I

This regard for human life was based on the same social [pg 009] instinct which every normal man possesses. But with Jesus it was so strong that it determined all his viewpoints and activities. He affirmed the humane instinct consciously and intelligently, and raised it to the dignity of a social principle. This alone would be enough to mark him out as a new type, prophetic and creative of a new development of the race.

Whence did Jesus derive the strength and purity of his social feeling? Was it simply the endowment of a finely attuned nature? Other fine minds of the ancient world valued men according to their wealth, their rank, their power, their education, their beauty. Jesus valued men as such, apart from any attractive equipment. Why? “The deeper our insight into human destiny becomes, the more sacred does every individual human being seem to us” (Lotze). The respect of Jesus for every concrete person whom he met was due to his religious insight into human life and destiny. But how did he get his insight?

Love and religion have the power of idealistic interpretation. To a mother her child is a wonderful being. To a true lover the girl he loves has sacredness. With Jesus the consciousness of a God of love revealed the beauty of men. The old gods were despotic supermen, mythical duplicates of the human kings and conquerors. The God of Jesus was the great Father who lets his light shine on the just and the unjust, and offers forgiveness and love to all. Jesus lived in the spiritual atmosphere of that faith. Consequently he saw men from that point of view. They were to him children of that God. Even the lowliest was high. The light that shone on him from the face of God shed a splendor on the prosaic ranks of men. In this way religion enriches and illuminates social feeling.

Jesus succeeded in transmitting something of his own sense of the sacredness of life to his followers. As Wundt says: “Humanity in this highest sense was brought into the world by Christianity.” The love of men became a social dogma of the Church. Some other convictions of Jesus left few traces on the common thought of Christendom, but the [pg 010] Church has always stood for a high estimate of the potential worth of the soul of man. It has always taught that man was made in God's image and that he is destined to share in the holiness and eternal life of God.

II

What effects has this registered on social conduct? Has the Church intelligently resisted social forces or conditions which brutalized or shamed men?

It is most difficult to estimate accurately the historic influence of religious ideas. They are subtle and hard to trace. But we can justly reason from our own observations in evangelism and foreign mission work. Those of us who have gone through a clearly marked conversion to Christianity will probably remember that we realized our fellow-men with a new warmth and closeness, and under higher points of view. We were then entering into the Christian valuation of human life. In foreign missions the influence of Christianity can be contrasted with non-Christian social life, and there is often a striking rise in the respect for life and personality as compared with the hardness and callousness of heathen society. This is one of the distinctive marks of the modern and Western world compared with the ancient and the Oriental. Those individuals among us who have really duplicated something of the spirit of Jesus are always marked by their loving regard for human life, even its wreckage. That sense of sacredness is the basis for the whole missionary and philanthropic activity of Christian men and women.

It is also an important force in the social movements. Have there been any widespread, continuous, and successful movements for social justice outside of the territory influenced by Christianity? Was there any causal connection between the historic reformation and purification of Christianity since the sixteenth century and the rise of civil and social democracy? Does the spread of Christian ideas and feelings predispose the powerful classes to make concessions? What contribution [pg 011] did the Wesleyan revival among the working people of England make toward the rise of the trade union movement, the education of stable leaders, and the faith in democracy? It takes idealistic convictions a long time to permeate large social classes, but they often spring into effectiveness suddenly. Certainly a belief in the worth and capacity of the common man is a spiritual support of democratic institutions, and where the Church really spread the Christian sense of the worth and sacredness of human life, it has been a great stabilizer of civil liberty.

Jesus asserted with religious power what all men feel. Sometimes it requires the solemn presence of death to brush aside the artificial distinctions of society and to make us realize that a life is a life, and precious as such. But when we are at our best, we do feel the sacredness of human life.

III

Does our present social order develop or neutralize that feeling in us?

Presumably it works both ways. For those who want to spread the spirit of Christ, it becomes important to inquire at what points our social institutions cheapen life and take the value out of personality.

The class differences inherited from the past are designed to hedge the upper classes about with honor, but they necessarily depreciate the lower classes by contrast and neutralize the tie of the common blood. In some countries the self-respect of the lower classes is affronted by degrading forms of legal punishment reserved for them. Forms of servility are exacted from servants and peasants. The practical working of class differences is most clearly seen in the relation of the sexes. Love is a great equalizer; hence it clashes with class pride. The plot of innumerable dramas and novels turns on the efforts of love to overcome the laws of social caste. Where class spirit is traditional and fully developed, men have a double code for the women of their own class, [pg 012] and those of the lower classes. It is a far greater offense for a gentleman to marry a girl of the lower class than to ruin her.

It is the glory of America that our laws do not intend to recognize class differences. The conditions of life on a raw continent and the principles embodied in religious and political idealism fortunately cooperated. Will this last, or are the great differences in wealth once more resulting in definite class lines and in class pride and contempt? What does the phrase “of good family” imply by contrast? What evidence does college fraternity life offer as to the existence of social classes? How is immigration likely to increase the cleavages by adding differences of race and color, religion, language, and manners? What light does the history of immigration in America cast on our valuation of human life in strangers?

Political oligarchies have usually defended their rule by the assumption that the masses are incapable and the few are superior. The laws made by them, however, have usually shown ignorance and indifference as to the human needs of the working masses. The same fundamental adjustment exists in industry. It is not an expression of the worth of the working people if they have no right to organize or to share in governing the conditions under which they work, and if years of good work earn a man no ownership or equity, no legal standing or even tenure of employment in a business. Is the right to petition for a redress of grievances an adequate industrial expression of the Christian doctrine of the worth and sacredness of personality? Is not property essential to the real freedom and self-expression of a human personality?

War and prostitution are the most flagrant offenses against this social principle. War is a wholesale waster of life. Prostitution is the worst form of contempt for personality.

Does our intellectual and scientific work ever tend to chill the warm sense of human values? Do we acquire something of the impassiveness of Nature in studying her enormous waste of life? Do we transfer to human affairs her readiness [pg 013] to use up the masses in order to produce a higher type? Jesus did not talk about eliminating the unfit. He talked about saving them, which requires greater constructive energy if it is really to be done. It also requires a higher faith in the latent recuperative capacities of human nature. The detached attitude of scientific study may combine with our plentiful natural egotism to create a cold indifference toward the less attractive masses of humanity. We need the glow of Christ's feeling for men to come unharmed out of this intellectual temptation.

IV

Doubtless the objection has arisen in our minds that it is not in the interest of the future of the race that religious pity shall coddle and multiply the weak, or put them in control of society.

But did Jesus want the weak to stay weak? Was his social feeling ever maudlin? He was himself a powerful and free personality, who refused to be suppressed or conformed to the dominant type. He challenged the existing authorities, one against the field. Even in the slender record we have of him we can see him running the gamut of emotions from wrath and invective to tenderness and humor. It was precisely his own powerful individuality which made him demand for others the right to become free and strong souls. Other powerful individuals have used up the rest as means to their end. What human life or character did Jesus weaken or break down? He was an emancipator, a creator of strong men. His followers in later times did lay a new yoke on the spirits of men and denied them the right to think their own thoughts and be themselves. But the spirit of Jesus is an awakening force. Even the down-and-out brace up when they come in contact with him, and feel that they are still good for something.

“Jesus Christ was the first to bring the value of every human soul to light, and what he did no one can any more [pg 014] undo” (Harnack). But it remains for every individual to accept and reaffirm that religious faith as his own guiding principle according to which he proposes to live. We shall be at one with the spirit of Christianity and of modern civilization if we approach all men with the expectation of finding beneath commonplace, sordid, or even repulsive externals some qualities of love, loyalty, heroism, aspiration, or repentance, which prove the divine in man. Kant expressed that reverence for personality in his doctrine that we must never treat a man as a means only, but always as an end in himself. So far as our civilization treats men merely as labor force, fit to produce wealth for the few, it is not yet Christian. Any man who treats his fellows in that way, blunts his higher nature; as Fichte says, whoever treats another as a slave, becomes a slave. We might add, whoever treats him as a child of God, becomes a child of God and learns to know God.

“The principle of reverence for personality is the ruling principle in ethics, and in religion; it constitutes, therefore, the truest and highest test of either an individual or a civilization; it has been, even unconsciously, the guiding and determining principle in all human progress; and in its religious interpretation, it is, indeed, the one faith that keeps meaning and value for life” (President Henry C. King).

I

None ever felt this social unity of our race more deeply than Jesus. To him it was sacred and divine. Hence his emphasis on love and forgiveness. He put his personality behind the natural instinct of social attraction and encouraged it. He swung the great force of religion around to bear on it and drive it home. Anything that substitutes antagonism for fraternity is evil to him. Just as in the case of the natural respect for human life and personality, so in the case of the natural social cohesion of men, he lifted the blind instinct of human nature by the insight of religion and [pg 024] constituted it a fundamental principle of life. It is the business of Christianity to widen the area of comradeship.

