WI-IAT TO DO
of the lost; not to yield to political partisanship, but to deal with moral questions before they become political issues and with those questions of public welfare which never do become political issues. They must lift the social questions to a religious level by faith and spiritual insight. The larger the number of ministers who attempt these untrodden ways, the saler and saner will those be who follow. By interpreting one social class to the other, they can create a disposition to make concessions and help in securing a peaceful settlement of social issues. The force of the religius spirit should be bent toward asserting the supremacy of lire over property. Property exists to maintain and develop lire. It is unchristian to regard human lire as a mere instrument for the production of wealth. The religious sentiment can protect good customs and institutions against the inroads of ruthless greed, and extenà their scope. It can create humane customs which the law is impotent to create. It can create the convictions and customs which are later embodied in good legislation. Out complex society tests largely on the stewardshîp of delegated powers. The opportunities to profit by the betrayal of trust increase with the wealth and complexity of civilization. The most fundamental evils in past history and present conditions vere due to converting stewardship into ownership. The keener moral insight created by Christianity should lend its help in scrutinizing all claires to property and power in order to detect latent public rights and to recall the recreant stewards to their duty. Primitive society was communistic. The most valuable institutions in modern life—the family, the school and church— are communistic. The State, too, is essentially communistic and is becoming increasingly so. During the larger part of its history the Christian Church regarded communism as the only ideal life. Christianity certainly bas more afiïnity for coSperative and fraternal institutions than for competitive disunion. It should therefore strengthen the existing communistic instftutions and aid the evolution of society from the present temporary stage of individualism to a higher form of communism. The splendid ideal of a fraternal organization of society cannot be realized by idealists only. It must be supported by the self-interest of a powerful class. The working class, which is now engaged in its upward movement, is struggling to secure better conditions of lire, an assured status for its class organizations, and ultimately the ownership of the means of production. Its success in the last great aire would mean the closing of the gap which now divides industrial society and the establishment of industry on the principle of solidarity and the method of co6peration. Christianity should enter into a working alliance with this rising class, and by its mediation secure the victory of these principles by a gradual equalization of social opportunity and power.
The first ap9. stolate of Chrfstianity was born from a deep fellow-feeling for social misery and from the consciousness of a great historical opportunity. Jesus saw the peasantry of Galilee following him about with their poverty and their diseases, like shepherdless sheep that have been scattered and harried by beasts of prey, and his heart had compassion on them. He felt that the harvest was ripe, but there were few to reap it. Past history had corne to its culmination, but there were few who understood the situation and were prepared to cope with it. He bade his disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, and then ruade them answer their own prayers by sending them out two by two to proclaim the kingdom of God. That was the beginning of the world-wide mission of Christianity. The situation is repeated on a vaster scale to-day. If Jesus stood to-day amid our modern life, with that outlook on the condition of all humanity which observation and travel and the press would spread before him, and with the saine heart of divine humanity beating in him, he would create a new apostolate to meet the new needs in a new harvest-time of history. To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs and the long reaches of rime needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a fait and futile dream. Yet in fact it is not one tithe as hopeless as when Jesus set out to do it. When he told his disciples, "Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world," he expressed the consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity. Yet it was a Nazarene carpenter speaking to a group of Galiloean peasants and fishermen. Under the circumstances at that rime it was an utterance of the most daring faith,—faith in himself, faith in them, faith in what he was putting into them, faith in faith. Jesus failed and was crucified, first his body by his enemies, and then his spirit by his friends; but that failure was so amazing a success that today it takes an effort on out part to realize that it required any t See Matthew 9. 32-I°- 42.
