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

One of the finest results of our free church life is that it has developed the resources of the laity and has offered to the ordinary members the opportunity to express their Christian lifeoin Christian work. The American conception of a church is not to have an active priest or minister with a passive people. All recent movements in church organization, for instance the Endeavor Societies and Men's Clubs, have tended to draw new groups of the membership into active participation in church work. Church work has been laicized. The instinct of the leaders of these movements has been entirely right. In our schools we have lcarned that a child profits not by what is said toit by the teacher, but by what it says and does itself. In the volunteer work of out churches lies their chief educational value, and the lay workers are the main reservoir of religious strength. It is, then, of the utmost importance to the churches to have a large supply of intelligent and competent men and women, who have a margin of leisure rime and a reserve fund of physical and mental strength which they can devote to church work. If these volunteer workers labor in factories or stores all week for long hours, at a rapid pace, and under unwholesome conditions, they cannot bring the saine physical and mental elasticity to their church work. While youth and health last, they may manage; but when age approaches or ill health drains their strength, they have to husband their forces for the task of getting a living. They will henceforth corne to church to be cheered and helped, and can no longer put forth much service. If a young woman is on her feet all day Saturday till late, her work in Sunday-school must be impaired by it. Thus the churches are concerned in the hours and conditions of labor. The exhaustion of the people drains the churches of their working force.

Christian workers, to be effective, must also have some measure of trained intelligence, managing ability, and resourcefulness. Those professions which develop these qualities furnish the ablest church workers. The business mantger, the doctor, the school principal, make the ideal Sunday-school superintendent or elder. In so far as out industrial lire deprives the ordinary workers of all opportunity for executive planning and reduces them to automatic parts of the machinery, it fails to develop their latent mental resources and thereby stunts their possibilities as Christian workers. Among the higher classes the churches can lay hold of minds trained by their daily work and press them into Christian service. Among the lower classes it has to take minds blunted by their daily work and itself train them. When the Church descends still lower in the social scale, it works on material that has almost no capacity for service. There the work falls back on a paid staff and officialism once more reigns in religion. Thus the churches have an interest at stake in the prosperity, physical elasticity, mental efficiency, and leisure rime of the people. As the modern factory and tenement stamp one generation after the other with the proletarian character, one of the most hopeful tendencies in the history of the Church will perforce be frustrated. Volunteer work will lessen, and the professional worker will carry the burden of work once more.

supply "Like priest, like people." The condition of the Church pirit of inis- depends on the character of the ministry, and the condition of the ministry depends on the social health of the people.

The ministry is recruited Irom the sons of the middle class, from the families of farmers, small business men, and the better grade of artisans. Students for the ministry rarely corne from the bornes of the very rich or the very poor. The boys of the poor may bave fine native ability and piety, but if they are early forced to work, their educational chances are slighter and their minds are likely to be blunted. The country and the smaller cities furnish a larger proportion of the supply than the large cities, because there thc wholesome conditions of middle-class life persist longer. The general shrinkage in the supply, which seems tobe undeniable, is doubtless due to a combination of causes: theological unrest; the glamour of wealth in business lire; the multiplied openings for intellectual work and social service; and the deterrent conditions existing in the ministry. But one chief cause for the shrinkage in the ministry must be the shrinkage of the class from which it is drawn. A spring will dry up if the rock formation is disturbed or removed within which the water collects. When the best elements of the country and village churches are drained off to the city; when the home lire in the cities is narrowed and withered; when many of the most intelligent men of the middle classes bave no children or very few of them — is hot so far reaching a social condition sure to affect the supply of young men drawn from these social classes? The inequality of wealth bas already lowered the spirit of the ministry. The most selfish church of wealthy people can offer a better salary and greater social advantages than the most generous church of working people. To get a warm berth, a man must get into the right stratum of society. Smoothness and courtly grace may courir for more than spirituality and earnestness. Prophet:c vigor may even be a disqualifying virtue. It is hard to make a comparative judgment of so elusive a thing as the.pirit of a profession, but it does seem that a spirit of anxiety, ambition, and selfadvancement is gaining ground and sapping one of the noblest of all professions of its power and its happiness. When lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and artists have been "commercialized" to their inner loss, is it likely that the ministry can escape? The chief reward of the ministry has always corne toit in the affection and respect of the people. But out age is so drunk with the love of money that anything which does hot pan out in cold cash has to take a back seat. Out newspapers constantly speak of college professors and ministers in atone of patronizing condescension. The salaries of teachers are pitifully inadequate when compared with their value to the community. They turn boys and girls into nobler men and women; a successful writer of advertisements may turn a lie into dollars; clearly he deserves the higher pay. There have been times when the community had a truer judgment of comparative values and gave its spiritual leaders veneration and love. Out commercial system has begotten a tierce competitive thirst for wealth. It has concentrated all minds on money, and accordingly all callings which serve the intellectual and spiritual lire have dropped in the relative importance and honor assigned to them. The ministry is one of them. It has lost its best perquisites. Most ministers are proletarians. They live from hand to rnouth on their wages like other wage-earners and have no share in the wealth-producing capital of the nation. They may hOt share in the class-consciousness of the wage-workers, but they do share in their sufferings. They, too, know the bitterness of hunting for a job and finding a long line of applicants ahead of them. Their tenure, too, has become insecure; what used to be a lire-position has become a rapid shifting. Committees naturally tend to use the saine methods in hiring or dismissing a minister which are used in hiring or "sacking" any other employee. Ministers, too, find that old men are hot wanted, and that when the buoyancy of their youth has been used up, they are put aside with no provision for their age. They, too, find that the trusts can advance prices much more easily than the wage-worker can advance his wage. Thus the minister is dragged down with his class, even though he does hot recognize that he belongs to that class. Ill health, changes of belief, painful experiences in the pastorate, or inability to secure a position often make it seem desirable to a minister to earn his living in some other way. He casts his eye wistfully toward other professions. If there were an economical organization of the working ability of the community and a brisk demand for men, he might find an opportunity. If the labor market is overstocked, especially with elderly men, he finds himself shut up to the ministry and resumes his work there; but now no longer with the old sense of free dedication, but with the consciousness of economic compulsion. If a man knows that he can leave, he may hot want to leave. If he knows that he never can leave, he may yearn to leave and pull his oar like a galley-slave. For the spirit of the ministry it is desirable that the door of exit shall be wide open. The old idea of "once a priest, always a priest," is a relic of sacerdotal religion which ascribed an indelible character to the ordained man. Thus the independence and joy of the ministry is subtly affected by the condition of the labor market. There are probably few preachers who can say that they bave never been influenced by the fear of endangering their income when they shaped or delivered their message to the people. They, too, are "in bondage through fear."