Common human judgment assents to the valuation of Jesus. Wherever an effective and stable form of fellowship has been created, a sense of sacredness begins to attach to it, and men defend it as a sort of shrine of the divine in man. Wherever men are striving to create a larger fellowship, they have religious enthusiasm as if they were building a temple for God. This is the heart of church loyalty.

The family is the most striking case of solidarity. It is first formed of two units at opposite poles in point of sex, experience, taste, need, and aims; and when they form it, they usually have as much sense of sacredness as their character is capable of feeling. When children are added, more divergences of age, capacity, and need are injected. Yet out of these contradictory elements a social fellowship is built up, which, in the immense majority of cases, defies the shocks of life and the strain of changing moods and needs, forms the chief source of contentment for the majority of men and women, and, when conspicuously successful, wins the spontaneous tribute of reverence from all right-thinking persons. In using the equipment of the home, in standing by one another in time of sickness and trouble, and in spiritual sympathy, a true family practices solidarity of interests, and furnishes the chief education in cooperation.

Political unity was at first an expansion of family unity. The passionate loyalty with which a nation defends its country and its freedom, is not simply a defence of real estate and livestock, but of its national brotherhood and solidarity. The devotion with which people suffer and die for their State is all the more remarkable because all States hitherto have been largely organizations for coercion and exploitation, and only in part real fraternal communities. Patriotism hitherto has been largely a prophetic outreaching toward a great fellowship nowhere realized. The peoples walk by faith.

What evidence does college life furnish us of the fact that social unity is realized with some sense of sacredness? Why [pg 025] do the years in college stand out in the later memories of graduates with such a glamour? Why do students devote so much unpaid service to their teams and fraternities? Is it for the selfish advantages they hope to get, or because they feel they are realizing the best of life in being part of a solidaristic group? Do the dangers of college organizations prove or disprove the principle that fellowship is felt to be something sacred?

Any historical event in which men stood by their group through suffering or to death is remembered with pride. Any case of desertion or betrayal is remembered with shame. No group forgives those who sell out its solidarity for private safety or profit.

Insurance and cooperation are two great demonstrations of the power of solidarity. In insurance we bear one another's burdens, “and so fulfil the law of Christ.” The cooperative associations, which have had such enormous success in Europe, succeed only where neighborhood or common idealistic conviction has previously established a consciousness of social unity. They have to overcome the most adverse conditions in achieving success. When they do, the effect on the economic prosperity of the people and on their moral stability and progressiveness is remarkable.

II

Thus the instincts of the race assent to the social principle of Jesus, that fellowship is sacred. The chief law of Christianity does not contradict the social nature of man but expresses and reenforces it. It is the special function of Christians to promote social unity and expand its blessings. To do this intelligently we should take note where, at present, solidarity is frustrated.

For instance, it is important to inquire how social unity is negatived in commercial life. Is competition necessarily unfraternal? Would a Socialist organization of society necessarily be fraternal? Is it a denial of fellowship to exact [pg 026] monopoly profit from consumers, or to take advantage of the ignorance or necessities of a buyer? Is the law of the market compatible with a fraternal conception of society?

Where can you trace the principle of solidarity actually at work in industrial life? Give cases where you have observed a real sense of human coherence and loyalty between employer and employes. How had the feeling been promoted in those cases and what effect did it have on the economic relations of the two groups? Why is the feeling of antagonism between these groups so common? Does the wages system make this inevitable? How ought we to value the willingness of organized labor to stand together, especially on strike, and what connection does the bitterness toward “scabs” have with our subject?

War is a rupture of fellowship on a large scale. The Great War of 1914 has been the most extensive demonstration of the collapse of love which any of us wants to see. As soon as one nation no longer recognizes its social unity with another nation, all morality collapses, and a deluge of hate, cruelty, and lies follows. The problem of international peace is the problem of expanding the area of love and social unity. It is the sin of Christendom that so few took this problem seriously until we were chastised for our moral stupidity and inertia. The young men and women of today will have to take this problem on their intellect and conscience for their lifetime, and propose to see it through.

III

Does religion create social unity or neutralize it? Does prayer isolate or connect? Has the force of religion in human history done more to divide or to consolidate men?

Evidently religion may work both ways, and all who are interested in it must see to it that their religion does not escape control and wreck fraternity. Even mystic prayer and contemplation, which is commonly regarded as the flower of religious life, may make men indifferent to their fellows.

It is worth noting that the prayer experiences of Jesus were not ascetic or unsocial. They prepared him for action. When he went into the desert after his baptism it was to settle the principles on which his Messianic work was to be done; his temptations prove that. When he went out from Capernaum to pray “a great while before day,” it was to launch his aggressive missionary campaign among the Galilæan villages. Prayer may be an emotional dissipation. Prayer is Christian only if it makes us realize our fellows more keenly and affectionately.

It is one thing to praise love and another thing to practice it. We may theorize about society and ourselves be contrary and selfish units in it. Social unity is an achievement. A loving mind toward our fellows, even the cranky, is the prize of a lifetime. How can it be evoked and cultivated in us? That is one of the most important problems in education. Can it be solved without religious influences? Love will not up at the bidding. We can observe the fact that personal discipleship of Christ has given some persons in our acquaintance a rare capacity for love, for social sympathy, for peaceableness, for all the society-making qualities. We can make test of the fact for ourselves that every real contact with him gives us an accession of fraternity and greater fitness for nobler social unity. It makes us good fellows.

IV

The man who intelligently realizes the Chinese and the Zulu as his brothers with whom he must share the earth, is an ampler mind—other things being equal—than the man who can think of humanity only in terms of pale-faces. The consciousness of humanity will have to be wrought out just as the consciousness of nationality was gradually acquired. He who has it is ahead of his time and a pioneer of the future. The missionary puts himself in the position to acquire that wider sense of solidarity. By becoming a neighbor to remote people he broadens their conception of humanity [pg 028] and his own, and then can be an interpreter of his new friends to his old friends. The interest in foreign missions has, in fact, been a prime educational force, carrying a world-wide consciousness of solidarity into thousands of plain minds and hones that would otherwise have been provincial in their horizon.

A world-wide civilization must have a common monotheistic faith as its spiritual basis. Such a faith must be unitive and not divisive. What the world needs is a religion with a powerful sense of solidarity.

I

His concern for the poor was the necessary result of the two fundamental convictions discussed by us in the previous chapters. If he felt the sacredness of life, even in its humble and hardworn forms, and if he felt the family unity of all men in such a way that the sorrows of the poor were his sorrows, then, of course, he could not be at ease while the people were “skinned and prostrate,” “like sheep without a shepherd.” Wherever any group has developed real solidarity, its best attention is always given to those who are most in need. “The whole have no need of a physician,” said Jesus; the strong can take care of themselves.

So he cast in his lot with the people consciously. He slept in their homes, healed their diseases, ate their bread, and shared his own with them. He gave them a faith, a hope of better days, and a sense that God was on their side. Such a faith is more than meat and drink. In turn they rallied around him, and could not get enough of him. “The common people heard him gladly.”

Furthermore, the feeling of Jesus for “the poor” was not the sort of compassion we feel for the hopelessly crippled in body or mind. His feeling was one of love and trust. The Galilæan peasants, from whom Peter and John sprang, were not morons, or the sodden dregs of city slums. They were the patient, hard-working folks who have always made up the rank and file of all peoples. They had their faults, and Jesus must have known them. But did he ever denounce them, or call them “offspring of vipers”? Did he ever indicate that their special vices were frustrating the Kingdom of God? They needed spiritual impulse and leadership, but their nature was sound and they were the raw material for the redeemed humanity which he strove to create.

II

There is one more quality which we shall have to recognize in the attitude of Jesus to “the poor.” He saw them over [pg 040] against “the rich.” Amid all the variations of human society these two groups always reappear—those who live by their own productive labor, and those who live on the productive labor of others whom they control. Practically they overlap and blend, but when our perspective is distant enough, we can distinguish them. In Greek and Roman society, in medieval life, and in all civilized nations of today—barring, of course, our own—we can see them side by side. Each conditions the other; neither would exist without the other. Each class develops its own moral and spiritual habits, its own set of virtues and vices. Some of us were born in the upper class, some in the lower; and in college groups the majority come from the border line. By instinct, by the experiences of life, or by national reflection, we usually give our moral allegiance to one or the other, and are then apt to lean to that side in every question arising.

Now, Jesus took sides with the group of toil. He stood up for them. He stood with them. We can not help seeing him with his arm thrown in protection about the poor man, and his other hand raised in warning to the rich. If we are in any doubt about this, we can let his contemporaries decide it for us. Plainly the common people claimed him as their friend. Did the governing classes have the same feeling for him? It seems hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus was not impartial between the two. Was he nevertheless just? To the æsthetic sense, and also to a superficial moral judgment, the upper classes are everywhere more congenial and attractive. To the moral judgment of Jesus, as we shall see more fully in a later chapter, there was something disquieting and dangerous about the spiritual qualities of “the rich,” and something lovable and hopeful about the qualities of the common man. Was he right? This is a very important practical question for all who are disposed to follow his moral leadership.

