THE WOR.K OF SOCIAL P,-ECONSTRUCTION
moral laws of Kansas or New York. We are apt, also, to forger that the moral force of Christianity was usually only one factor in producing such a change as the abolition of slavery or piracy, and that over against the benign influences of the Church must be set the malign and divisive influences which she created by persecuting zeal, intellectual intolerance, or religious wars. In short, we must sobefly face the fact that a good many deductions bave tobe ruade from the popular panegyrics, and that the Church has not accomplished all that is often claimed for ber. In the next place, the social effects which are usually enumerated do not constitute a reconstruction of society on a Christian basis, but were mainly a suppression of some of the most glaring evils in the social system of the rime. For instance, amid the incessant feuds of the Middle Ages the Church for a short time and within a limited area succeeded in imposing the Truce of God and so giving the harassed people a chance to breathe. In out own time it bas aided in mitigating the suffering entailed by war through the Red Cross conventions and otherwise. But it bas never yet turned more than a fragment of its moral force against war as such. The Church is rendering some service to-day in opposing child labor and the sweat-shop system, which are among the culminating atrocities of the wages system, but its conscience bas not at all awakened to the wrongfulness of the wages system as a whole, on which out industry tests. Thus, in general, the Church bas often rendered valuable aid by joining the advanced public conscience of any period in its protest against some single intolerable evil, but it has accepted as inevitable the general social system under which the world was living at the rime, and has not undertaken any thoroughgoing social reconstruction in accordance with Christian principles. In the third place, the most important effects of Christianity went out from it without the intention of the Church, or even against its will. For instance, the position of woman has doubtless been elevated through the influence of Christianity, but by its indirect and diffused influences rather than by any direct championship of the organized Church. It is probably fait to say that most of the great Churches through their teaching and organization have exerted a conservative and retarding influence on the fise of woman to equality with man. Similarly Christianity has been one of the most powerful causes of democracy, but the conscious influence of the Church has more widely been exerted against democracy than for it. A volatile spirit has always gone out from organized Christianity and aroused men to love freedom and justice and their fellow-men. It is this diffused spirit of Christianity rather than the conscious purpose of organized Christianity which has been the chief moral force in social changes. It has oflen taken its finest form in heretics and free-thinkers, and in non-Christian movements. The Church has often been indifferent or hostile to the effects which it had itself produced. The mother has refused to acknowledge her own children. It is only when social movements have receded into past history so that they can be viewed in the larger perspective and without the irritation created by all contemporary disturbance of established conditions, that the Church with pride turns around to claim that it was she who abolished slavery, aroused the people to liberty, and emancipated woman. The facts of history are so clear on this point that the lrMirectness of the social influence of Christianity has been set up as a kind of doctrine. We are told that Christianity is sure 'to affect society, but that Christianity must hOt seek to affectit. The mission of the Church is to implant the divine lire in the souls of men, and from these regenerated individuals forces of righteousness will silently radiate, and evil customs and institutions will melt away without any propaganda. That is çertainly one of the most important means of social transformtîon. Put a new moral standard and a new moral motive into a human heart, and it will unconsciously affcct all it touches. A Christian woman will make a home sweet and Christian, even if she has no theory about Christianizing the home-lire. But would it not be more effective still if she added the conscious purpose to make her home a little kingdom of God, and intelligently set herself to counteract all customs and outside influences that expressed the selfishness and ostentation and gluttonyof the lire surrounding her home? If a result gives us joy and pride after it is attained, wh æ- should it not be our conscious object before it is attained? Why should the instinctive and unpurposed action of Christian men be more effective than a deeply rooted and intelligent purpose? Since when is a curved and circuitous line the shortest distance between two points? Will the liquor traffic disappear if we say nothing about it? Will the atrocities on the Congo cease if we merely radiate goodness from out regenerate souls? We suspect that this theory was devised to put the best face on an uncomfortable fact. It is a fact that there has been a startling absence of any thorough and far-seeing determination or effort to transform and Christianize the social lire of
,ossibilff any al propada in first cen- humanity. But that lack has hot been due to the wise self. restraint of the Church, which knew a better way, but to a series of historical causes which have paralyzed its reconstructive purpose and power. These causes I shall try to set fortb in this chapter and it can then be judged whether the past failure of the Church to undertake the reconstruction of social life justifies a present refusal to undertake it consciously. This brief survey will have to run back and forth over nineteen centuries of Christian history. Its brevity will have to excuse the abruptness and the lack of due qualifications in many of the statements.
It is correctly asserted that the apostles undertook no social propaganda. Paul held no antislavery meetings, and Peter ruade no public protest against the organized grafting in the Roman system of tax-farming. Of course they did not. Even the most ardent Christian socialist of out day would have stepped softly if he had been in their place. The right of public agitation was very limited in the Roman Empire. Any attempt to arouse the people against the oppression of the government or the special privileges of the possessing classes, would have been choked off with relentless promptness. If, for instance, any one had been known to sow discontent among the vast and ever threatening slave population,- which was hOt negro, but white,- he would have had short shrift. Society was tensely alert against any possible slave rising. If a slave killed his toaster, the law provided that every slave of that household should be killed, even if there was no trace of complicity. Upper-class philosophers might permit themselves very noble and liberal sentiments only because there was no connection between them and the masses, and their sentiments ended in perfumed smoke. Under such circumstances any prudent man will husband his chances of life and usefulness, and drop the seeds of truth warily. If the convictions of William Lloyd Garrison had burned in Paul, we should probably not know that Paul had ever existed. There is no parallel between such a situation and out own in a country where we are ourselves the citizenkings, anè where the right of moral agitation is almost unlimite& The parallel would have to be sought with American missionaries working among the Armenians in Turkey, or with evangelical sectarians in Russia before the present revolution. Our missionaries in China are in a privileged position, yet they have to let oncial corruption alone or their consuls are likely to hear from the mandarins.
