THE WORK OF SOCIAI RECONSTRUCTION I5
parts of that Satanic kingdom which opposes God and Iris kingdom. They were not figments of the imagination, but real and terrible seducing spirits who had for ages enthralled the world and persuaded men to offer them gifts and sacrifices. Whatever was good in pre-Christian civilization, or whatever was similar in heathen ritual to Christian rites or institutions, was a counterfeit devised in advance by the demons in order to thwart Christianity which threatened to rob them of their power. It is necessary to read the early Church Fathers and apologists to realize how fundamental this belief was in their theology and in their interpretation of history and contemporary life. A theology like ours, with no demons in it, would have seemed to Justin Martyr or Cyprian to "knock the bottom out of the Christian faith. But if heathen religion was the service of demons, all heathen life was under their control, for all heathen life was woven through with religious acts and ceremonies. Every official act of State, every military ceremony, every public or private festivity, was connected with sacrifices, libations, or prayers. No Christian could take part in them without deling himself with the deadly sin of idolatry. The only course open to Christians was to diminish their points of contact with heathen society and constitute a little social world within the world. Such a mingling in the common life as an effort at social reconstruction would involve, was quite out of the question. The best social service which the Church could render to the heathen world was to counteract and break the power of the demons.
The causes already enumerated were on the whole confined to early Christianity. The State was hostile, and any moral campaign against social wrongs was impossible. The Lord was coming to usher in the new era, and any human effort for a slow amelioration was needless. The heathen world was so corrupt, so hostile, and so penetrated by demon powers, that any hope of changing its evil lire was paralyzed by the very magnitude of the task involved. Thus in spire of the powerful social impetus residing in primitive Christianity such a process of conscious moral reconstruction of society as we conceive to-day was both theoretically and practically out of the question in the first three centuries. Moreover, these early Christians were subject to the saine limitations of human nature to which we all are prone. They, too, were creatures of custom. Before slavery was abolished in our country, there were millions of genuine Christians, honestly willing to see and do the right in other matters, to whom it seemed a preposterous proposition that slavery is incompatible with Christianity. To them it was a necessary and fundamental human institution, like the family or the school. To-day there are very few Christians who realize that it is a crying wrong to hold land idle for speculation in cities where men's lungs are rotting away, overgrown with tuberculosis bacilli for lack of air; few who realize that it is a fiat denial of Christianity to take advantage of the needs of your fellow-man to buy his labor cheaply or sell him your goods dearly. These things seem to us a necessary and inevitable part of the structure of society. If, therefore, the early Christians accepted the universal institution of slavery as part of the social universe; if it was centuries before we hear any straight declaration against the principle of slavery in the Church; and if the Church itself became a great slaveowner in the later days of its wealth—need we be surprised who have had nineteen centuries of Christian influences upon us and who are still so blind to wrong? Moreover, in the early generations the churches were mainly composed of slaves and poor people whose minds were stunted by toil and lack of culture. The physical fear of persecution, the sense of social ostracism, the superstitious fear of demon powers, the self-righteous pride and narrowness inseparable from sectarian religious lire, combined to shut them up in their own organizations and to rob them of the wide and free outlook on human lire. It is quite possible for a flower-pot or a religious body to be exceedingly narrow, and yet to harbor the germinating seed of something very great. It is one of the most convincing testimonies to the Chrstian religion that within such human environment it was able to generate such religious thought and cnergy. It was thus entirely natural and excusable if the reconstructive purpose inherent in Christianity did not find its largest application in the primitive beginnings of Christianity. It would be miraculous if it had. But the harm was done when subsequent generations took this failure as an excuse or even as a command for similar inaction. Since the end of the second century "apostolic" became the decisive word in the Church. Whatever the apostles had done or not done was binding precedent. In later rimes the opinions of the great Fathers received a similar authority, which almost throttled free initiative. Human lire is always imitative and therefore conservative. But religion, by the very reverence which makes it noble, intensifies the conservative instinct. It embalms even insignificant usages and ideas and gives them binding authority. Thus the attitude of the primitive Church toward society tended to perpetuate itself when all the causes which had created that attitude had long disappeared. Paul lived under a hostile government and in view of the speedy end of the world. We live under out own governinent, free to think and speak as we will; ve look backward on nineteen centuries of Christian history, and we look forward to an indefinite continuance of the present world. Yet it still passes as a clinching arguinent for Chrisflan indifference to social questions that Paul never started a good governinent campaign. "When two do the saine thing, it is not the saine." We cling to the letter of priinitive Christianity and are fa!se to its spirit. We have turned the eagle-rninded Paul, one of the greatest chainpions of freedoin and progress in all history, into a personified code of law and precedent that bids us ever reinain where he stood. We have thrust the steel driving-rod of an old locornotive between the spokes of a new locomotive. There is the grim hulnor of huinan lire!