Other organizations may conceivably be indifferent when confronted with the chronic or acute poverty of out cities. The Christian Church cannot. The very naine of "Chris-. tian" would turn into an indictment if it did not concern itself in the situation in some way. One answer to the challenge of the Christian spirit bas been the organization of institutional church work. A church perhaps organizes a day-nursery or kindergarten; a playground for the children; a meeting-place for young people, or educational facilities for those who are ambitious. It tries to do for people who are living under abnormal conditions what these people under normal conditions ought to do for themselves. This saving helpfukness toward the poor must be distinguished sharply from the money-making efforts of some churches called institutional, which simply run a continuous sacred variety performance. Confront the Church of Christ with a homeless, playless, joyless, proletarian population, and that is the kind of work to which some Christian spirits will inevitably feel impelled. All honor to them! But it purs a terrible burden on the Church. Institutional work is hard work and costly work. It requires a large plant and an expensive staff. It puts such a strain on the organizing ability and the sympathies of the workers that few can stand it long. The Church by the voluntary gifts and labors of a few here tries to furnish what the entire coSperative community ought to furnish. Few churches have the resources and leadership to undertake institutional work on a large scale, but most churches in large cities have some institutional features, and all pastors who are at all willing to doit, have institutional work thrust on them. They have to care for the poor. Those of us who passed through the last grcat industrial depression will never forget the procession of men out of work, out of clothes, out of shoes, and out of hope. They wore down our threshold, and they wore away our hearts. This is the stake of the churches in modern poverty. They are buried at times under a stream of human vreckage. They are tumed aside constantly from their more spiritual functions to "serve tables." They bave a right, therefore, to inquire who is unloading thisburden of poverty and suffering upon them by underpaying, exhaugting, and maiming the people. The good Samaritan did not go after the robbers with a shot-gun, but looked after the wounded and helpless man by the wayside. But if hundreds of good Samaritans travelling the saine road should find thousands of bruised men groaning to them, they would not be such very good Samaritans if they did hot organize a vigilance committee to stop the manufacturing of wounded men. If they did not, presumably the asses who had to lug the wounded to the tavern would have the wisdom to inquire into the causes of their extra work.

An architect might have a Parthenon before his mind's The eye, but unless he had quarries for the marble, he could not and build it. A general might be a military genius, but if the rial.

recruits furnished to him were puny, spiritless, and sick with vices, he could make no forced marches nor fight long-drawn battles. Every human institution needs fit human material, as well as a great idea. Clubs and fraternal societies can pick their material; the Church cannot. It must take in all sorts and conditions of men, and has a special call to seek out and draw in the most abandoned and lost. It has to take the material furnished to it by secular society. If that material is degenerate, the work of the Church is harder and there will be disastrous breaks. The lower the previous moral condition, the more frequent the backslidings. Native workers on foreign mission fields sometimes relapse into the most revolting vices, because their bodies and imaginations were saturated with contamination. Rescue missions are familiar enough with the pitiful attempts of broken human beings to rally faith and hope, and with the swift collapse of the enfeebled will. If large sections of the population should approximate the condition of the hobo, what chance would there be for church work among them? Poverty does approximate that condition. It creates a character of its own. Constant underfeeding and frequent exhaustion make the physical tissues flabby and the brain prone to depression and vacillation, incapable of holding tenaciously to a distant aire. Mr. Jacob A. Riis says that street life develops in the child "dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, carelessness of the happiness of others." This characterization will apply to the human material produced by modem city poverty everywhere. Religious faith is the capacity for taking long outlooks and holding all minor aims under control to reach the highest. Poverty teaches men to live from hand to mouth, and for the moment. The experience of the Salvation Army shows that the poor need the strongest thrills of excitement and the most rigid discipline to arouse and hold them. The process of degeneration can be watched in acute form in times of industrial misery. If the decline of a social class is gradual, it escapes observation and only the final results appall us. There is an old maxim current among religious workers that times of national disaster are followed by a revival of religion, for trouble drives men to God. It is true that in the lower stages of religion, famine, pestilence, and earthquake drove men to their temples and churches to plead with their angry gods. The priests of the temples would be likely to regard that as a hopeful revival of religion; we should call it a superstitious panic. It is true also that every deep emotion of joy or sorrow acts like the earthquake at Philippi: it opens the gates of the soul in the darkness, and then great things may happen. Both the birth and the death of a child may turn the parents to nobler thoughtfulness. But long-continued economic helplessness of entire classes acts differently. That bears the soul down with a numbing sense of injustice and despair. Israel in Egypt "hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit and for cruel bondage." The industrial depression of the 9o's was followed by moral disintegration and religious lethargy. It took the churches longer than commerce to recover from that paralysis of hopelessness. The maxim quoted is a relic of the ascetic view of lire, which assumed that a man was closest to holiness when he was most emaciated and stripped of the joys of lire.