The perception that Jesus championed the people can be found throughout literature and art. Our own Lowell has expressed it in his “Parable” in which he describes Jesus [pg 041] coming back to earth to see “how the men, my brethren, believe in me.”

III

We shall get the historical setting for Christ's championship of the people by going back to the Old Testament prophets. They were his spiritual forebears. He nourished his mind on their writings and loved to quote them. Now, the Hebrew prophets with one accord stood up for the common people and laid the blame for social wrong on the powerful classes. They underlined no other sin with such scarlet marks as the sins of injustice, oppression, and the corruption of judges. But these are the sins which bear down the lowly, and have always been practiced and hushed up by the powerful. “Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that oppress the poor, that crush the needy.... Ye trample upon [pg 042] the poor, and take exactions from him of wheat; ... ye that afflict the just, that take a bribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right.... For three transgressions of Israel, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; they that pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor” (Amos 4:1; 5:11-12; 2:6-7). Micah describes the strong and crafty crowding the peasant from his ancestral holding and the mother from her home by the devices always used for such ends, exorbitant interest on loans, foreclosure in times of distress, “seeing the judge” before the trial, and hardness of heart toward broken life and happiness (Micah 2:1-2; 2:9; 3:1-2). We cannot belittle the moral insight of that unique succession of men. Their spiritual force is still hard at work in our Christian civilization, especially in the contribution which the Jewish people are making to the labor movement.

IV

Among the Greeks and Romans political and literary life was so completely dominated by the aristocratic class that no such succession of champions of the common man could well arise. Yet some of the men of whom posterity thinks with most veneration were upper-class champions of the common people—Solon, for instance, Manlius, and the Gracchi.

In recent centuries the vast forces of social evolution seem to have set in the direction toward which Jesus faced. Since the Reformation the institutions of religion have been more or less democratized. The common people have secured some participation in political power and have been able to use it somewhat for their economic betterment. They share much more fully in education than formerly. Before the outbreak of the Great War it seemed safe to anticipate that the working people would secure an increasing share of the social wealth, the security, the opportunities for health, for artistic enjoyment, and of all that makes life worth living. Today [pg 043] the future is heavily clouded and uncertain; but our faith still holds that even the great disaster will help ultimately to weaken the despotic and exploiting forces, and make the condition of the common people more than ever the chief concern of science and statesmanship.

Jesus was on the side of the common people long before democracy was on the ascendant. He loved them, felt their worth, trusted their latent capacities, and promised them the Kingdom of God. The religion he founded, even when impure and under the control of the upper classes, has been the historical basis for the aspirations of the common people and has readily united with democratic movements. His personality and spirit has remained an impelling and directing force in the minds of many individuals who have “gone to the people” because they know Jesus is with them. In fact we can look for more direct social effectiveness of Jesus in the future, because the new historical interpretation of the Bible helps us to see him more plainly amid the social life of his own people.

V

So we must add a third social principle to the first two. The first was that life and personality are sacred; the second that men belong together; the third is that the strong must stand with the weak and defend their cause. In his description of the Messianic Judgment, Jesus proposed to recognize as his followers only those who had responded to the call of human need and solidarity. He created the apostleship and therewith the germ of the Church in order to serve the people whose needs he saw and felt.

How does this concern college men and women? By our opportunities and equipment we rank with the strong. Disciplined intellect is armor and sword. Many of us have inherited social standing and some wealth; it may not be much, but it raises us above the terrible push of immediate need. What relation do we propose to have with the great mass of men and women who were born without the chances which have [pg 044] fallen to us without exertion? Do we propose to serve them or to ride on them? Will we seek to gain some form of power by means of which we can live in plenty, with only slight and pleasurable exertion? In that case we can hardly return to our fellow-men in work as much as we take from them in enjoyment and luxury. We shall be part of that dead weight which has always bent the back of the poor. Is that an honorable ambition? Or do we propose to enter the working team of humanity and to hold up our end? Our end ought to be heavier than the average because we have had longer and better training. “To whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.”

The moral problem for college communities is accentuated when we remember that few students pay fully for what they get. Whether our institutions are supported from taxation or from endowments, a large part of their incomes are derived from the annual labor of society; tuitions pay only a fraction of the running expenses and of the interest on the plant. Even if a student pays all charges, he is in part a pensioner on the public. The working people in the last resort support us; the same people who are often so eager for education, and who can not get it. Some of them would feel rich if they had the leavings of knowledge which we throw to the floor and tread upon in our spirit of surfeit. To take our education at their hands and use it to devise ways by which we can continue to live on them, seems disquieting even to a pagan conscience. It ought to be insufferable to a sense of social responsibility trained under Christian influences.

Here is a test for college communities more searching than the physical test of athletics, or the intellectual tests of scholarship. Do we feel our social unity with the people who work for their living, and do we propose to use our special privileges and capacities for their social redemption?

I

He spoke of this great good as “the Kingdom of God.” Even a superficial reading of the first three Gospels shows that this was the pivot of his teaching. Yet he nowhere defines the phrase. He took an understanding of it for granted with his hearers, and simply announced that it was now close at hand, and they must act accordingly. What did the words mean to them? The idea covered by the phrase was an historic product of the Jewish people, and we shall have to understand it as such.

The Hebrew prophets had concentrated their incomparable religious energy on the simple demand for righteousness, especially in social and national life. The actual life of the nation, especially of its ruling classes, of course never squared with the religious ideal. The injustice and oppression around them seemed intolerable to the prophets, just because the ethical imperative within them was so strong. So their unsatisfied desire for righteousness took the form of an ardent expectation of a coming day when things would be as they ought to be. God would make bare his holy arm to punish the wicked, to sift the good, to establish his law, and to vindicate the rights of the oppressed. This great “day of Jehovah” would inaugurate a new age, the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God. The phrase, then, embodies the social ideal of the finest religious minds of a unique people. The essential thing in it is the projection into the future of the demand for a just social order. The prophets looked to a [pg 058] direct miraculous act of God to realize their vision, but they were in close touch with the facts of political life and always demanded social action on the human side.

Plato's Republic and More's Utopia are intellectual productions which have appealed to single idealistic minds. The Hebrew prophets succeeded in socializing their ideal. By the force of religion they wrought the conception of the Kingdom of God into the common mind of a nation as a traditional conviction which was assimilated by every new generation.

But when a great idea is appropriated by the masses, it is sure to become cruder to suit their intellect and their need; and when a national ideal is handed on for centuries, it will change with the changing fortunes of the people that holds it. When the Hebrew nation came under the foreign rule of the Assyrians, Persians, and finally the Romans, its freedom and chance for political action were lost, and its political ideals, too, deteriorated. The Kingdom hope became theological, artificial, a scheme of epochs of predetermined length and of marvelous stage settings. Yet, even in this form, it was a splendid hope of emancipation, of national greatness, and of future justice and fraternity, and it helped to keep the nation's soul alive amid crushing sorrows.

The people at the time of Jesus in the main held this apocalyptic conception of the Kingdom. It was to come as a divine catastrophe, beginning with an act of judgment and resulting in a glorious Jewish imperialism. Jesus shared the substance of the expectation, but as a true spiritual leader he reconstructed, clarified, and elevated the hope of the masses. He would have nothing to do with any plans involving blood-shed and force revolution. The Hebrew Jehovah became "our Father in heaven" and this democratized the Reign of Jehovah. The pious Jew expected God to enforce the ceremonial laws; Jesus had little to say about religious ceremonial, and a great deal about righteousness and love. Under his hands the Jewish imperialistic dream changed into a call for universal human fraternity. He repeatedly and emphatically explained the coming of the Kingdom in terms taken [pg 059] from biological growth, and his thoughts seem to have verged away from the popular catastrophic ideas toward ideas of organic development. These changes—if we have correctly interpreted them—represent Jesus' own contribution to the history of the Kingdom ideal, and they are all in the same direction in which the modern mind has moved. (For a fuller statement of these modifications see Rauschenbusch, “Christianizing the Social Order,” p. 48-68.)

II

So much by way of historical information. Now let us emphasize again that this social ideal seemed to Jesus so fair and fine that he gave his whole soul to it. Naturally he would. Since he loved men and believed in their solidarity, the conception of a God-filled humanity living in a righteous social order, which would give free play to love and would bind all in close ties, would be the only satisfying outlook for him. He promised that all who hungered and thirsted after righteousness would be satisfied in the Kingdom, and he was himself the chief of these. The Kingdom of God was his fatherland, in which his spirit lived with God; and with that vision of perfect humanity before him, he kept its calm and tranquillity amid the enmity of men as he sought to win men to its better ways.