There is another line of causes which set in very early, but which did not corne to their full force in primitive Christianity. They swayed that "catholic" Christianity which developed out of primitive Christianity about the end of the second century and which ruled with unbroken power till the Reforrnation. We have seen that the ancient Hebrew religion had been for this present life. The hope of blessedness or the fear of punishrnent in a lire after death plays no appreciable part in Old Testainent religion. The prophetic insistence on present social righteousness and the hope of a Messianic reioo-n on earth developed in a national religion devoted to the present lire.
On the other hand, in the Groeco-Roman world there was an intense desire for the future lire. A great revival of religion had begun in the pagan world before the Christian era and continued for several centuries to gather strength. The deep interest in religious philosopby, the popularity of the "mysteries," the eagemess with which old Oriental religions were welcomed in the West, and the swiftness with which religions made headway, were ail symptoms of this new religious awakening. The chier hope held out by ail these religious movements was the atonement and purification of sin and the attainment of immortal lire. It was natural that when Christianity spread in the pagan world that men should seize that part of its rich and varied contents which most appealed to their desires, and emphasize it to the exclusion of others. They saw in Christ the redeemer from earthliness. By his incarnation, his death and resurrection he had implanted potential immortality in the human race. By baptism the immortal lire could be imparted to the believer; by the eucharist, that "medicine of immortality," and by the mortification of the body, it could be nourished and strengthened to the final triumph over ail that clogged it. Nearly ail the early Fathers wrote on the resurrection. The gift of immortality was the great theme of early Greek theology. The Nicene Council was not merely the triumph of a christological formula, but of that conception of Christianity which made it primarily redemption from death and impartation of immortality. The prayers for the dead and to the dead, the festivals of the martyrs and saints, the poetic speculation on heaven and hell and purgatory, the desire for »J blessed death with ail "the consolations of religion," the apparatus presented in the M sacraments of the Church to attain security from hell and early release from purgatory, the churchyards crowding up to the churches and into them- ail these testify to the place which the future world held in the thoughts of anciem and medioeval Christianity. But as the eternal lire came to the front in Christian hope, the kingdom of God receded to the background, and with it went much of the social potency of Christianity. The kingdom of God was a social and collective hope and it was for this earth. The eternal lire was an individualistic hope, and it was not for this earth. The kingdom of God involved the social transformation of humanity. The hope of eternal lire, as it was then held, was the desire to escape from this world and be done with it. The kingdom was a revolutionary idea; eternal life was an ascetic idea. We modern men, too, belicve in eternal lire, but the asceticism is almost drained out of it. We hold that this life is good and the future life will be still better. We feel that we must live robustly now and do the work God bas given us to do, and at death we shall pass to a higher world in which we shall serve him in still higher ways. But in former stages of Christianity the feeling was rather that this is an evil world from which only death can free us: at the best a discipline to prepare us for the heavenly lire; at the worst a snare to cheat us of it. The body is a sepulchre; the world a prison; from both the soul hopes to escape. The heaven-born spirit longs for emancipation from the grossness of matter. This dualism of spirit and matter was not derived from the teaching of Jesus. It was in the intellectual atmosphere of the day part of the general spiritual equipment of the rimes. Platonic and Stoic philosophy taught it. It was the strongest religious ingredient in Gnosticism, in Neo-Platonism, and ail the religious movements of that age. It was inevitable that Christianity, both in its theology and its popular religious feelings, should be deeply affected by it. But such a conception of present life and future destiny offered no motive for an ennobling transformation of the present lire. Vqay should Christians labor to make this present life just and beautiful when by its very nature it was sensual and debasing? To make this lire sweet and attractive would only rivet the chains which