The churches may well pray like the wise man, "Give me neither poverty nor riches." 1 Poverty and luxury alike enervate thc will and degenerate the human materiaI for religion. Both create the love of idleness, vagrant habits, the dislike of self-restraint, and the inclination to indulge in the passing emotions. Ethical religion calls for precisely the opposite qualifies. Itis written large in the present conditions of the churches that they flourish best among people who have income enough for health and comfort, security enough for cheer and hope, and leisure enough to cultivate thc higher sides of life. In London the type of religion rep  resented by the Free Churches thrives best in the middle-class parishes.  When a certain line of poverty has been passed, the churches lose their hold almost completely, in spite of the most heroic efforts of Christian men and women. A social system which lifts a small minority into great wealth, and submerges a great number in poverty, is thus directly hostile to the interests of the Church. A system which would distribute wealth with approximate fairness and equality would offer honest religion the best working chance.

Human nature is the raw material for the Christian character. The spirit of Christ working in the human spirit is to elevate the aims, ennoble the motives, and intensffy the affections. This process is never coIplete. The Christian is always but in the making. In the same way human society is the raw material for Christian society. The spirit of Christ is to hallow ail the natural relations of men and give them a divine significance 1 Proverbs 3 o. 8- 9. * Charles Booth» "Lire and Labor in London," Third Series.

and value. This process, too, is never complete. The kingdon of God is always but coming. The situation is changed when the individual presents hot only the obstacles of raw human nature, a will sluggish to good, a preference for pleasure rather than duty, and the clogging influence of evil habits, but a spirit and principles consciously hostile to the influence of Christianity, and sets defiant pride and selfishness against the gentleness and unselfishness urged by the spirit of Jesus. In the saine way the situation is changed when the social relations are dominated by a principle essentially hostile to the social conceptions of Christ. Then the condition is not that of a stubborn raw material yielding slowly to the higher fashioning force, but of two antagonistic spirits grappling for the mastery. The more such a hostile principle dominates secular society, the more difficult will be the task of the Church when it tries to bring the Christ-spirit to victorious ascendency. Christianity bases all human relations on love, which is the equalizing and society-making impulse. The Golden Rule makes the swift instincts of self-preservation a rule by which we are to divine what we owe to our neighbor. Anything incompatible with love would stand indicted. Christ's way to greatness is through preoeminent social service. Self-. development is desirable because it helps us to serve the better. So far as the influence of the Christian spirit goes, it bows the egoism of the individual to the service of the community. It bids a man live his lire for the kingdom of God. In urging the social duty of love, Christianity encounters the natural selfishness of human nature. But this is nota hostile force. It is the instinct of self-preservation without which no child would survive. In a well-trained child the frank egoism of the baby is steadily modified by a growing sense of duty and of solidarity with the family and the little social group in which it moves. With the change of adolescence cornes a powerful instinct of self-devotion to society. If the influence of Christianity accompanies the child during this development, and cornes to conscious adoption in the adolescent period, it gives an immense reënforcement to the moralizing influence of the family and the school, and creates a character ready for real social life and service. If the larger human society into which the young man or woman then enters were adapted to continue the social training given in the family and the school; if the industrial life which moulds the adult set tasks for conscious social service and inspired all workers with the sense of moral solidarity, social lire would be so closely akin to the Christîan conception that the task of Christianity would be easy, and comparative success would be within reach. Instead of that the young adult in the most plastic time of his development is immersed in an industrial life which largely tends to cotmteract and neutralize Christian teaching and training. Competitive industry and commerce are based on selfishness as the dominant instinct and duty, just as Christianity is based on love. It will outbuy and outsell its neighbor if it can. It tries to take his trade and grasp aH visible sources of income in its own hand. The rule of trade, to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, simply means that a man must give as little to the other man and get as much from him as possible. This rule makes even honest competitive trade  to say nothing of the immense volume of more or less dishonest and rapacious trade- antagonistic to Christian principles. The law of Christ, wherever it finds expression, reverses the law of trade. It bids us demand little for ourselves and give much service. A mother does hOt try to make as rich a living as possible, and to give a minimum of service to her children. It would be a sorry teacher who would lie awake thinking how he could corner the market in education and give his students as small a chunk of information as possible from the pedagogic ice-wagon. The relation between a minister and a church is Christian only when the church pays him as well as it can afïord to do, and he gives as whole-hearted and complete service as he can get out of himself. There are some professions and some social relations which are in the main dominated by the Christian conceptions of solidarity and service, and they are the only ones that arouse our enthusiasm or win our love. Industry and commerce are not in that class. Commerce has moved away from the golden age of competition, when business men were like Ishmaels, with every man's hand against every other man. Large social groups are now working on the principle of co6peration in great corporations. That develops loyalty and human good-will within the co6perative group. But only within it. Every trust still has a lot of outsiders whom it has to fight and tame into submission. The wonderful mechanism of a great department store is hOt directed merely to mutual service, but also to the undoing of its competitors. A board of directors may feel a sense of coherence, — modified by a fear of treachery, — but when they turn toward their employees and toward the public, the sense of solidarity ends. It is probably faix to

say that the great business world is not appreciably influenced in its daily struggles by the consciousness that it exists to serve mankind. A minister, a doctor, a teacher, an artist, a soldier, or a public official may forger it often and may turn traitor to the principle altogether; but if he is good for anything, he will always feel the constraint of the higher principle upon him. In these callings itis comparatively easy for a man to realize the joy and strength of that principle, if he is only willing. In business life the constraint is all the other way. The social value of business is reserved for ornamental purposes in after—dinner speeches. There all professions claire to exist for the good of society. Ata recent dinner of the Pawnbrokers' Association of New York, Mr. Abraham Levy spoke of the company as "the benefactors and bearers of the burdens of the poor," and doubtless he believed it when he said it. Every human institution creates a philosophy which hallows it to those who profit by it and allays the objections of those who are victimized by it. Thus M. Pobîedonestzeff, the great procurator of the Holy Synod in Russia, taught the sacredness of the autocracy and thereby strengthened the hands of those who kept the people down. Where alcoholism dominates the customs of a people, it weaves a halo around itself in the songs and social obsela, ances of the people, till joy and friendship seem to be inseparable from mild narcotic paralysis of the nerve centres. Similarly, the competitive industry has its own philosophy to justify the ways of business unto men. "Competition is the 1,_'le of trade." "If every man will do the best for himself, he will thereby do the best for society." In short, the surest way tobe unselfish is to look out for Number One.