The Kingdom of God is the highest good. The idea of God is the highest and most comprehensive conception in philosophy; the idea of the Kingdom of God is the highest and broadest idea in sociology and ethics. It is so high and broad that many find it hard even to grasp the idea. Just as a barbaric tribe of hunters or fishermen would find it impossible to comprehend the social coherence and the patriotism of a nation of a hundred millions; just as the narrow nationalist of today falls down intellectually and morally when he confronts world-forces and relations: so we who are trained to think in terms of family and State, give out when we are to treat the Kingdom of God as a reality. It takes faith of the [pg 060] intellect to comprehend a stage of evolution before it is reached. It takes faith of character to launch yourself toward a great moral goal before its tangible and profitable elements are within reach. It takes more moral daring today than for a century past to believe in the reemergence and final victory of God's social order. But this is the time for all true believers to square their shoulders and say with Galileo, “And yet it moves.”

Any man whose soul is kindled by the conception of the Kingdom of God is a real man. Whoever loves the idea, must turn it into reality as far as life lets him. Whoever tries it, will suffer. But even if he suffers, he will be more blessed and more truly a man than he would be if he did not try. In seeking the Kingdom he realizes himself. “He that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it.”

III

Jesus bade us “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,” and he obeyed his own call. The main object of his life was the ideal social order and the perfect ethic. Now if Jesus is our ideal of human goodness, is any goodness good unless it works in the same direction? If a man is of flawless private life, but is indifferent to any social ideal, or even hostile to all attempts at better justice and greater fraternity, is he really good? Even a strong desire for personal perfection, if there is no desire for a regeneration of society in it, must be rated as sub-Christian because it is lacking in the sense of solidarity and may be lacking in love.

I

He communicated energy to others. He hated mere talk and discouraged fruitless theorizing. He praised energetic action when he found it, as in the case of Zacchæus, and of the men who climbed the roof with a paralytic man and dug up the roofing to let him down to Jesus. He called that sort of thing “faith.” Faith, in Jesus' use of the word, did not mean shutting your eyes and folding your hands. He said it was an explosive that could remove mountains. He gave three of his disciples nicknames, and they were all given to express forcefulness; Simon he called Peter, the Rock; and James and John he called Boanerges, the sons of thunder. He sent his disciples open-eyed to face trouble; he told them the wolves were waiting for them, but to rejoice and be exceeding glad for the chance of lining up against them. Let us clear our minds forever of the idea that Jesus was a mild and innocuous person who parted his hair and beard in the middle, and turned his disciples into mollycoddles. Away with it!

Though the spirit of Jesus has never had more than half a chance in historic Christianity, yet it is demonstrable that the total efficiency of humanity, the bulk of work done, and the capacity for heroic tension of energies have been greatly increased by it. Taking it on the smallest scale—every real conversion means a break with debasing habits, with alcoholism, with the waste of sexual energies; it means more self-control, more responsiveness to duty, more capacity to take a long outlook, and consequently better work. We can [pg 073] observe this in ourselves and others. We still need the coercion of stern necessity and of public opinion to keep us straight, but an inward compulsion is added. A Christian carries his policeman around inside of him. Where Christianity gets a really firm hold on men or women, especially if there is a basis of natural ability, it pushes them on to lead in moral movements and they break away for human progress.

When Christianity multiplies such cases, and makes soberness, duty, and hard work the habit of entire communities, we have a social fact of first-class importance; for the human animal is naturally lazy, sluggish, and inclined to live for today. The capacity to subordinate immediate gratification for a future good is scarce; the capacity to subordinate selfish advantage to a great common and moral good is scarcer still.

We can see this force working on a larger scale on the foreign mission field where Christianity is a new social energy. There it is easier to disentangle it from other social forces. What are the comparative results when it gets a lodgment in a single social class or tribal group? This question will bear watching during the next fifty years. The full social results of Christianity will not show till the third generation.

We get another demonstration of increased working efficiency in humanity wherever Christianity has passed through an internal purification which has set free more of its spiritual energies. What, for instance, has been the historic connection between the development of capitalistic industry in Holland, England, and France, and the sober and frugal piety and patient laboriousness created in the Calvinists of Holland, the Puritans of England, and the Huguenots of France?

II

The contributions made by Christianity to the working efficiency and the constructive social abilities of humanity in the past have been mainly indirect. The main aim set before [pg 074] Christians was to save their souls from eternal woe, to have communion with God now and hereafter, and to live God-fearing lives. It was individualistic religion, concentrated on the life to come. Its social effectiveness was largely a by-product. What, now, would have been the result if Christianity had placed an equally strong emphasis on the Kingdom of God, the ideal social order? Other things being equal, a Christian father and mother are better parents than others because they have more sense of duty, more love, and a higher valuation of spiritual things. But if, in addition, they have a religious desire for a higher social order and realize that noble children are a splendid contribution to it, how will that affect their parenthood? A teacher, artist, or scientist who is also a religious man, will do conscientious work if he works under the motives of individualistic religion. But if he has a vision of the Kingdom of God on earth and sees the contributions he can make to it, will not that raise the character of his output? A business man of strong Christian character will work hard, keep his word in business, and deal fairly with employes and customers. But would not a new direction be given to his moral energies if his religion taught him that he must help to shape the workings of industry and trade so that hereafter there will be no fundamental clash between business and the morals of Christianity?

What the world of Christian men and women needs is to have a great social objective set before them and laid on their conscience with the authority of religion. Then religion would get behind social evolution in earnest.

This would be no new and foreign element imported into our religion. It would be a modern revival of the doctrine of Jesus himself, which has been too long submerged and neglected. One chief reason why it was side-tracked is that no despotic State and no society dominated by a predatory class ever wanted religion applied to a reconstruction of the social order. The idea of the Kingdom of God reawoke with the rise of modern democracy. Now is the time for it.

III

The idea of the Kingdom of God is not identified with any special social theory. It means justice, freedom, fraternity, labor, joy. Let each social system and movement show us what it can contribute and we will weigh its claims. We want the old ideal defined in modern terms, in the terms of modern democracy, of the power machine, of international peace, and of evolutionary science. But we want to embrace it with the old religious faith and ardor, so that we can pray over it.

This great task of establishing a righteous social life on earth embraces all minor tasks in so far as they are good. The mother who tries to make a good home, the farmer who feeds the people, the teacher who trains them, the scientist who gets the facts for all, the merchant, the workingman, the artist, the leader in play—they are all contributing to the Kingdom, provided they view their work so, and are trying to put an evolutionary plus into it which will lift the total nearer to the divine will. The Kingdom is the supreme task, and all small tasks are part of it. That gives every man a place in it who works—where is the idler's place in it?—and it hallows all good work with religious glory.

It may seem as if this social aim of religion may depreciate the aim of developing our own personality and of saving our souls. It ought not. Sometimes it does for a time. But we are each so enormously important to ourselves that we are not likely to forget ourselves, and the practical struggle with temptation and sorrow will teach us to seek strength for our personal needs from Christ. In time we shall learn to say with Jesus, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified.” In time surrender to the Kingdom ideal, toil for it, self-denial for it, cooperation with others for it, will have the strongest kind of reactions on ourselves and our moral fiber. Gymnasium work is all right, but real work in the open is better. We are most durably saved by putting in hard work for the Kingdom of God.

In every great task a religious man is consciously thrown back on the aid of God—most of all in the greatest task of all. Eternal powers are cooperating with our puny efforts. That alone guarantees that our work is not wasted. We plant and water, but unless God's sun shines upon it, our work is nothing. He is a fool that is not reverent and humble. We sorely need this faith in the collaboration and patience of God today when so much of the best spiritual achievement of mankind is swept away, and we seem far away from a kingdom of love. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

IV

Here, then, we have another social principle of Jesus. A collective moral ideal is a necessity for the individual and the race. Every man must have a conscious determination to help in his own place to work out a righteous social order for and with God. The race must increasingly turn its own evolution into a conscious process. It owes that duty to itself and to God who seeks an habitation in it. It must seek to realize its divine destiny. “Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven!” This is the conscious evolutionary program of Jesus. It combines religion, social science, and ethical action in a perfect synthesis.

What has this to say to students? Everything, it seems.

First, whatever is to be our particular job, we must relate it to the supreme common task at which God and all good men are working. Unless we see and assert that relation, we are mere day-laborers or slaves, with neither intelligence nor enthusiasm.

Second, anyone who, instead of loyally relating his life-work to God's work, pursues his own ambition at the expense of the Kingdom and damages it to make profit for himself, is like a man who takes pay to damage his country. He [pg 077] makes the work harder for all who are more faithful than he, and their blood will be upon him.