the soul should long to strip off, and would quench that longing for heaven which was the mark of earnest religion. It is significant that those Church Fathers who brought the eternal life to the front in the thought of the Church, either unconsciously or consciously parted company with the millennial hope.' The hymns of the Church are like an auriferous sand-bed in which the intenser religious feelings of past generations have been deposited. They perpetuate what would otherwise be most fugitive: the religious emotions. If any one will look over either the standard church hymnals or the popular revival collections, he will find very few hymns e×pressing the desire for a purer and diviner life of humanity on earth. So far as I bave been able to see, those hymns which have something of the ring of the social hope are either re-expressions of Hebrew hymns, or hyrnns about the millennial coming of Christ, or patriotic hymns, or foreign missionary hymns. From these four significant sources some joy of the social hope bas streamed into Christian hymnology. On the other hand, the hymns expressing the yearning of the soul for the blessed life in the world to corne are beyond computation. Irenoeus unconsciously; Clement of Alexandria and Orîgen consciously.
The other-worldliness of Christians indirectly did affect social life for good. The fear of eternal punishment, the hope of eternal reward, the prospect of facing the great Judge of all things, held many a coarse nature from evil and to justice and mercy, who might hot have done the right for the right's sake or through any higher motive. It helped to sensitize the conscience of the Christian nations up to a certain point. But that only confirms out general proposition, that the social effects hitherto produced by Christianity have been produced indirectly as by-products, and that the main current of its power has been deflected from the task of Christianizing social life.
The other-worldliness of early Christianity was only one aspect of its general ascetic view of life. When ascetic piety turned its face to the future, it longed for complete release from the world and the body, and for the bliss of pure spirituality in heaven. When it turned its face to present duties and relations, it sought to lessen the contact with the wofld and to wear thin the body, in order to weaken the hold of the sensuous and material over the soul, to enjoy some foretaste of the rapturous contemplation in heaven, and to prepare the spirit for its final victory and escape. This attitude of mind was common to all earnest religious movements of the ancient wofld. Christian asceticism was hot Christian; it was only a Christian modification of a general spiritual drift in contemporary life. AIl these movements in some measure identified evil with matter. The flesh that envelops the soul is the seat of evil; hence it must be opposed and worn down. The world with its glamour and entanglements is a kind of larger physical integument, enchaining the soul in material and temporal interests; the less of it, the better fol the soul. The spirit that desires emancipation must not only avoid excess and wrongful pleasure, but cut down all satisfaction of the natural desires to a minimum. The perfect life would be the contradiction of nature. The sexual instinct is the most insistent, powerful, and intimate form in which the soul encounters the power of the material life and the attractiveness of the world. Therefore ascetic religion turned against sexual desire as its chier enemy. Its fight against sexual evils is one of the Church's chief titles to honor. It was a fight against tremendous odds of hereditary abnormal passions, vicious customs and opinions, and the deposit of centuries of sensuality in literature, art, and religion. The Church branded ail sexual intercourse outside of marriage as mortal sin, in man as well as in woman, and so protected the happiness of the family and the most important right of woman. It stood against concubinage and the divorce evil of the ancient world. Its influence on legislation in the Roman Empire was stronger in this domain of lire than in any other. 1 But this insistence on personal purity lost much of its social value by its disparagement of the sexual life in general. Marriage, too, was regarded by many of the early church teachers as a lower moral condition, a relation necessarily involving physical defilement, a compromise with the fallen life of humanity, a concession to the weakness of the flesh. It was not a relation good in itself, but simply a preventive of licentiousness needed by the veak. Blessed were those who did not need it. Since the second century the Church honored voluntary virginity in man and woman. For a long time it * See Brace, "Gesta Christi," Chaps. III-IV.
