis owned by wealthy proprietors and tilled by landless agricultural laborers, a curse is on the people. All the provisions of the Hebrew Law were meant to counteract the separation of the people from the land. It sought to prevent the growth of great estates and a landed aristocracy on the one side, and the growth of a landless proletariat on the other side) Every seven years the fields were to lie fallow (probably in rotation) and their untilled harvests were to belong to all alike, like the berries that grow along our country roadside or in our forests. 2 Of course the poor were benefited most by such liberty to picnic. When the grain, the grapes, and the olives were harvested, the poor had the right to glean, and the owner was forbidden to be too careful in harvesting the corners or to go over the vines and trees a second time. s A hungry man passing through the fields was alwavs free to eat of grain or fruit) These provisions doubtless were based on ancient customs, which in turn were remnants of primitive communism in land, a lingering rec%o'nition that the entire community has rights in the land which limit those of the individual owner. This right of the hungry man to help himself was not like the coin flung to a beggar in pity. It was the claim to joint-ownersbAp. It was bas right. There is a fundamental moral distinction between the two things. The laborer was to be paid at sundown. 5 That recognizes the importance of prompt payment of wages, for wbAch modern labor legislation has had to contend. The principle for which the Eight-hour Movement and the Early-closing Movement now agitate was embodied in the Sabbath law. The Decalogue emphatically throws the protection of that law over those whose labor-force was most in danger of being exploited, the slaves, the immigrant stranger, and the beasts of burden. It was quite within the bounds of human nature for the frugal fariner to send them to work, while he sent himself to rest; hence they are especially enumerated. The earliest form of the Sabbath law is the most purely humane in its wording: "that thine ox and thine ass, and the son of thy handmaid, and the sojourner may be refreshed." t In a non-capitalistic community loans would usually be asked only to relieve need and therefore no advantage was to be taken of a neighbor's necessities by making his distress profitable. Interest was forbidden, so that debt could not breed more hopeless debt. This also counteracted the tendency to inequality in mobile capital. If an Israelite through debt or misfortune became slave to another, he was hot a pariah, but was still to be treated as a member of the family, with a right to share in the family feasts. His servitude was not to become perpetual and when its term was over, he was to be loaded with gifts that he might have a start in shifting for himself. A fugitive slave was to be protected. Israel had no "Fugitive Slave Law." There is no record of any slave riots or of any buming slave question in its history. - Thus the Law, like the preaching of the prophets, mani- çests a striking sympathy for the poorer classes and an unflagging respect for their equal humanity. The manhood of the poor was more sacred to it than the property of the rich. In this fundamental attitude the Hebrew Law differs widely from the Roman Law, which was formulated in a despotic

State and amidst a flagrant monopoly of wealth, and is responsible for much of the excessive reverence for private property rights in our Western civilization. Some of the laws were purely ideal conceptions. The Year of Jubilee provided for a universal shake-up and a new start ail around every fifty years; it was to restore the slave to liberty and the peasant to his land, and lift to the sad6_le again those families that had been thrown by a stumble in some gopher-hole of misfortune. 1 We "know that this beautiful scheme remained a Utopia which even post-exilic.eal for the Law managed to disregard. Other laws were set aside by the ruthlessness of the strong. Only those were likely to be really effective which were firmly based on ancient custom. But in any case these were the ideals of social life that lived in the nobler hearts of Israel, and these ideals either created the prophetic convictions, or they were the product o the prophetic preaching.

We rightly hold that social ideals of such moral value could grow only out of a religious life of high value. But the reverse is also historically true: that the high religious life of Israel could develop only witlfin a nation that cherished and maintained such social ideals. We have seen that the religion of the prophets was hot th¢ quiet devoutness of private religion. They lived in the open air of national life. Every heart-beat of their nation was registered in the pulse-throb of the prophets. They made the history of their nation, but in tutu the history of their nation rnade them. They looked open-eyed at the events about them and then turned to the inner voice of God to interpret 1Leviticus 25. 8-x7, 47-55.