Third, “noblesse oblige.” If we belong to the republic of learning and education, something extra is justly due from us. Here, for instance, is the evangelization of the world in this generation. An organization has been created to accomplish it. Heroic pioneers have died, preparing the way for larger forces. Is our life fit and good enough to put into that? Here is the Christianization of the social order in the next two generations. What have all our social studies been for in the design of God? To fit ourselves for exploiting our fellows or to show them the way to the Kingdom of God?

I

The Hebrew religion was an unfinished religion. That is one of the best proofs of its divine inspiration. The prophets had the forward look. Great things were yet to come. As one of the most daring expressed it, the old and hallowed [pg 088] covenant, made by God at the Exodus, would be superseded by a new and higher relation; God would write his law into the hearts of the people; the old drill in outward statutes would disappear, for all men would know God by an inward experience of forgiveness and love (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

Jesus not only shared this expectation of a new religious era, but set it in the center of his teaching. Religion to him was not static. He lived in a moving world. A new age was coming, and he would be the initiator of it. “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of God suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force.” John had been the greatest of the prophets; with him a new swift movement had begun; but something far greater was coming; even the least in the new age would have an advantage over John (Matt. 11:11-19).

The popular conception expected the new age to come by divine miraculous interference simply. The Messiah would descend from heaven with angelic legions, expel the Romans, judge the nation, punish the apostate Jews, and then the new Jerusalem, which was already complete and waiting in heaven, would descend from above. That was the Utopia of Jewish apocalypticism. Jesus never eliminated the direct acts of God and the significance of divine catastrophes from his outlook. But in his parables taken from biological processes (see especially Matthew 13) he developed a conception of continuous and quiet growth, culminating at last in the judgment act of God. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like a farmer who sows his grain and lets the forces of nature work; he goes about his daily tasks, and all the time the tiny blades come up, the ear forms and gets heavy, and then comes the harvest (Mark 4:26-29). Jesus was working his way toward evolutionary conceptions. They were so new to his followers that he put them in parable form to avoid antagonism.

Such a conception of the Kingdom brought it closer to human action. It was already at work; it was in one sense [pg 089] already present (Luke 17:20-21). It was possible then to help it along.

The most obvious duty was for every man to clean up his own backyard and repent of his sins. Every one should approximate the life of the Kingdom by living now as he would expect to live then. But, as we have seen from his sayings, Jesus went far beyond this. He demanded an elevation of the accepted ethical standards. It was not simply a matter of erring and lagging individuals, but of the socialized norms of conduct. He had deep reverence and loyalty for the religion of his nation, and never told his followers to break with it. But he asserted boldly that the customary ethics of Judaism, based on the Decalogue and its interpretation by the Jewish theologians, was not good enough. It was good as far as it went, and he had no destructive criticism of it, but it needed to be “fulfilled” and to have its lines prolonged.

We have studied the six sample instances which he offered in order to explain his principle of moral and social progress. In each case he accepts the law as it stood, but asks for more of the same thing, more respect for personality, more reverence for womanhood, more stability for the home, more truthfulness, more peacefulness, more love. Thus he combined continuity with progress, conservatism with radicalism.

II

The platform for ethical progress laid down in the Sermon on the Mount is a great platform. When Tolstoi first realized the social significance of these simple sentences, it acted as a revelation which changed his life. Even men who reject the supernatural claims of Christianity uncover before the Sermon on the Mount. Yet its fate is tragic. It has not been “damned with faint praise,” but made ineffective by universal praise. Its commandments are lifted so high that nobody feels under obligations to act on them. Only small sections [pg 090] of the Christian Church have taken the sayings on oaths, non-resistance, and love of enemies to mean what they say and to be obligatory. Yet all feel that the line of ethical and social advance must lie in the direction traced by Jesus, and if society could only climb out of the present pit of predatory selfishness and meanness to that level, it would be heaven.

Do you and I believe in it? Do we believe that it is not enough to keep out of the spiritual hell and damnation of adultery, but that a clean mind would be the most efficient and cheerful mind? Do we believe that a man who forgives and keeps sweet is happier and safer than a man who always resents things and stirs the witches' caldron of hate in his soul? If a man loved his enemy and turned the other cheek, would he be everybody's door-mat or everybody's temple of refuge?

Suppose we mark for the present those parts which we are willing to accept as our own standards of action. If there are portions which do not seem practicable, let us post them in our minds as debatable propositions, as points to be tested by the experience of coming years, or as working hypotheses in the science of living.

But whatever we may think of single points, let us stick to the leading thought of Jesus, that every advance toward the Kingdom of God, that is, toward the true social order, involves a raising of the ethical standards accepted by society. This is a principle of social progress which every leading intellect ought to know by heart.

III

When Jesus offered his six sample cases of ethical progress, he had no intention of exhausting the principle of advance which he laid down. There was more to say about the Jewish law. It is now for his followers to treat the inherited ethical conceptions of traditional Christianity with the same combination of reverence and courage with which he treated the Jewish law.

From the beginning Christianity taught self-control and the mastery of the spirit over physical desires. It always condemned drunkenness. But ancient Christianity never demanded abstinence from fermented drink. With modern methods of manufacturing alcoholic drinks and modern capitalistic methods of pushing their sale, the danger has become more pressing. With modern scientific knowledge the physiological and social problems of drink have become clearer. Modern life demands an undrugged nervous system for quick and steady reactions. It was said of old time, “Thou shalt not get drunk”; but today the spirit of Christianity and modern life says, “Thou shalt not drink nor sell intoxicants at all.”

In every case in which the interests of woman came before Jesus, he took her side. At that time woman was the suppressed half of humanity. The attitude of historic Christianity has been a mixture between his spirit and the spirit of the patriarchal family. Today Christianity is plainly prolonging the line of respect and spiritual valuation to the point of equality between men and women—and beyond.

From the beginning an emancipating force resided in Christianity which was bound to register its effects in political life. But in an age of despotism it might have to confine its political morality to the duty of patient submission, and content itself with offering little sanctuaries of freedom to the oppressed in the Christian fraternities. Today, in the age of democracy, it has become immoral to endure private ownership of government. It is no longer a sufficient righteousness to live a good life in private. Christianity needs an ethic of public life.

It was said of old “Thou shalt not commit murder.” It is said to us, “Ye shall not wear down life in the young by premature hard labor; nor let the fear of poverty freeze the fountain of life; and ye shall put a stop to war.”

It was said of old, “Thou shalt not steal.” It is said to us, “Ye shall take no unearned gain from your fellows, but pay to society in productive labor what ye take from it in goods.”

IV

This matter of raising the moral standards of society is preeminently an affair of the young. They must do it or it will never be done. The Sermon on the Mount was spoken by a young man, and it moves with the impetuous virility of youth. The old are water-logged physically. They are mentally bound up with the institutions inside of which they have spent a lifetime, and they want to enjoy in peace the wealth and position they have attained. We shall be just the same forty years from now. But while we are young is the time to make a forward run with the flag of Christ, the banner of justice and love, and plant it on the heights yonder. We must not only be better men and women than we are now. We must leave a better world behind us when we are through with it. Whatever we affirm in our growing years will work out in some fashion in our years of maturity and power. If fifty thousand college men and women a year would range themselves alongside of Jesus Christ, look at our present world as open-eyed as he looked at his world, see where the social standards of conduct are in contradiction with his spirit and with modern need, and work to raise them, the world would feel the effect in ten years. And those who would strive in that way would live by faith in the higher commonwealth of God and have some of its nobility of spirit.

I

The desire to lead and excel is natural and right. Because men are gregarious, they need leadership for their social groups, and social progress depends largely on securing adequate leaders. Those who have the natural gifts for leadership—and also those who merely think they have—usually have a keen desire for its satisfactions. College life is a miniature world of criss-cross ambitions and of contrivances for trying out leaders.

Jesus did not demand self-effacement and the suppression of ability. He welcomed evidences of noble self-assertion. His own Messianic call was a summons to the highest leadership. His temptations were the settlement of leadership problems. His final lament over the city of Jerusalem was a burst of sorrow because he had failed to win his people to follow him.

Now, in moving about among men to win them for the Kingdom, Jesus encountered the leaders who were on deck before he came—the wealthy men who controlled the economic outfit; the official groups who held what political power was left to the Jews; and the lawyers, theologians, priests, and zealots who dominated the religious life of a very religious people. These classes overlapped; together they constituted the oligarchy of his nation. Both sides soon realized that there were fundamental antagonisms between them. The conflict grew acute, until it headed up in the great duel of the last days at Jerusalem. His experiences in this conflict with hostile leadership are recorded in the passages which we have studied and others like them.

II

In the fundamental reply to James and John he formulated his observations in a great political generalization: “Ye know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them and their great men hold down the rest by force.” In its earlier and cruder forms, the State is a contrivance of a victorious group to hold down the conquered, and exploit them. If anyone has not yet read political history as an account of systematic exploitation of nation by nation and class by class, he has some education still coming to him.