frowned on a second marriage as a blemish on Christian character. Men who were already in the bonds of marriage might become priests, but none who was already in holy orders should descend to marry. Of its higher churchmen it early began to demand a lire of abstinence, even if they were married. Finally celibacy was demanded of all priests in the Western Church. But the moral demands imposed on the clergy as a law were imposed on all men as an ideal, especially after monasticism captured the heart of the Church from the fourth century onward. Not only the young remained unmarried, but many left their families to join the "angelic choirs" of the ascetic. Women handed their children over to churches or monasteries and dedicated themselves to holiness. That enthusiastic propagandist of monkery, St. Jerome, said, "Though your mother with hair unbound and garments torn point to the breasts that nourished you, and though your father lie on the threshold, tread over him with dry eyes and take the flag of Christ," that is, become a monk. 1 "To be converted to God" came to mean entering a monastery. Even Chrysostom, the sensible, pictures the model husband as the one who lives almost like a monk. Now, marriage is the fundamental social relation. The family is the social cell. It is society in miniature. If this was the attitude of ascetic Christianity toward the most natural and most loving of all social institutions, what chance of proper treatment did the other social relations have? Of course for the majority of men the common sense of nature was fortunately stronger than any ideal motives which religion ¢ould marshal to thwart nature. They continued to marry 1 Episfle 14, .
and to beget children and be happy. But with such views of the perfect Christian life, it would be with a feeling either of actual sin or at least of falling short of the highest life. It is true the Church in many ways took the family life under its special care. It ruade marriage a religious ceremony and declared it a sacrament. And yet marriage continued to be a second-best condition, and in that atmosphere a true Christianizing of even that simplest social relation was hardly possible. It was one of the greatest social services of the Reformation that it broke with the ascetic ideal so far as marriage was concerned, and ranked the married life as higher than the unmarried. The Catholic Church still theoretically views voluntary celibacy as the flower of virtue, but practically Catholics have shared with Protestants in the emancipation from the ascetic ideal, which was originally due to non-Christian influences, but which has so long been able to pose as almost the essence of Christian morality. The attractireness of this present world reaches us mainly through two channels,—the family and property. The family comprises the people who are dear to us, and property the things that are dear to us. Asceticism turned its vigor against both. If we are to be emancipated from the world, the hold of the property instinct must be broken. Under the pressure of the monastic movement men left their property altogether, and dedicated themselves to a lire of poverty. The more absolute the poverty, the holier the monk or the order. For those who remained in their family and calling, the ideal was fundamentally the saine. Let them at least limit their needs and give away the surplus saved. Under the stimulus of this ascetic distrust of property very large amounts were set free for charity. In act, the charitable activity of the Church was amazing. For shee! willingness to give, modern Christianity cannot match its benetïcence with ascetic Christianity. But this giving was not essentially a social conflict with the moral evils of pauperism, but a religious conflict with the moral evil of the love of property. The aire was not primarily to lift the poor recipient to social health, but to discipline the soul of the giver. The Church Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries condemned private property with such vigor that they have often been classed as communists. But they took this ground, not because they saw how valuable for the moral life a fait diffusion of property would be, but because they feared the seductive charm of property. They never proposed a communistic production of more wealth, but only called on men to share what wealth they had. If all had obeyed them, the productive capital of society would have been turned in for consumption, and society would have eaten its own head off. The zeal for giving evoked by ascetic self-discipline was greatly reënforced by the desire to gain merit. Asceticism and the idea of religious merit are very closely connected. If the Christian who enjoys his family and property can be saved and get to heaven, the man who, for the love of God, strips himself of family and property surely must have something more than mere salvation. He would have a surplus with God, with which he could either pay up the debts contracted through former sins or which he could turn over to the general treasure of merit on which the weak and sinful could bank. It was one of the most important contributions of Paul to spiritual religion that he denied uttefly that man could earn merit with God, but threw him naked and