aith on his part to inaugurate the kingdom of God and t« send out his apostolate. To-day, as Jesus looks out upon humanity, his spirit must leap to see the souls responsive to his call. They are sown broadcast through hurnanity, legions of thern. The harvestfield is no longer deserted. All about us we hear the clang of the whetstone and the rush of the blades through the grain and the shout of the reapers. With all our faults and our slothfulness we rnodern men in many ways are more on a level with the real rnind of Jesus than any generation that has gonc before. If that first apostolate was able to remove mountains by the power of faith, such an apostolate as Christ could now sumrnon rnight change the face of the earth. The apostolate of a new age rnust do the work of the sower. When the sower goes forth to sow his seed, he goes with the certainty of partial failure and the knowledge that a long rime of patience and of hazard will intervene before he can hope to see the result of his work and his venture. In sowing the truth a man rnay never see or trace the results. The more ideal his conceptions are, and the farther they rnove ahead o[ his tirne, the larger will be the percentage of apparent failure. But he can afford to wait. The powers of life are on his side. I-Ie is like a man who has scattered his seed and then goes off to sleep by night and work by day, and all the while the seed, by the inscrutable chemistry of lire, lays hold of the ingredients of its environment and builds thern up to its own growth. The mustard-seed becomes a tree. The leaven assirnilates the meal by biological processes. The new life penetrates the old hurnanity and transforms it. Robert Owen was a sower. His co/5perative comrnunities failed. He was able to help only a srnall fraction of the workingrnen of his day. Bu[:
his moral enthusiasm and his ideas fertilized the finest and most self-sacrificing minds among the working classes. They cherished his ultimate hopes in private and worked for realizable ends in public. The Chartist movement was filled with his spirit. The most influential leaders of English unionism in its great period after the middle of the nineteenth century were Owenites. The Rochdale Pioneers were under his influence, and the great co6perative movement in England, an economic force of the first importance, grew in some measure out of the seed which Owen had scattered. Other men may own the present. The future belongs to the sower—provided he scatters seed and does not mistake the chaff for it which once was so essential to the seed and now is dead and useless. It is inevitable that those who stand against conditions in which most men believe and by which the strongest profit, shall surfer for their stand. The little group of early Chrisflan socialists in England, led by Maurice, Kingsley, and Hughes, now stand by common consent in the history of that generation as one of its finest products, but at that time they were bitterly assailed and misunderstood. Pastor Rudolf Todt, the first man in Germany who undertook to prove that the New Testament and the ethics of socialism have a close affmity, was almost unanimously attacked by the Church of Germany. But Jesus told his apostles at the outset that opposition would be part of their day's work. Christ equipped his Church with no legal rights to protect her; the only poh'tical right he gave his disciples was the right of being persecuted.* It is part of the doctrine of vicarious atonement, which is fundamental in Christianity, that the prophetic souls i Nathusius, "Mitarbeit der Kirche," p. 476.
must vîndicate by their sufferings the truth of the truth they preach.
"Disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled; Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience ail the passion of great hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings lais patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe, One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 1
The championship of social justice is almost the only way left open to a Christian nowadays to gain the crown of martyrdom. Theological heretics are rarely persecuted now. The only rival of God is mammon, and it is only when his sacred naine is blasphemed that men throw the Christians to the lions. Even for the social heretics there is a generous readiness to listen which was unknown in the past. In our country that openness of mind is a product of our free intellectual lire, our ingrained democracy, the denominational manifoldness of our religious life, and the spread of the Christian spirit. It bas become an accepted doctrine among us that all great movements have obscure beginnings, and that belief tends to x James Russell Lowell, "Columbus."
make men respectful toward anything that cornes from some despised Nazareth. Unless a man forfeits respect by bitterness or lack of tact, he is accorded a large degree of tolerance, though he will always be ruade to feel the difference between himself and those who say the things that please the great. The certainty of opposition constitutes a special call to the strong. The ministry seems to have little attraction for the sons of rich men. It is hOt strange when one considers the enervating trials that beset a rich man in a pastorate. But here is a mission that ought to appeal to the rich young man if he has heroic stuff in him. His assured social standing would give him an influence with rich and poor alike which others attain but slowly if at ail The fear of being blacklisted for championing justice and mercy need have no tertors for him. To use his property as a coat of mail in fighting the battles of the weak would be the best way of obeying Christ's command to the rich young ruler to sell all and give it to the poor. When Mr. Roosevelt was still Police Commissioner in New York, he said to the young men of New York: "I would teach the young men that he who°has hOt wealth owes his first duty to his family, but he who has means owes his to the State. It is ioble to go on heaping up money. I would preach the doctrine of work to all, and to the men of wealth the doctrine of unremunerative work."' The most "unremunerative work" is the work that draws opposition and animosity. Mr. Roosevelt implies here that a man's duty to his family is the first and dominant duty, and that this exempts him in some measure from service to the larger public. It follows that the childless have a call to the dangerous work of the Jacob A. Riis, ' Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen."