This individualistic philosophy was worked out at the end of the eighteenth century in order to cut away the artificial restraints inherited from a by-gone period of industry. The noblest thinkers enthusiastically believed that the unfettered operation of self-love would result in happy conditions for all. Experience has proved this a ghastly mistake. Scientific thought and practical statesmanship have abandoned the policy of unrestrained competition. The more enlightened business men, too, view it with moral uneasiness and a certain shame. The selfish hardness of business lire is to them a sad fact, but they feel they must play the game according to the rules of the game. Yet as long as competitive commerce continues and is the source of profit in the business world, competitive selfishness will be defended as the true law of lire. As soon as the competitive philosophy of life encounters an opposing philosophy in socialism, it is angrily insistent on its own righteousness. The saine is the case when any attempt is made to urge the Christian law of lire as obligatory for business as well as private lire. "Don't mix business and religion." "Business is business." These common maxims express the consciousness that there is a radical divergence between the two domains of lire, and that the Christian rules of conduct would forbid many common transactions of business and make success in it impossible. Thus lire is cut into two halves, each governed by a law opposed to that of the other, and the law of Christ is denied even the opportunity to gain control of business. When a man lives a respectable and religious lire in one part of the city and a lire of vice in another part, he is said to live a double life. That is the heart-breaking condition forced

314 CHRISTIANITY AND TH SOCIAI CRI$I$ upon Christian business men by the antagonism of Chris. tianity and competitive commerce. They have to try to da what Christ declares impossible: to serve God and mammon. It is no wonder that many try to maintain their faith in their own integrity of character by denying that business life is antagonistic to Christianity at all. But the rest of the community judge differently. The moral sincerity of the most prominent members of the churches is impum'ed by the public, which bas little sympathy with the tragic situation in which Christian business men find themselves. This deeply affects the moral prestige of the churches in the community. They are forced into the defensive instead of challenging the community to a higher standard of morals. When txvo moral principles are thus forced into practical antagonism in daily life, the question is which will be the stronger. If the Church cannot Christianize commerce, commerce will commercialize the Church. When the churches buy and sell, they follow the usual methods and often drive hard bargains. When they hire and dismiss their employees, they are coming more and more to use the methods of the labor market. In the teaching of the Church those elements of the ethics of Jesus which are in antagonism to commercial lire are toned down or unconsciously dropped out of sight. The Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus clearly defines the points of difference between his ethics and the current morality, is always praised reverently, but rarely taken seriously. [ts edge is either blunted by an alleviating exegesis, or it is asserted that it is intended for the millennium and hot for the present social life. When the religious teachings of Tolstoi first became known in the 8o's, they gave many of us . shock of surprise by asserting with the voice of faith that these were the obligatory and feasible laws of Christian conduct. Thus the principles of commerce affect the moral practice of the Church and silence its moral teachings in so far as they are antagonistic to business morality. We pointed out that there are some departments of life which are to some degree under the actual dominion of the Christian principle, especially personal morality, the family lire, and neighborly social intercourse. But the principle incorporated in business life is so deeply affecting the methods of action, the points of view, and the philosophy of life as preached in the press and in conversation, that itis encroaching even on those realms of life which have hitherto been blessed by Christ's law. If Christianity cannot advance, it will have to retreat even from the territory already claimed by it. If the Church cannot bring business under Christ's law of solidarity and service, it will find his law hOt merely neglected in practice, but flouted in theory. With many the Darwinian theory has proved a welcome justification of things as they are. Itis right and fitting that thousands should perish to evolve the higher type of the modern business man. Those who are manifestly surviving in the present struggle for existence can console themselves with the thought that they are the fittest, and there is no contradicting the laws of the universe. Thus an atomistic philosophy crowds out the Christian faith in solidarity. The law of the cross is superseded by the law of tooth and nail. It is hot even ideal and desirable "to seek and to save the lost," because it keeps the weak and unfit alive. The philosophy of Nietzsche, which is deeply affecting the ethical thought of the modern world, scouts the Christian virtues as the qualities of slaves. It glorifies the strong man's self-assertion which treads under. foot whatever hinders him from living out his life to the full. The philosophy regnant in any age is always the direct outgrowth of the sum total of life in that age. We view Neo- Platonism, for instance, as the necessary product of the third century. It is safe to say that students of some future century will establish an intimate causal connection between the industrial system which evolves the modern captain of industry and the philosophy of Nietzsche which justifies and glorifies him. On the other hand, among the masses who are being ground up in this evolutionary mill there will be a growing sense of the inexorable cruelty of natural law and a failing faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe. And if the universe is not at bottom good, then the God who ruade it and who runs it is hot good. Or perhaps there is no God at all. Goodness is folly. Force rules the world. Let us use what force we have, grasp what we can, and die. The Church in the past has been able to appeal to the general faith in a good and just God and to intensify that. If that half-unconscious religion of the average man once gives way to a sullen materialism, there will be a permanent eclipse of the light of lire among us. This is the stake of the Church in the social crisis. If one vast domain of lire is dominated by principles antagonistic to the ethics of Chïistianity, it will inculcate habits and generate ideas which will undermine the law of Christ in all other domains of life and even deny the theoretical validity of it. If the Church has hot faith enough in the Christian law to assert its sovereignty over all relations of society, men will deny that it is a good and practicable law at all. If the

THE CHURCI:[ AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT Church cannot conquer business, business will conquer the Church.