Even where political leadership has not been plainly predatory but rested on real service, humanity has often had a heavy price to pay for it. Successful military leaders were able to perpetuate a royal dynasty and perhaps fasten a race of hereditary incapables on a nation, to be maintained in royal splendor. The feudal nobility performed useful work in the earlier, turbulent times, but it continued to take rent and tribute for centuries after its useful functions had lapsed. Modern business men who have organized public service corporations have often served the nation well, but they now own the highways and fundamental outfit of the nation, and if their descendants or assignees collect tribute, perhaps on inflated capitalization, for generations to come, it looks like rather costly service. The obligations of power have a curious way of getting lost in the shuffle of time, but titles, rank, legal privileges, rent, and interest are carefully groomed. If one man loses them, some other man nurses them, and the people always pay.

The Kingdom of God sets a fraternal and righteous social order against the predatory and unrighteous order which humanity has inherited from the past. The new order must have a new dynasty of leaders, for every social order has its own kind of aristocracy. Jesus does not propose to abolish leadership, but he proposes a new basis for greatness which is sharply opposed to the old: “Whoever has ambition to be a great man among you, let him be your servant; and whoever [pg 108] is ambitious to rank first among you, let him be your bondservant. Just as the Son of Man did not come to have others serve him, but to render service and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Ability and ambition are still to lead, but they are to be yoked to the service of all. Not he who kills and subjugates, but he who makes life safe and happy, shall have the statue set up in his honor. Not the great warrior and killer, but the great healer and the man who multiplies the blades of grass and the ears of wheat and the size of potatoes shall be the great names treasured. The higher the honor craved, the more strenuous must be the service; if a man wants first prize, he must get down to voluntary slavery. The old way to leadership was to knock others down and climb up on them; the new way is to get underneath and boost.

III

Jesus put himself under this law of leadership. We see from his words that the cross was the outcome of a consistent principle adopted by him. The rules he laid down for his apostolate were meant to bar out selfish acquisition: “Freely ye received, freely give. Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses; no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff; for the laborer is worthy of his food.” It is a significant fact that again and again religious leaders who really cared for the condition of the people, have tried to create a genuine leadership for them along the same lines; Francis of Assisi gathered his “little brothers”; Peter Waldus his Bible teachers; Wycliffe his “poor preachers”; John Wesley his local preachers and itinerants; William Booth his ensigns and captains with the big bass drum; and the entire foreign mission propaganda calls for leaders who will go to the people and offers them nothing but enough to live in health. Today practically the entire Christian ministry, one of the most important bodies of men, has come under the law of leadership for service. It was once, at least in its upper-class sections, rich with unearned [pg 109] incomes, pervaded by graft, and domineering in spirit; it is now a clean and plain-living profession; whatever its shortcomings, graft and extortion are not of them.

The question is now, whether other professions will go through the same historical process of cleansing. The religious spirit has pioneering qualities; under its impulse men blaze the trail which broad social movements or historical developments follow later. Greedy leadership first seemed intolerable in the Church; after a time it may become intolerable in politics and business. The trend of civilization is toward intelligent service on plain pay. Educators, judges, scientists, doctors are on that basis now. It has become dishonorable for them to use their positions for a holdup. The great discoverers in the line of sero-therapy might have taken toll in golden streams, but they did not. It would have been contrary to the ethics of their profession. That means that their profession is on a Christian basis. Where graft is taken out of politics, officials become devoted public servants. The reproach has been made against a man of great ability that at the end of his life his name is not connected with any great cause or measure for the welfare of the people. Whether the judgment was just or not, that point of view is the one to take.

Can business be brought under the law of service? Or is commerce constitutionally incapable of it? There are many indications that a conscious spiritual change is coming over those men in business who have enough intellect and character to look beyond immediate needs. The type of business leadership which took millions out of filthy factory towns, wore out women and took the youth out of children, cleared twelve per cent from slum tenements, kept men and women from marriage by underpayment, and kept the cradle empty by high prices and fear of the future—this type of leadership is antiquated. It belongs to a pre-Christian and pagan age. It is only a question whether business leaders will voluntarily turn their back on such misuse of power or have a change forced on them. Those who mark time on the old [pg 110] methods will become moral derelicts, and their wealth will not forever screen their moral obtuseness.

The nation needs leaders who will persuade conservative farmers to use scientific methods; who will teach our wasteful people the value of self-restraint, and the beauty of cooperative buying and selling; who will teach our communities that it is a sin to rob our own children by leaving soil, water, and forests poorer than we found them; who will give the people good housing without taking the unearned increment; who will organize the dangerous industries for safety; who will place the relations of leaders and workers in industry on a basis of justice and goodwill so that industrial peace can be attained. Is such an object satisfying to a young man of business capacity, or does he want to build a million dollar house and populate it with one child? It is confessed that civilization has been succeeding on the technical side and failing on the ethical. The more the machinery of life is concentrated in the hands of a limited group of business leaders, the more important does the social enlightenment and moral objective of these leaders become to society. To which of the two types do we belong?

IV

Will a life of service satisfy the capable and call out their best powers for the service of humanity? Men will play the game according to the rules of the game. If humanity changes the rules, its strong men will still let out their energies, because they can not help it, and they will like themselves all the better for being on the side of their fellow-men. There is no pleasure in being isolated, eyed with resentment, and conscious of hardness. If ten per cent net means long hours, low wages, and repression, and if six per cent would mean good will and contentment, it might pay the leaders of industry to take less in dividends and take it out in the higher satisfactions.

For men of great ability this is the chance for enduring [pg 111] fame. Who will remember the men that did nothing but amass wealth? Who of our presidents are remembered and loved? Those who suffered with and for the people.

The leadership of service validates its rightness by its intellectual results. Predatory and parasitic classes become intellectually sterile and ignorant of real life. A man who wants to serve men, must get close to them. If we carry a load uphill, we have to choose our footing, and will perforce become intimately acquainted with the law of gravitation. Nothing develops the intellect like heading a just cause and fighting for it.

Here, then, we have another social principle of Jesus. The ambition of the strong must be yoked to the service of society. Power and honor must be earned by distinguished and costly service. Progress along this direction marks the progress of the Kingdom of God. Extortionate and domineering leadership must be superseded where the Kingdom of God moves forward.

V

Does the life of our colleges and universities square with this principle? College men and women crave honor from their fellows, or their fraternities crave it for them vicariously. How do the “big men” in college win it? Do they win it by raising the standards of intellectual work for all? By making fun clean and honorable through the power of a clean public opinion? By creating a college spirit which will put manhood into every generation of Freshmen that plunges into it? Or do they win honor by organizing parties, by intoxicating themselves and others with frothy “social” successes, by acting for the gallery to see and applaud, and by wasting the dynamics of youth on shooting rockets that look like stars and come down like sticks? Such men are essentially selfish; even their service is self-seeking and deserves no honor from others. The more talented and attractive they are, the more damage do they do. They perpetuate [pg 112] their kind. If fraternities or honorary societies honor and reward that sort of leadership, they force individuals into futility, and reenforce the natural temptation to shallow work and display by the powerful pressure of socialized public opinion.

What has just been said applies to the inner life of the college group during its brief command over young men and women. But meanwhile the outside life is waiting for them. Society creates and finances the colleges and universities from the social fund created by those who work. A college man who toys with his work and fights those who want to make him work, ought to be demoted and his chance given to some workingman who has intellectual hunger and would use it. But even of the able and efficient college men society has a right to inquire whether it is training enemies and exploiters or friends and leaders. This question will be asked more and more insistently by democracy as it becomes intelligent. Christianity anticipates this inquiry by its appeal to the individual conscience. Every college man and woman should choose the principle on which he proposes to exercise leadership in case he wins it. Are we willing to gain wealth by impoverishing others? Are we willing to get pleasure by degrading others? Are we willing to gain power and freedom for ourselves by making others powerless and unfree? Jesus distinguishes three kinds of men who are interested in the sheep—the robber, the hireling, and the shepherd. You can tell the presence of the robber by the death of the sheep; the hireling by his cowardice; the true leader by his valor and love.

A special word should be said to college women. In her book on “Woman and Labor,” Olive Schreiner has pointed out that as families rise to wealth, the women slip into parasitism more readily than the men. They cease to do productive work, accept the luxuries of life as their right, and fall in with upper-class pretensions. The means of leadership—time, wealth, social resources—are at their command. How will they use them? The number of women [pg 113] with unearned incomes is increasing rapidly in America. Now, if much is given them, much will be required. Can they produce enough social values to justify what they consume? The least we can do is to give as much as we get. Anything less is immoral.

What kind of influence do college girls exert on able young men who turn toward them in love? Nothing will shrivel the idealistic conceptions of life in a young man as thoroughly as love for a selfish woman. The world is full of eyeless Samsons, grinding the money-mills, and whipped to a quicker pace by smiling grafters—who would not recognize this description of them if they saw it.