kingdom of God. A man and woman who are feeding and training young citizens are performing so immense and absorbing a service to the future that they might well be exempt from taxes to the State and from sacrificial service to the kingdom of God. If nevertheless so many of them assume these duties in addition, the childless man and woman will have to do heroic work in the trenches before they can rank on the saine level. It is not fair to ask a man with children to give his time and strength as freely to public causes as if he had none. It is still more unfair to expect him to risk the bread and the prospects of lais family in championing dangerous causes as freely as if he risked only himself. The childless people should adopt the whole coming generation of children and fight to make the world more habitable for them as for their own brood. The unmarried and the childless should enlist in the new apostolate and march on the forlorn hopes with Jesus Christ. In asking for faith in the possibility of a new social order, we ask for no Utopian delusion. We know well that there is no perfection for man in this life: there is only growth toward perfection. In personal religion we look with seasoned suspicion at any one who claires to be holy and perfect, yet we always tell men to become holy and to seek perfection. We make it a duty to seek what is unattainable. We have the saine paradox in the perfectibility of society. We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith. We shall never abolish suffering. There will always be death and the empty chair and heart. There will always be the agony of love unreturned. Women will long for children and never press baby lips to their breast. Men will long for faine and miss it. Imperfect moral insight will work hurt in the best conceivable social order. The strong will always have the impulse to exert their strength, and no system can be devised which can keep them from crowding and jostling the weaker. Increased social refinement will bring increased sensitiveness to pain. An American may surfer as much distress through a social slight as a Russian peasant under the knout. At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming. But every approximation to it is worth while. Every step toward personal purity and peace, though it only makes the consciousness of imperfeçtion more poignant, carries its own exceeding great reward, and everlasting pilgrimage toward the kingdom of God is better than contented stability in the tents of wickedness.,Mad sometimes the hot hope surges up that perhaps the long and slow climb may be ending. In the past the steps of our race toward progress have been short and feeble, and succeeded by long intervals of sloth and apathy. But is that necessarily to remain the rate of advance? In the intellectual life there has been an unprecedented leap forward during the last hundred years. Individually we are not more gifted than our grandfathers, but collectively we have wrought out more epoch-making discoveries and inventions in one century than the whole race in the untold centuries that have gone before. If the twentieth century could do for us in the control of social forces what the nineteenth did for us in the control of natural forces, our grandchildren would lire in a society that would be justified in regarding our present social life as semi-barbarous. Since the Reformation began to free the mind and to direct the force of religion toward morality, there has been a perceptible increase of speed. Humanity is gaining in elasticity and capacity for change, and every gain in general intelligence, in organizing capacity, in physical and moral soundness, and especially in responsiveness to ideal motives, again increases the ability to advance without disastrous reactions. The swiftness of evolution in our own country proves the immense latent perfectibility in human nature. Last May a miracle happened. At the beginning of the week the fruit trees bore brown and greenish buds. At the end of the week they were robed in bridal garments of blossoin. But for weeks and months the sap had been rising and distending the cells and maturing the tissues which were hall ready in the fall belote. The swift unfolding was the culmination of a long process. Perhaps these nineteen centuries of Christian influence have been a long preliminary stage of growth, and now the flower and fruit are almost here. If at this juncture we can rally suflïcient religious faith and moral strength to snap the bonds of evil and turn the present unparalleled economic and intellectual resources of humanity to the harmonious development of a true social lire, the generations yet unborn will mark this as that great day of the Lord for which the ages waited, and count us blessed for sharing in the apostolate that proclaimed it.