Paul was not an anti-slavery man. He doubtless realized the oppressive conditions of many slaves, just as we recognize the hard lot of miners or oyster-dredgers. But to his lofty idealism outward conditions were almost indifferent. Ho himself bore poverty and homelessness almost with equanimity for Christ's sake. Let the slave realize that ho is Christ's freeman, and ho can hold his head as erect as any. 1 This is sublime, but it is too rare an atmosphere for the mass of mon, and even the few can maintain such victorious elevation of soul only under the tension of unusual feelings and only for a limited time. Paul and the entire primitive Church were under such tension. They expected the very speedy coming of the Lord. Paul expected that this event would signalize the Corinthians 7- 7-24 transformation and spiritualization of all the material wofld, t and what did out transient earthly troubles marrer in the face of so trèmendous a change? Others, as we have seen, 2 expected the coming of the Lord to usher in an earthly millennium of justice and happiness, which would solve ail social questions in one blessed catastrophe. They were then in the saine position as those revolutionary socialists who refuse to dabble with social palliatives because the people are almost on the point of seizing control of ail. We know now that the Christians of the first century were at the beginning of Christian history; they thought they were at the end. This expectation, to any one who took it seriously, affected ail relations and outlooks on lffe. Paul even advised against marriage on account of the nearness of the end and the upheavals sure to precede it. He counselled an attitude of inner detachment. Let those who had wives be as if they had none, and those who purchased property as if they did hot own it; let those who had dealings with the wofld make them as slight as possible; for the rime was short, and the present make-up of the wofld was soon to pass away. 3 Given that conviction of the coming end, and this was the lallguage of an heroic soul. Any one with that faith would be morally absolved from entering on any moral crusade that would take time. But without that honest faith the same attitude would be a shirking of responsibility. If a man spends only a single night in a shack in the woods, he does not mind if the stars shine through the roof or the tain leaks in, for in the morning he wiil strike camp. But if he occupies a bouse i I Corinthians IS; Romans 8. x Corinthians 7- 2;-3;. p. o3ff.
for years in which roof and drainage are defective, and if his children are perpetually sick in consequence, it is criminal for him to let things run on because some day it may happen that he will move.
In the preceding chapter we discussed the attitude of primitive Christianity to the Empire and the civilization organized in it. 1 We saw that the hope of the Lord's coming necessarily involved the hope that the Empire and its social life would corne to an end. The feelings inherited from Judaism and its apocalyptic literature, and the feelings generated by the persecution of the Christians, united in creating a clouded atmosphere of fear and distrust through which imperial Rome loomed threatening and detestable. This feeling received a strong moral reënforcement by the awakened Christian conscience which felt keenly the immorality of heathen society, the lasciviousness of its pleasures, the unnaturalness of its ornaments and luxuries, the greed of its traffic, the factiousness and hatred prevalent in private and public lire. How could the ideals of life which they carried in their hearts be realized in a world so incompatible with them? How could a social life so fundamentally wrong be reconstructed? Men usually undertake a hopeful reformatory activity only if betterment is somewhere within sight. In some of our cities in which local politics seemed bad beyond remedy, citizens were long in a state of pessimistic lethargy. Socialists are so profoundly convinced of the hopeless and fundamental injustice of the c_'pitalistic system that they will coSperate in no reform which is simply to ameliorate or prolong a system that ought to cease. Similarly the political and p. xoSff.
Hostil the EI and it civiliz moral outlook of Christians on the world about them was so dark and hopeless that the idea of a moral campaign could hardly have occurred to them, even if it had been permitted, and even if their hope of God's intervention had not made their efforts seem useless. This moral outlook received a sinister reênforcement by the religious belief prevailing in early Christianity that the heathen wofld was under the control of demon powers. 1 This was the common belief of the heathen world itself. Only the word "demon" did hOt bave the exclusively evil significance which it bas with us. Their demons were good, bad, or indifferent. The common man believed himself surrounded by them just as the medieval Christian felt himself protected by ministering angels and saints, or tempted by devils. For their favor the Roman merchant offered gifts and prayers. Against their anger or spite the Greek sailor wore his amulets. From their defilements men sought cleansing in the ritual of the heathen "mysteries" and the prevalent Oriental cults. For the educated man, with whom the conception of one God had shouldered aside the belief in the ancient gods, it was convenient to think that the traditional gods were real spiritual powers, though of an inferior rank. The Christians simply retained this common belief of the second century, but by a process which has often been repeated in the history of religion this many-hued world of spirits was suddenly all dyed in uniform black. They were t Harnack, "Expansion of Christianity," Bk. II, Chap. II, has an Excursus about this belief and its influence on ancient Christianity. Many of the most interesting passages in the Fathers are quoted there.