The world is getting small. The shuttle of trave] îs weaving back and forth. The E xst and the West have met. We are camping in the front yard of the Hindu and Chinaman, and they are peering over the fence into our back yard. Never before since Islam contended with Christendom for the mastery of the Mediterranean world has the Church been compelled to confront the non-Christian religions as now o The modern movement of foreign missions was the response of the spirit of Christ in the Church to the opportunity presented by the new world-wide commerce. From the outset the missionaries were put to it to explain what relation the white traders who sold the natives rum and brought them contagious diseases bore to the Jesus-religion taught by the missionaries. Trade ruade the way for missions, but traders also frustrated Christianity. To-day commerce is bearing down on the non-Christian nations with relentless eagerness, breaking down their national independence at the cannon's mouth, breaking up their customs and tribal coherence, industrializing them, atomizing them, and always making profit on them. At the saine rime the non-Christian peoples are getting intinaate information about Christianity as it works in its own home. They travel through our slums and inspect Packingtown. They see our poverty and our vice, out wealth and our heartlessness, and they like their own forms of misery rather better. "By their fruits ye shall know them," when applied to religions, reads, "By their civilizations ye shall know them." The moral prestige of Christian civilization ought to be the most valuable stock in trade for the foreign representatives of Christianity; instead of that it is forcing missionaries into an apologetic attitude. With all the faults that any one can point out in it, the foreign mission work of the modern Church is one of the most splendid expressions of the Christ spirit in history, full of blessing for the Church at home, and fuller of historie importance for the future of mankind than any man can now foresee. Here the Church is really on the fighting-line. But here its sword-arm is paralyzed by the existence of a mass of unchristianized life in its own camp. Our industrial life antagonizes our Chrisflan gospel to non-Christian nations. It even reacts on the faith of the people at home. The Japanese war has furnished a demonstration of the moral qualifies of a heathen nation in an object lesson so brilliant that it has gone home with all the world. It has shaken our confidence in the easy moral supremacy of Christianity. We are gaining in respect for the spiritual forces resident in other nations at the saine rime that we are getting an ever more vivid sense of out evils at home and of our impotence in dealing with them. Thus our unsettled social problems dog the footsteps of the Church wherever it goes. The social wrongs which we permit at home contradict our gospel abroad and debilitate our missionary enthusiasm at home. With what different confidence we should present the claims of our religion abroad if our missionaries went out from a nation of free rnen, living in social equality and organized fraternity I

To most thoughtful men to-day the social question is the absorbing intellectual problem of out rime. To the working class itis more. Socialism is their class movement. The The great forward movement inaugurated by the French Revolu- and wor tion was the movement of the business men who wrested clas political control from the feudal nobility and clergy. The wage-workers were then neither strong nor intelligent enough to force a readjustment of rights in their favor. That class is now in its birth-throes. The rest of us may be sympathetic onlookers and helpers, but to them it is a question of life and death. Every great movement which so profoundly stirs men, unlocks the depths of their religious nature, just as great experiences in out personal lire make the individual susceptible to religious emotion. When the chaotic mass of humanity stirs to the throb of a new creative day, it always feels the spirit of God hovering over it. The large hope which then beckons men, the ideal of justice and humanity which inspires them, the devotion and self-sacrifice to the cause which they exhibit- these are in truth religious. As long as the people are still patriotic and religious, their first impulse is to march under the banner of their inherited religion, sure that it must be on their side. }Vhen the German peasants in i525 set forth their simple and just demands in the celebrated "Twelve Articles," they based them all on the Bible and offered to surrender any demand which should be proved out of harmony with God's word. 1 Thus again the people of St. Petersburg on January 22» I905» moved to the Winter Palace to present their petition to "the Little Father," led by a priest in the vestments of religion, and bearing before them the portrait of the Czar and the 1 E. Belfort Bax, "The Peasants' War in Germany"; Zimmermani "Geschichte des Bauernkrieges."

32o CHRISTIAIIITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISI$ cross of Christ. In both cases the response to their petition was a massacre. It is humiliating to say that the confidence with which the people at the beginning of such risings have turned to their religion for moral backing has not been justified in the past. Luther had scant sympathy with the peasants at the outset, and as soon as they used force against the castles of the barons and the monasteries, he called for forcible repression in the most violent language. The pope, too, wrote a congratulatory letter to those who had been most active in repressing the movement. The state Church in Russia is certainly not on the side of the revolution, though many of her priests may be. The churches in Europe were almost universally hostile to the French Revolution. When the people find their aspirations opposed and repudiated by their churches, they turn away chilled or angry. It is then a question whether the discipline of the Church is sufficiently strong to turn the people back from the popular movement and retain them in obedience to the Church. That is the problem which the Roman Catholic Church is now confronting in its opposition to socialism. It is trying to quarantine the Catholic workingmen in organizations of their own and to keep them immune from the bacillus of socialism. It is far fitter for such paternal repression than the Protestant churches, but its ultimate success is dubious. The mass of the people.are more likely to sweep on and away from churchly religion. XVhen the dearest ethical convictions of the people in such a crisis are brought into collision with organized religion, the result is sad for the people and disastrous for the Church. In Germany the process bas worked out its conclusions quite fully. For a long time the German state Church took no sympathetic interest in the socialist movement. It preached loyalty to the king, the divine necessity of social classes, submission, and godly patience. A socialist was a heathen and a publican. It was generally denied that a man could be both a socialist and a Christian. The socialists in their propaganda constantly encountered the Church as a spiritual and social force defending the existing social order, a bulwark of privilege and conservatism. They could gain a man for socialism only by undermining the authority of the Church over his mind. At the saine time the leaders of the working class were drinking in eagerly the new results of natural science and philosophy, which at that rime was baldly atheistic in Germany. "Science," as popularized in socialist literature and propaganda, was atheistic materialism. The German Social Democracy professes to be indifferent to religion and declares it a private ailair, but actually itis a force hostile to religion. The ride of socialism has risen until now the Social Democratic Party is almost coextensive w-ith the working class in the cities. Gradually the Church u-oke up. It tried to remedy the social misery of the people by charitable work and by alleviative legislation on the basis of the existing social order. In both directions splendid w'ork has been done, but the allegiance of the people has not been regained. The clergy are now thoroughly awake to social questions. Many of them are more or less socialistic in their thought, but the State and the governing bodies of the Church have favored the social activitv of the clergy only when it seemed likely to quiet the people and establish the existing order, and have been harshly repressive as soon as individual ministers went farther.