I

Plainly Jesus felt that the acquisitive instinct, like the sex instinct, easily breaks bounds and becomes ravenous; there is even less natural limit to it. It absorbs the energies of intellect and will. As with the rich fool, the horizon of life is filled with chances to make the pile grow bigger. Life seems to consist of money, and the problems of money.

People are valued according to that standard. Marriages are arranged for it. Politics is run for it. Wars are begun for it. Creative artistic and intellectual impulses are shouldered aside, fall asleep, or die of inanition. Property is intended to secure freedom of action and self-development; in fact, it often chains men and clips their wings. This is what Jesus calls “the deceitfulness of riches” and “the darkening of the inner eye.”2

In addition to the blight of character, wealth exerts a desocializing and divisive influence. It wedges apart groups that belong together. Dives and Lazarus may live in the front and rear of the same block, but with no sense of solidarity. Dives would have been deeply moved, perhaps, if one of his own class had punctured a tire in the Philistian desert and gone for two days without any food except crumbs. The separation of humanity into classes on the lines of wealth is so universal and so orthodox that few of us ever realize that it flouts all the principles of Christianity and humanity.

In the case of the young ruler Jesus encountered the fact that wealth bars men out of the world of their ideals. The question was not whether the young man could get to heaven, but whether he could have a share in the real life, in the kingdom of right relations. It is hard to acquire great wealth without doing injustice to others; it is hard to possess it and yet deal with others on the basis of equal humanity; it is hard to give it away even without doing mischief.

We have seen that Jesus believed profoundly in the value and dignity of human life; that he sought to create solidarity; that he was chiefly concerned for the saving of the lowly; and that he demanded an heroic life in the service of the Kingdom of God. But wealth, as he saw it, flouted the value of life, dissolved the spiritual solidarity of whole classes, and kept the lowly low; the wealthy had lost the capacity for an heroic life.

This is radical teaching. What shall we say to it? Jesus is backed by the Old Testament prophets and the most spiritual teaching of the Hebrew people, which condemned injustice and extortionate money-making even more energetically than did Jesus. Medieval Christianity sincerely assented to the principle that private property is a danger to the soul and a neutralizer of love. Every monastic community tried to cut under sex dangers by celibacy, and property dangers by communism. This was an enormous misinterpretation of Christianity, but it shows that men took the teachings on the dangers of private property seriously. The modern Christian world does not. It has quietly set aside the ideas of Jesus on this subject, lives its life without much influence from them, and contents itself with emphasizing other aspects.

Has the teaching of Jesus on private property been superseded by a better understanding of the social value of property? Or has his teaching been suppressed and swamped by the universal covetousness of modern life? “Our moral pace-setters strike at bad personal habits, but act as if there was something sacred about money-getting; and, seeing that the master iniquities of our time are connected with money-making, they do not get into the fight at all. The child-drivers, monopoly-builders, and crooked financiers have no fear of men whose thought is run in the moulds of their grandfathers. Go to the tainted-money colleges, and you will learn that Drink, not Graft, is the nation's bane” (Edward A. Ross, “Sin and Society, an Analysis of Latter-day Iniquity,” p. 97—the italics are his).

II

The machinery for making money which Jesus knew, was simple, crude, and puny compared with the complicated and pervasive system which the magnates of modern industry have built up. There was probably not a millionaire in all Palestine. What would he have said to our great cities?

We need a Christian ethics of property, more perhaps than anything else. The wrongs connected with wealth are the most vulnerable point of our civilization. Unless we can make that crooked place straight, all our charities and religion are involved in hypocrisy.

We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.

Where do we draw the line? Is it true that property created by productive labor is a great moralizer, and that property acquired without productive labor is the great demoralizer? Is it correct that property for use is on the whole good, and property for power is a menace?

What is the relation between property and self-development? At what point does property become excessive? At what point does food become excessive and poisonous? At what point does fertilizer begin to kill a plant? Would any real social values be lost if incomes averaged $2,000 and none exceeded $10,000?

To what extent does a moral purpose take the dangers out of acquisition?

Is any life moral in which the natural capacities are not sincerely taxed to do productive work? If a man's wealth is destined to cut his descendants off from productive labor, is it a blessing? What is the moral difference between strenuous occupation and labor? How large a proportion of our time and energy can be devoted to play and leisure without softening our moral fiber?

At what points does private property come to be anti-social? [pg 128] If we could eliminate the monopoly elements and the capacity to levy tribute, would there be much danger in the remainder?

Does private property, in the enormous aggregations of today and in control of the essential outfit of society, still correspond to the essential theoretical conception of private property, or have public properties and public functions fallen under private control? “Much that we are accustomed to hear called legitimate insistence upon the rights of property, the Old Testament would seem to call the robbery of God, and grinding the faces of the poor” (The Bishop of Oxford).

III

The religious spirit will always have to call the individual farther than the law can compel him to go. After all unjust and tainted portions have been eliminated from our property, religion lays its hands on the rest and says, “You are only a steward over this.” In the parables of the talents, the pounds, and the unjust steward, Jesus argues on the assumption that our resources are a trust, and not absolute property. We manage and control them, but always under responsibility. We hold them from God, and his will has eminent domain. But the will of God is identical with the good of mankind. When we hold property in trust for God, we hold it for humanity, of which we are part. We misuse the trust if by it we deprive others of health, freedom, joy, hope, or efficiency, for instance, by overworking others and underworking our own children.

I

The opposition of Jesus was not, of course, against religion itself, but against religion as he found it. It was not directed against any departure from the legitimate order of the priesthood; nor against an improper ritual or wrong doctrine of sacrifices. In fact, it did not turn on any of the issues which were of such importance to the Church in later times. He criticized the most earnest religious men of his day because their religion harmed men instead of helping them. It was unsocial, or anti-social.

The Old Testament prophets also were in opposition to the priestly system of their time because it used up the religious interest of the people in ceremonial performances without ethical outcome. It diverted spiritual energy, by substituting lower religious requirements for the one fundamental thing which God required—righteousness in social and political life. They insisted over and over that Jehovah wants righteousness and wants nothing else. Their aim was to make religion and ethics one and inseparable. They struck for the social efficiency of religion.

At the time of Jesus the Jewish sacrifices had lost much of their religious importance. During the Exile they had lapsed. They were professional performances of one class. The numerous Jews scattered in other countries perhaps saw the temple once in a lifetime. Modern feeling in the first century was against bloody sacrifices. The recorded sayings of Jesus hardly mention them. On the other hand the daily life of the people was pervaded by little prescribed religious actions. The Sabbath with its ritual was punctiliously observed.3 There were frequent days of fasting, religious ablutions and baths, long prayers to be recited several times daily, with prayer straps around the arm and forehead, and a tasseled cloth over the head. The exact performance of these things seemed an essential part of religion to the most earnest men.

We have seen how Jesus collided with these religious requirements and on what grounds. If men were deeply concerned about the taboo food that went into their bodies, they would not be concerned about the evil thoughts that arose in their souls. If they were taught to focus on petty duties, such as tithing, the great ethical principles and obligations moved to the outer field of vision and became blurred. The Sabbath, which had originated in merciful purpose toward the poor, had been turned into another burden. Religion, which ought to bring good men into saving contact [pg 141] with the wayward by love, actually resulted in separating the two by a chasm of religious pride and censoriousness. A man-made and artificial religious performance, such as giving toward the support of the temple, crowded aside fundamental obligations written deep in the constitution of human society, such as filial reverence and family solidarity.

Other reformers have condemned religious practices because they were departures from the holy Book or from primitive custom. Jesus, too, pointed out that some of these regulations were recent innovations. But the real standard by which he judged current religious questions was not ancient authority but the present good of men. The spiritual center on which he took his stand and from which he judged all things, was the Kingdom of God, the perfect social order. Even the ordinances of religion must justify themselves by making an effective contribution to the Kingdom of God. The Sabbath was made for man, and its observance must meet the test of service to man's welfare. It must function wholesomely. The candle must give light, or what is the use of it? The salt must be salty and preserve from decay, or it will be thrown out and trodden under foot. If the fig-tree bears no fruit, why is it allowed to use up space and crowd better plants off the soil? This, then, is Christ's test in matters of institutional religion. The Church and all its doings must serve the Kingdom of God.

II

The social efficiency of religion is a permanent social problem. What is the annual expense of maintaining the churches in the United States? How much capital is invested in the church buildings? (See U. S. Census Bulletin No. 103, of 1906.) How much care and interest and loving free-will labor does an average village community bestow on religion as compared with other objects? All men feel instinctively that religion exerts a profound and subtle influence on the springs of conduct. Even those who denounce [pg 142] it, acknowledge at least its power for harm. Most of us know it as a power for good. But all history shows that this great spiritual force easily deteriorates. Corruptio optimi pessima.

