THE SALVATION OF THE SUPER-PERSONAL FORCES
In discussing the doctrine of sin we faced the fact that redemption will have to deal not only with the weakness of flesh and blood, but with the strength of principalities and powers.^ Beyond the feeble and short-lived individual towers the social group as a super-personal entity, dominating the individual, assimilating him to its moral standards, and enforcing them by the social sanctions of approval or disapproval.
When these super-personal forces are based on an evil principle, or directed toward an evil purpose, or corrupted by some controlling group interest which is hostile to the common good, they are sinners of sublimer mould, and they block the way of redemption. They are to us what demonic personalitiesWere to earlier Christian minds. Men of religious vision have always seen social communities in that way. The prophets dealt with Israel and Judah, with Moab and Assyria, as with personalities having a continuous life and spirit and destiny. Jesus saw Jerusalem as a man might see a beloved woman who is driven by haughtiness and self-will into tragic ruin.
In our age these super-personal social forces present more difficult problems than ever before. The scope and diversity of combination is becoming constantly greater. The strategy of the Kingdom of God is shortsighted indeed if it does not devote thought to their salvation and conversion.
The salvation of the composite personalities, like that of individuals, consists in coming under the law of Christ. A few illustrations will explain how this applies.
Two principles are contending with each other for future control in the field of industrial and commercial organization, the capitalistic and the co-operative. The effectiveness of the capitalistic method in the production of wealth is not questioned; modern civilization is evidence of it. But we are also familiar with capitalistic methods in the production of human wreckage. Its one-sided control of economic power tempts to exploitation and oppression; it directs the productive process of society primarily toward the creation of private profit rather than the service of human needs; it demands autocratic management and strengthens the autocratic principle in all social affairs; it has impressed a materialistic spirit on our whole civilization.
On the other hand organizations formed on the cooperative principle are not primarily for profit but for the satisfaction of human wants, and the aim is to distribute ownership, control, and economic benefits to a large number of co-operators.
The difference between a capitalistic organization and a co-operative comes out clearly in the distribution of voting power. Capitalistic joint stock companies work on the plan of " one share, one vote." Therewith power is located in money. One crafty person who has a hundred shares can outvote ninety-nine righteous men who have a share apiece, and a small minority can outvote all the rest if it holds a majority of stock. Money is stronger than life, character, and personality.
Co-operatives work on the plan of *' one man, one vote." A man who holds one share has as much voting power as a man with ten shares; his personality counts. If a man wants to lead and direct, he can not do it by money power; he must do it by character, sobriety, and good judgment. The small stockholders are not passive; they take part; they must be persuaded and taught. The superior ability of the capable can not outvote the rest, but has to train them. Consequently the co-operatives develop men and educate a community in helpful loyalty and comradeship. This is the advent of true democracy in economic life. Of course the co-operative principle is not a sovereign specific; the practical success of a given association depends on good judgment and the loyalty of its constituents. But the co-operatives, managed by plain men, often with little experience, have not only held their own in Europe against the picked survivors of the capitalistic competitive battle, but have forged steadily ahead into enormous financial totals, have survived and increased even during the war, and by their helpful moral influence have gone a long way to restore a country like Ireland which had long been drained and ruined by capitalism.
Here, I think, we have the difference between saved and unsaved organizations. The one class is under the law of Christ, the other under the law of mammon. The one IS democratic and the other autocratic. Whenever capitalism has invaded a new country or industry, there has been a speeding up in labor and in the production of vi^ealth, but always with a trail of human misery, discontent, bitterness, and demoralization. When co-operation has invaded a country there has been increased thrift, education, and neighborly feeling, and there has been no trail of concomitant evil and no cries of protest. The men in capitalistic business may be the best of men, far superior in ability to the average committee member of a co-operative, but the latter type of organization is the higher, and when co-operation has had as long a time to try out its methods as capitalism, the latter will rank with feudalism as an evil memory of mankind.
Super-personal forces are saved when they come under the law of Christ. A State which uses its terrible power of coercion to smite and crush offenders as a protection to the rest, is still under brutal law. A State which deals with those who have erred in the way of teaching, discipline, and restoration, has come under the law of Christ and is to that extent a saved community. " By their fruits ye shall know them." States are known by their courts and prisons and contract labor systems, or by their juvenile courts and parole systems. A change in penology may be an evidence of salvation.