The Church in past centuries repeatedly lost the respect and affections of the people by its corruptions and the oppression which it sanctioned and intensified, but it was able to regain its hold when it repented and irnproved. It rnay be that in corning days the Church in Gerrnany will regain its old influence in the life of the people. But the outlook is not sure. The old rnedioeval reverence for the Church as the only rnediator of salvation is gone, and the people are permanently critical in spirit. Forrnerly the Church was able to envelop itself in awe by the shirnrnering rnist of idealized history which it spread about its past services. The people are now educated beyond that. So the future is sombre. When a rnountain-side is once denuded of vegetation and the roots of the trees no longer lace the soil together and hold the rain, the soil is washed down into the valleys. The rocks are again corroded and rnight forrn new soil, but as it is forrned, it is again washed away. Because the rocks are bare, they stay bare. Frorn hirn that hath hOt is taken even that which he bath. In our own country we are still at the parting of the ways. Our social rnovement is still in its eafliest stages. The bitterness and anger of their fight has not eaten into the heart of the working classes as it bas abroad. Many of thern are still ready to make their fight in the narne of God and Christ, though hot of the Church. Populistic conventions used to recite the Lord's Prayer with deep feeling. The Single Tax rnovernent utilized religious ideas freely. A Cooper Union meeting cheered Father lIcGlynn when he recited the words: "Thy kingdorn corne! Thy will be done on earth!" Some of the favorite speakers and organizers of the socialists in our country are former Christian rninisters, who use their power of ethical and religious appeal. In Labor Lyceums and similar gatherings, ministers are often invited as speakers, though perhaps quite as much in the hope of converting them as with a desire to hear what they have to say. The divorce between the new class movement and the old religion can still be averted. It is a hopeful fact that in our country the Church is so close to the common people. In many of the largest denominations the churches are organized as pure democracies, and the people own and run them. Our ministry is not an hereditary pundit class, but most ministers have sprung from plain familles and have worked for their living before they became ministers. The Church is not connected with the State and is not tainted, as in Europe, with the reputation of being a plain-clothes policeman to club the people into spiritual submission to the ruling powers. The churches of monarchical countries have preached loyalty to the monarchy as an essential part of Christian character. The Church in America believes heartily in political democracy. But a Church which believes in political democracy can easily learn to believe in industrial democracy as soon as it comprehends the connection. It has one foot in the people's camp. The type of Christianity prevailing in America was developed in the Puritan Revolution and has retained the spirit of its origin. It is radical, evangelical, and has the strong bent toward politics which Calvinism has everywhere had. American ministers naturally take a keen interest in public lire, and, as well as they know, have tried to bring the religious forces to bear at least on some aspects of public affairs. As a result of these characteristics, the Christian Church in America is actually deeply affected by sympathy with the social movement. It stands now, at the very beginning of th social movement in America, where the repentant Church of Germany stands after a generation of punishment by atheistic socialism. No other learned profession seems to be so open to socialist ideals as the ministry. Several years ago the New York Evening Post began to lainent that the Church had gone over to socialism. Nevertheless the working class have not as yet gained the impression that the Church is a positive reënforcement to them in their struggle. The impression is rather the other way. The eminent ministers whose utterances are most widely disseminated are usually the pastors of wealthy churches, and it is natural that they should echo the views taken by the friends vith whom they are in sympathetic intercourse. Even those ministers who are intellectually interested in social problems are not always in sympathy with the immediate conflicts of the working class. They may take a lively interest in municipal reform or public ownership, and yet view dubiously the efforts to create a fighting organization for labor or to end the vages system. We are of a different class and find it hard to sympathize with the class struggle of the wage-,vorkers. In recent years many ministers have spoken frankly and boldly against the physical violence and brutality in connection with the great strikes, and against the denial of "the right to work." The former protest vas ruade in the naine of law and order, the latter in the naine of liberty. No one vho has ever seen the destruction of property in a riot, or the hounding of scabs by a mob, or the unleashing of the brute passions under the continued strain of a great industrial conflict, can help sympathizing vith both contentions. And yet it is probable that when posterity looks back on the struggles of our day, it will judge that the righteous indignation of these protests was directed against a cause that was more righteous still. Law is unspeakably precious. Order is the daughter of heaven. Yet in practice law and order are on the side of those in possession. The men who are out can get in only through the disturbance of the order now prevailing. Those who in the past cried for law and order at any cost have throttled many a new-born child of justice. The aristocracy and bureaucracy of Russia are all for law and order, for law and order mean the old law and their own order. When the German peasants in 525, betrayed and murdered by their aristocratic enemies who scorned to keep faith with the canaille, used violence in turn, Luther lost all his former faint sympathy with their fair demands, and called for order at any price. He said they had forfeited all rights, and summoned the forces of order to kill them as one would kill a mad dog. They did it. The princes and barons, assured that they were not only protecting their class interest, but serving God in the bargain, slaughtered probably a hundred thousand, devastated entire districts, broke the backbone of the German peasantry, and retarded the emancipation of a great and worthy class by centuries. It was a very righteous impulse with Luther, and yet we count it one of the darkest stains on his life. That class which he opposed in the blind agony of its emancipation is now rising to intelligence and power, and is forgetting all his great merits for this sin committed against the common people. When violence was used during the Brooklyn street-car strike in 1895, an eminent minister of that city used words that sounded strangely like Luther's fearful invective, "If clubs will not do, then bayonets; if bayonets will hot do, then lead; if bullets will hOt do, then Gatling guns." He said he was willing to have the churches turned into hospitals to see order maintained. Freedom, too, is a holy word. The right to labor is one of the fundamental rights of man. But the cry of "the right to work" in our country has been raised mainly by the employers on behalf of those who were willing to help them in breaking down the resistance of organized labor. Their interest seems to be more in the right to be worked for than in the right to work. Strike-breaking is now a highly organized business, and those who do it rank morally with the mercenaries kept by princes to subdue their people. For those workmen who under the pressure of need break away from the coherence of their class and take the job which is calling for them, the situation is indeed terrible. The "scab" may be actuated by fine motives. He may feel loyalty to the employer whose bread he has long eaten; he may be driven by the hunger and sickness of his family to provide bread for them at any cost; or he may disapprove of this strike or of labor-unions in general. But he breaks down the solidarity of his class, and his class will judge him by that standard alone. There has never beell a social class or group which has hot punished to the best of its ability any one who betrayed the interests of the class, and which did not visit bitterer condemnation on those actions which endangered its safety than on any others. A boy may steal apples and retain his moral standing with the other boys, but he must hot "tell on a fellow." A cow-boy could sin ail around the compass with impunity, but if he stole a horse, he was hung; the safety of his class depended on the security of their horses. Militarism winks at gambling and lewdness, but strikes relentlessly at insubordination. The governing powers in Russia have been lenient on many things, but they tolerated no opinions which undermined the moral foundations of the autocracy. While the clerical hierarchy was dominant, it punished the schismatic and heretic, for he was the "scab" and "blackleg" of the Church. Each class regards the punishment visited on its traitors as just and natural, but regards with horror the class of offences punished by the opposing class and its methods of getting even with its traitors. These observations have held true throughout human history, and bave been deeply influential in the gradual formation of customary and statutory law. The working class is now engaged in a great historic class struggle which is becoming ever more conscious and bitter. Their labor is all they have. Individually they are helpless. Their only hope for wresting better wages and conditions from the other side is in union of action. With infmite effort, with sacrifice of time, money, and chances of self-advancement, they create organizations which obey discipline and act together. Under certain circumstances any one breaking away from their discipline may secure exceptional terres for himself, but he does so at the expense of all the efforts which the union bas put forth. Others are laboriously erecting a dam to raise the water level so that ail may irrigate their fields and raise better crops. This man breaks through the dam to get an inamediate supply for his own field. If we expect the working class to be patient with those who seil out the interest of their class for personal advantage, and lend themselves as tools to those who seek to undermîne the fighting force of the organization, we demand of one of th lowest groups of society a moral mamaanimity and breadth of view which no other group has ever shown. The great sociologist Schaeffle, who was by no means a radical, said, "There is nothing more brutal than a moneyed aristocracy in persecuting those who dispute its dominion." The philosophy of all class movements is summed up in Kipling's Jungle Law:1 __

" Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break t rnust die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength o] the Pack is the Wol], and the strength o] the Wol] is tke Pack. Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is — 'Obey!'"

In its struggle the working class becomes keenly conscious of the obstacles put in its way by the great institutions of society, the courts, the press, or the Church. It demands not only impartiality, but the kind of sympathy which will condone its mistakes and discern the justice of its cause in spite of the excesses of its followers. When out sympathies are enlisted, we develop a vast faculty for making excuses. If two dogs fight, our own dog is rarely the aggressor. Stealing peaches is a boyish prank when out boy does it, but petty larceny when that dratted boy of our neighbor does it. If the other political party grafts, it is a flagrant shame; if our own party does it, we regret it politely or deny the fact. If Germany annexes a part of Africa, it is brutal aggression; if England does it, she i Kipling, "The Second Jungle Book. "»

"fulfils her mission of civilization." If the business interests exclude the competition of foreign merchants by a protective tariff, it is a grand national policy; if the trades-unions try to exclude the competition of non-union labor, it is a denial of the right to work and an outrage. The working class likes to get that kind of sympathy which will take a favorable view of its efforts and its mistakes, and a comprehension of the wrongs under which it suffers. Instead of that the pulpit of late has given its most vigorous interest to the wrongs of those whom militant labor regards as traitors to its cause. It has been more concerned with the fact that some individuals were barred from a job by the unions, than with the fact that the entire wage-working class is debarred from the land, from the tools of production, and from their fair share in the proceeds of production. It cannot well be denied that there is an increasing alienation between the working class and the churches. 1 That alienation is most complete wherever our industrial development has advanced farthest and has created a distinct class of wage-workers. Several causes have contributed. Many have dropped away because they cannot afford to take their share in the expensive maintenance of a church in a large city. Others because the tone, the spirit, the point of view in the churches, is that of another social class. The commercial and professional classes dominate the spiritual atmosphere in the large city churches. As the workingmen grow more class-conscious, they come to regard the business men as their antagonists and the possessing classes as exploiters who live 1 On the extent and causes of this alienafion see Richard Heath's "Captive City of God."