humble on the mercy of God. When the capitalistic impulse tries to accumulate a cash balance in heaven and do business with the Lord on a debit and credit basis, commercialism poisons religion. The desire to discipline the soul and the desire to win merit united in making men give large amounts in charity, but they also vitiated the social effectiveness of the giving. The social effect was subsidiary. The giving was the main thing, not '.the help. Almsgiving was the best means of penitence, the most effective bath of the soul next to baptism — a means of holiness even stronger than prayer or fasting. The poor, through whom this virtue was acquired, were "the treasure of the Church," part of its equipment, a kind of gyrnnastic apparatus on which the givers increased their moral muscle. Hence begging was ennobled. It became a profession with its own class spirit. The mendicant orders almost glorified it. Since the effect produced by the alms was a secondary matter, men preferred to turn their altos over to the Church to be used at its discretion; their part was done with the giving. There were many organizations to elicit gifts, but no systematic organization of charity for the purpose of abolishing pauperism. Of course a great deal of good was done. Human kindliness and good sense were never wholly paralyzed. The touch of brotherly love was warm in spite of all calculations of merit to be earned. But it is clear that the religion which elicited the charity, at the same rime thwarted it, and that under these religious conceptions a sane Christianization of social relations would never be undertaken. As long as asceticism ruled in Christianity, the force of religion was exerted to lift men out of their social relations, instead of
][O CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS bringing them into normal relations. It would seek to sup, press the natural instincts instead of finding the right and happy channels for them.
It is a remarkable demonstration of the incurably social nature both of man and of Christianity that when religion sought most earnestly to escape from social lire, it turned its hand once more to build up a true social lire. Every monastery proposed to be an ideal community. The idea that society and the State were ruled by demons and were anti-Christian in their character, was abandoned as a marrer of course when the Church was supported by the State and society became Christian in naine. But this primitive pessimism was not supplanted by any true conception of this world as the very place in which the kingdom of God was to be built up by making all natural relations normal and holy. The older view was replaced by another pessimistic amalgamation of Greek philosophy and biblical ideas. Philosophy had speculated about the original condition of humanity as a state of freedom and equality. The Bible told of a happy state in paradise before man fell. Man then must have been by nature free from those evils from which ascetic piety now painfully strove to free him once more. Originally man was free from sexual desire and from covetousness; there was no family nor private, property, no commercial machinery for money-getting, no difference of rich and poor, or of toaster and slave. The ideal lire, then, would consist in the abandonment of all these social institutions. Their abolition was out of the question for the mass of fallen humanity, but the chosen few at least could leave the sinful social lire and create a litfle world apart in which they would live out the holy life which God originally ordained for man. These social ideas blended with the ascetic desire for selfdiscipline to create the monastic community. Here the foundations of civil society, the family, property and worldly profession, were annihilated, and here the lire of Christian perfection was to be lived. Throughout the Middle Ages an incalculable quantity of moral and spiritual energy was put into the organization and reformation of monastic communities. Whoever desired to live a consecrated Christian lire, became a monk as a matter of course. Every monastic order was a society for Christian endeavor. The noblest and greatest minds spent themselves in summoning men to a still higher type of ascetic community life, or in repairing these fragile human edifices which were built on a contradiction of nature and persisted in obeying the law of gravitation and sliding down to ruin. In turn, all the great moral movements of medioeval Christianity were led by monks and fostered in the monasteries where all the idealists gathered. In ever widening circles the monastic ideal laid hold of men. The mendicant orders immensely increased the numbers, because they Rade the support of the monks so cheap. And beyond the regular orders were the lay brotherhoods, the members of which approximated the monastic life as nearly as their family and calling permitted. Monasticism was rich in beneficent social effects. Many of the monks were sympathetic and wise counsellors and friends of the people. Every monastery was a centre for charitable aid of travellers and the poor. The monasteries founded in wild and desert districts became pioneers of civilization, models of better agricultural methods and simple horticultural experiment stations.