A State which uses its superior power to overrun a weaker neighbor by force, or to wrest a valuable right of way from it by instigating a coup d'etat, or uses intimidation to secure mining or railway concessions or to force a loan at usurious rates on a half-civilized State, is in mortal sin. A State which asks only for an open door and keeps its own door open in return, and which speaks as courteously to a backward State as to one with a big fleet, is to that extent a Christian community.^
With composite personalities as with individuals " the love of money is the root of all evil." Communities and nations fall into wild fits of anger and cruelty; they are vain and contemptuous of others; they lie and love lies; they sin against their critical conscience; they fall in love with virile and magnetic men just as women do. These are the temptations and dangers which every democracy will meet and from which it will recover with loss and some shame. But, as has been said before, evils become bold and permanent when there is money in them. It was the need of protecting wealth against poverty which made the courts and the criminal law so cruel in the past. It was theological superstition which started the epidemic of witch trials in Europe, but it was the large fees that fell to the lawyers and informers which made that craze so enduring. Nearly all modern wars have had their origin in the covetousness of trade and finance.^
If unearned gain is the chief corrupter of professions, institutions, and combinations of men, these super-personal beings will be put on the road to salvation when their graft is in some way cut off and they are compelled to subsist on the reward of honest service.
The history of the Church furnishes a striking exam-
1 This matter of saving the community life has been discussed more fully in my book, " Christianizing the Social Order," the Macmillan Company, 1912.
pie. For generations before the Reformation the condition of the Church and of the ministry was the sorest social question of the time, weighing heavily on the conscience of all good men. The ministrations of the Church, the sacrament of the altar, the merit gained by the sacrifice of the mass, the penitential system, the practice of indulgences, had been turned into means of great income to the Church and those who were in control of it. The rank and file of the priests and monks were from the common people, and their incomes were poor. But the higher positions of the Church and the wealthier monasteries were in possession of the upper classes, who filled the lucrative places with their younger sons or unmarried daughters. Where rich sinecures existed and an immense patronage was in the gift of the higher churchmen, the rake-off was naturally practised and perfected. Everyone who had paid for getting his position, recouped his investment. The highest institution of service had become the most glaring example of graft. Since the Church always resisted the interference of the laity, and since the oligarchy which surrounded the papacy was itself the chief beneficiary of the ecclesiastical graft, reform was successfully blocked out, or quickly lapsed when it was attempted.
It was this profit system in the Church which produced the religious unrest and finally the revolutionary upheaval of the Reformation in some nations. Men were not dissatisfied with the doctrines of the Church. There were surprisingly few theological heretics. Wycliffe and his followers are the only ones that gained popular influence, and his chief interest, too, was in the social utilization of the wealth of the Church. Men like Savonarola were not doctrinal reformers, but were trying to cleanse the Church of its graft and the resulting idleness and vice. The ideal of *' the poverty of the Church," which was common to men so unlike as Saint Bernard, Arnold of Brescia, Saint Francis, and all the democratic sects, must be understood over against the vested wealth, the graft, and the semigovernmental power of the Church. They wanted the Church voluntarily to give up its wealth, and to put its ministers on the basis of service and the daily bread.
The Church refused to take this heroic path of repentance of its own free will. So it was compelled to take it. In all the countries which officially adopted the Reformation, the possessions and vested incomes of the Church were secularized. The sinecures mostly disappeared. The bishops lost their governmental functions. Everywhere the reform movements converged on this impoverishment of the Church with a kind of collective instinct. Luther's theses on indulgences got their popularity not by their new and daring theology, for they were a hesitating and wavering statement of a groping mind, — but by the fact that they touched one of the chief sources of papal income. Several of the great doctrines of the Reformation got their vitality by their internal connection with the question of church property.
The process of reformation which stripped the Church of its landed wealth and privileges was nothing beautiful. It was high-class looting. Only a small portion of the wealth was used to endow education and charity. Most of it was seized by kings, princes, and nobles. This gave a new lease of life to autocracy, and in England set up some of the splendid aristocratic families, who still consume what was once given to God. But this unholy procedure did cleanse the Church and its ministry of graft. When there were few large incomes, the rake-off perforce ceased. A body of ministers developed who were on the whole educated, clean, and willing to serve to the best of their understanding on a meagre salary. A great profession had been saved. Its salvation did not come from theology, as theology would have us believe. Where the Roman Catholic clergy is on the basis of hard work and plain income, it has shown similar improvement. The remedy which purified the ministry and the Church " so as by fire," was that " poverty of the Church " which the medieval reformers had demanded. The average minister will not be in doubt that he has married the Lady Poverty, and that this keeps him from wantonness.
The salvation of the super-personal beings is by coming under the law of Christ. The fundamental step of repentance and conversion for professions and organizations is to give up monopoly power and the incomes derived from legalized extortion, and to come under the law of service, content with a fair income for honest work. The corresponding step in the case of governments and political oligarchies, both in monarchies and in capitalistic semi-democracies, is to submit to real democracy. Therewith they step out of the Kingdom of Evil into the Kingdom of God.