on their labor, and they resent it when persons belonging t« these classes address them with the tone of moral superiority. When ministers handle the labor question, they often seem to the working class partial against them even when the ministers think theyare most impartial. Foreign workingmen bring with them the long-standing distrust for the clergy and the Church as tools of oppression which they have learned abroad, and they perpetuate that attitude here. The churches of America surfer for the sins of the churches abroad. The "scientific socialism" imported from older countries through its literature and its advocates is saturated with materialistic philosophy and is apt to create dislike and antagonism for the ideas and institutions of religion. Thus in spite of the favorable equipment of the Church in America there is imminent danger that the working people will pass from indifference to hostility, from religious enthusiasm to anti-religious bitterness. That would be one of the most unspeakable calamities that could corne upon the Church. If we would only take warning by the fate of the churches in Europe, we might avert the desolation that threatens us. We may well be glad that in nearly every city there are a few ministers who are known as the outspoken friends of labor. Their fellow-ministers may regard them as radicals, lacking in balance, and very likely they are; but in the present situation they are among the most valuable servants of the Church. The workingmen see that there is at least a minority in the Church that champions their cause, and that fact helps to keep their judgment in hopeful suspense about the Church at large. Men who are just as one-sided in favor of capitalism pass as sane and conservative men. If the capitalist class have their court- chaplains, it is only fair that the army of labor should have its army-chaplains who administer the consolations of religion to militant labor. Thus the Church has a tremendous stake in the social crisis. It may try to maintain an attitude of neutrality» but neither side will permit it. If it is quiescent, it thereby throws its influence on the side of things as they are, and the class which aspires to a fitter place in the organization of society will feel the great spiritual force of the Church as a dead weight against it. If it loses the loyalty and trust of the working class, it loses the very class in which it originated, to which its founders belonged, and which has lifted it to power. If it becomes a religion of the upper classes, it condernns itself to a slow and comfortable death. Protestantism from the outset entered into an intimate alliance with the intelligence and wealth of the city population. As the cities grew in importance since the Reformation, as commerce overshadowed agriculture, and as the business class crowded the feudal aristocracy out of its leading position since the French Revolution, Protestantism throve with the class which had espoused it. It lifted its class, and its class lifted it. On the other hand, the Anabaptist. movement in Germany, which propagated within the lower classes, was crushed with the class that bore its banner. If the present class struggle of the wage-workers is successful, and they become the dominant class of the future, any religious ideas and institutions which they now embrace in the heat of their struggle will fise to power with them, and any institution on which they turn their back is likely to find itself in the cold. The parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins holds of entire nations and institutions as well as of individuals.

We have seen that the crisis of society is also the crisis o| the Church. The Church, too, feels the incipient paralysls that is creeping upon our splendid Christian civilization through the unjust absorption of wealth on one side and the poverty of the people on the other. It cannot thrive when society decays. Its wealth, its independence, its ministry, its social hold, its spiritual authority, are threatened in a hundred ways. But on the other hand the present crisis presents one of the greatest opportunities for its own growth and development that have ever been offered to Christianity. The present historical situation is a high summons of the Eternal to enter on a larger duty, and thereby to inherit a larger lire. In all the greatest forward rnovernents of hurnanity, religion has been one of the driving forces. The dead weight of hoary institutions and the resistance of the caked and incrusted customs and ideas of the past are so great that unless the dormant energies of the people are awakened by moral enthusiasrn and religious faith, the old triurnphs over the new. "Mighty Truth's yet rnightier rnan-child" cornes to the hout of birth, but there is no strength to bring forth. But in turn the greatest forward rnovernents in religion have always taken place under the call of a great historical situation. Religious rnovernents of the first rnagnitude are seldom purely religious in their origin and character. It is when nations throb with patriotic fervor, with social indignation, with the keen joy of new intellectual light, with the vastness and fear of untried conditions, when "the energy sublime of a century bursts full-blossorned on the thorny stem of Tirne," that religion, too, will rise to a new epoch in its existence.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century is a classical illustration of this fact. The popular view which regards it first of all as a restoration of evangelical doctrine on the basis of the open Bible is almost wholly misleading. 1 The Reformation had been gathering headway for four years before Luther put his hand to the translation of the Bible, and then he had no clear foresight of the importance of that work. Ne nailed up his Theses on indulgences in 5  7, but he did hOt begin to attack the doctrines of the Church till 52o. The prime cause of the Reformation was the smouldering anger of the Northern nations at their financial exploitation by the Italian papacy. Luther's great manifesto "to the Christian Nobility of Germany" was a tremendous social, educational, and ecclesiastical reform programme. Ne secured the support of the princes and nobles because he said with a thundering voice what all felt about the extortion and oppression of the ecclesiastical machine. At the Diet of Worms in 52 nearly all the German estates were friendly to him, but they cared nothing for his doctrinal differences, and would have been best pleased if he had abjured them. The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 57 to 525, when the whole nation was in commotion and a great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of lire. The mightiest years in the lire of Luther were those saine years when he was the spokesman of an awakened  H. C. Lea, "Cambridge Modern History," I, 653: "The religious changes incident to the Reformation... were not the object sought, but the means for attaining that object.... The overthrow of dogma was the only way to obtain permanent relief from the intolerable abuses of the existing ecclesiasfical systern." This statement is extreme, but it is nearer th truth than the popular view.

nation and grappled fearlessly with all the problems of human lire. 1 Then came the reactionary turn in his lire. He feared the spirit which he had helped to evoke. He disavowed the cause of the lower classes, distrusted the common people in Church and State, alienated their love and trust, and strengthened the wealth and power of the princes. By his theological dognmtism he repelled the men who had fought with him in the interests of education and science, and the Swiss reformers who differed with him on points of doctrine. He had been the leader of a nation; now he became the head of a sect. The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and creative when it embraced the whole of human lire and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became "religious" in the narrower sense, it grew scholastic and spiny, quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noble lire. The sceptre of leadership passed from Lutheranism to Calvinism and to regenerated Catholicism. Calvinism had a far wider sphere of influence and a far deeper effect on the lire of the nations than Lutheranism, because it continued to fuse religious faith with the demand for political liberty and social justice. Similafly the religious reform movements of the Middle Ages were very closely connected with wider social causes: the changes created by the crusades, the consequent fise of commerce, the growth of luxury, the transition to a money basis in industry, the rise of the cities and the development of a new city preletariat. The movement of Francis of Assisi, of the Waldenses, of the Humiliati and Bons Hommes, were all inspired by democratic and communistic ideals. Wiclif 1 Harnack, "History of Dogma," VII, i68 ff.