But they rendered this social aid wîthout any intention t« reconstitute the social community about them. That was impossible. If any one desired to lire in a really Christian community, let him corne into the monastery. The monks aided the poor and sick, because that was part of ascetic Christianity; in doing so they gave away the property of the order, and giving was salutary. They preferred the barren and wild places for their monasteries, not in the spirit of the modern missionary or the social settlement, because they were most needed there, but because they were farthest away from human society and therefore nearest to God. The Irish monks, for instance, first settled the lonely islands in their rivers; then the islands of the sea; then the strange countries with alien tongue—all to be pilgrims for Christ. Then incidentally they came in contact with the inhabitants of these foreign countries and became missionaries by force of their humane Christianity and in spire of their ascetic Christianity. If the monks became pioneers of agriculture, it was not because they were anxious to enrich the peasants. They had to work to get a living for their monastic colony and the poor supported by it, and to be independent of the world. Moreover, work was a salutary means of subduing the sensual desires begotten by idleness, and of giving the 'agrant thoughts a definite task. Usually they selected trades that were compatible with meditation and that did hot minister to luxury. But since they were a community working under a single management and having a continuous economic lire, they had division of labor, gradual accumulation of wealth and improvement of methods, and contact with the experience and resources of distant regions. Thus the latent socialism in their community life worked a blessing in spite of their ascetic religion. In fact, every monastic body was a communistic colony. That was an essential part of its attempt to revive the apostolic and ideal life. Now these institutions, founded usually with noble devotion to God, with an honest desire to live the perfect life, carrying with them so many admirable effects for the religious and social life of men, were nevertheless one potent cause for the failure of Christianity to undertake its reconstructive social mission. The finest and most elevated natures were picked out of society as by a spiritual magnet and placed in communities by themselves, isolated from common society. The energy which they ought to have devoted to making society normal, they employed in making themselves abnormal. The power that might have lifted mankind up, was used in wearing themselves down. The good men among the monks served mankind even as monks; but would men of that stamp not have served it if they had remained in the natural bonds of family and neighborhood? When the monastic movement first swept over the ancient Church, it is certain that many went out to the hermit colonies at least partly because they were weary of the burdens of taxation and service imposed by the tottering Empire, and of the lack of freedom that hemmed all men in. They shook off the burdens of civilization at a rime when civilization was desperately in need of all its human resources, and especially of all moral energy. They necessarily unloaded on those who remained the burdens which they refused to carry longer. Thus a social organism, wasted by disease and attacked by external dangers, was further bled of some of its best blood corpusdes. Ascetic and monastic Christianity contributed nota little to the fall of the Roman Empire and the destruction of ancient civilization. During the Middle Ages some of the best organizing ability, which might have sufficed to meet the social anarchy and disorganization of society, was devoted to the organization of local monasteries or new orders, or to the reformation of old orders. When occasionally some great monastic leader took hold of a real moral and social task, the effect was sometimes wonderful. One of the worst consequences of monasticism was the sterilizing of the best individuals. The minds of ideal bent were not allowed to propagate. The monks and nuns were condemned to childlessness. The enthusiasm of the monastic movement dragged the common priesthood into celibacy also. Aside from the considerations of ecclesiastical politics, it was chiefly the reaction of monasticism which mide celibacy compulsoryfor the priest. But the sterility of monks and ntms and priests for so many centuries turned the laws of heredity against the moral progress of the race. It was just as if an agricultural experiment station should nip off ail the flowers that showed unusual color and fragrance and should develop seed from the rest. It has been truly asserted that the most draining effect which war has on the lire of nations is that it kills off the capable and lets the incapable propagate. Monasticism eliminated the morally capable, just as war eliminates the physically capable. God alone knows where the race might be to-day if the natural leaders had hOt so long been made childless by their own goodness. The wonderful fecundity of the irotestant parsonage in men of the highest ability and ideality is proof of what has been lost. If those who were vowed to celibacy still followed the desires of nature,