Religion may develop an elaborate social apparatus of its own, wheels within wheels, and instead of being a dynamic of righteousness in the natural social relations of men, its energies may be consumed in driving its own machinery. Instead of being the power-house supplying the Kingdom of God among men with power and light, the Church may exist for its own sake. It then may become an expensive consumer of social wealth, a conservative clog, and a real hindrance of social progress.

Live religion gives proof of its value by the sense of freedom, peace, and elation which it creates. We feel we are right with the holy Power which is behind, and beneath, and above all things. It gives a satisfying interpretation of life and of our own place in it. It moves our aims higher up, draws our fellow-men closer, and invigorates our will.

But our growth sets a problem for our religion. The religion of childhood will not satisfy adolescent youth, and the religion of youth ought not to satisfy a mature man or woman. Our soul must build statelier mansions for itself. Religion must continue to answer all our present needs and inspire all our present functions. A person who has failed to adjust his religion to his growing powers and his intellectual horizon, has failed in one of the most important functions of growth, just as if his cranium failed to expand and to give room to his brain. Being microcephalous is a misfortune, and nothing to boast of.

Precisely the same problem arises when society passes through eras of growth. Religion must keep pace. The Church must pass the burning torch of religious experience from age to age, transmitting the faith of the fathers to the children, and not allowing any spiritual values to perish. But it must allow and aid religion to adjust itself. Its inspiring teaching must meet the new social problems so [pg 143] effectively that no evil can last long or grow beyond remedy. In every new age religion must stand the test of social efficiency. Is it passing that test in Western civilization?

Religion is a bond of social coherence. It creates loyalty. But it may teach loyalty to antiquated observances or a dwarfed system of truth. Have you ever seen believers rallying around a lost cause in religion? Yet these relics were once a live issue, and full of thrilling religious vitality.

Society changes. Will religion change with it? If society passes from agriculture and rural settlements to industry and urban conditions, can the customary practices of religion remain unchanged? Give some instances where prescientific conceptions of the universe, embodied in religion, have blocked the spread of scientific knowledge among the people. The caste distinctions of Hinduism were the product of a combination between religion and the social organization of the people; can they last when industrialism and democracy are pervading India? The clerical attitude of authority was natural when the Catholic clergy were the only educated class in the community; is it justified today? Protestantism won the allegiance of industrial communities when the young business class was struggling to emancipate itself from the feudal system. It developed an individualistic philosophy of ethics. Today society tends toward solidaristic organization. How will that affect religion and its scheme of duty? Thus religion, by its very virtues of loyalty and reverence, may fall behind and lose its full social efficiency. It must be geared to the big live issues of today if it is to manifest its full saving energies.

How does this problem of the efficiency of religion bear on the foreign missionary movement? How will backward or stationary civilizations be affected by the introduction of a modern and enthusiastic religion?

We may feel the defects of our church life at home, but there is no doubt that the young men and women who go out from our colleges under religious impulses, are felt as a virile and modernizing force when they settle to their work [pg 144] in Turkey or Persia. Christian educational institutions and medical missions have raised the intellectual and humane standards of young China. Buddhism in Japan has felt the challenge of competition and is readjusting its ethics and philosophy to connect with modern social ideals. The historical effects of our religious colonization will not mature for several generations, but they are bound to be very great. The nations and races are drawing together. They need a monotheistic religion as a spiritual basis for their sense of human unity. This is a big, modern, social task. It makes its claim on men and women who have youth, education, and spiritual power. Is the religious life of our colleges and universities efficient enough to meet the need?

Here are the enormous tasks of international relations, which the Great War has forced us to realize—the prevention of armed conflicts, the elimination of the irritant causes of war, the protection of the small nations which possess what the big nations covet, the freedom of the seas as the common highway of God, fair and free interchange in commerce without any effort to set up monopoly rights and the privilege of extortionate gain, the creation of an institutional basis for a great family of nations in days to come. These are some of the tasks which the men and women who are now young must take on their mind and conscience for life, and leave to their children to finish. What contributions, in your opinion, could the spirit of the Christian religion make to such a program, if it were realized intelligently and pressed home through the agencies of the Christian Church? In what ways has American religion shown its efficiency since the war broke out?

Christianity has been a great power in our country to cleanse and fraternalize the social life of simple communities. Can it meet the complex needs of modern industrialism in the same way? It can not truthfully be claimed that it has done so in any industrial country. Its immense spiritual forces might be the decisive element, but they have been effectively organized against a few only of the great modern [pg 145] evils. On the fundamental ethical questions of capitalism the Church has not yet made up its own mind—not to speak of enforcing the mind of Christ. Nor have the specialists in the universities and colleges supplied the leaders of the Church with clear information and guidance on these questions. We can not make much permanent progress toward a just social order as long as the masses of the working people in the industrial nations continue in economic poverty and political helplessness, and as long as a minority controls the land, the tools, and the political power. We shall linger on the borders of the Inferno until a new accession of moral insight and spiritual power comes to the nations. How will it come?

III

What could the churches in an average village community accomplish if they intelligently directed the power of religion to foster the sense of fraternal unity and to promote the institutions which make for unity? How could they draw the new, the strange, and the irregular families into the circle of neighborly feeling? In what way could they help to assimilate immigrants and to prevent the formation of several communities in the same section, overlapping, alien, and perhaps hostile? How would it affect the recreational situation if the churches took a constructive rather than a prohibitive attitude toward amusements, and if they promoted the sociability of the community rather than that of church groups?

With the rise of land prices and the control of transportation and markets, the rural population is moving toward a social crisis like that which transformed the urban population in the industrial revolution. Agriculture will become capitalistic, and the weaker families will drop to the position of tenants and agricultural laborers. Cooperation is their way of salvation. Its effectiveness has been amply demonstrated in older countries. It requires a strong sense of solidarity, loyalty, and good faith to succeed. It has made so little headway in America because our national character [pg 146] has not been developed in these directions. What could the churches do to save the weaker families from social submergence by backing cooperation and developing the moral qualities needed for it?

The strong religious life of our people might be more effective if the churches were less divided. Their economic and human resources are partly wasted by useless competition. Our denominational divisions are nearly all an historical heritage, imported from Europe, and coming down from a controversial age. Their issues all meant something vital and socially important in the midst of the social order of that day; but in many cases the real significance has quietly crumbled away, and they are not really the same issues that deeply engaged our forefathers. We are all “tithing mint, anise, and cummin,” and forgetting the weighty matters, such as social justice and Christian fraternity. Everybody is ready to acknowledge this about every denomination except his own. We need a revaluation of our religious issues from the point of view of the Kingdom of God. That would bring us into harmony with the judgment of Jesus. Nothing else will.

IV

The social efficiency of religion—what call is there in that to the college men and women of this generation? Shall they cease to worship and pray, seek the salvation of society in ethics and sociology, and abandon religion to stagnation? Or shall they seek a new experience of religion in full sight of the modern world, and work by faith toward that reign of God in which his will shall be done?

I

Evangelism is the attack of redemptive energy in the sphere of personal life. It comes to a man shamed by the sense of guilt and baffled by moral failure, and rouses him to a consciousness of his high worth and eternal destiny. It [pg 159] transmits the faith of the Christian Church in a loving and gracious God who is willing to forgive and powerful to save. It teaches a man to pray, curing his soul by affirming over and over a triumphant faith, and throwing it open to mysterious spiritual powers which bring joy, peace, and strength beyond himself. It sets before him a code of moral duty to quicken and guide his conscience. It puts him inside of a group of like-minded people who exercise social restraint and urge him on.

When all this is wisely combined, it constitutes a spiritual reenforcement of incomparable energy. It acts like an emancipation. It gives a sense of freedom and newness. The untrained observer sees it mainly in those cases where the turn has come in some dramatic form and where the contrast between the old and new life is most demonstrable. But the saving force is at work even when it seeps in through home influences so quietly that the beneficiary of it does not realize what a great thing has been done for him.

The saving force has to attack the powers in possession. Only those who have helped in wresting men free from sin can tell what a stiff fight it often is. Here is an intellectual professional man who goes off for a secret spree about once in sixty days; a respectable woman who has come under the opium habit; a boy who is both a cigarette fiend and sexually weak; a man who domineers and cows his wife and family; a woman who has reduced her husband to slavery to supply her expensive tastes; a girl who shirks all work and throws the burden of her selfish life on a hard-worked mother; a college man whose parents are straining all their resources and using up their security for old age to keep him at college, and who gambles—complete the catalogue for yourself. To make these individuals over into true citizens of the Kingdom of God and loyal fellow-workers of their fellow-men means constructive conflict of a high order. It has been done.4

II

The problem of evil becomes far more complicated when evil is socialized. The simplest and most familiar form of that is the boys' gang. Here is a group of young humans who get their fun and adventure by pulling the whiskers of the law. They idealize vice and crime. Leadership in their group is won by proficiency in profanity, gambling, obscenity, and slugging. The gang assimilates its members; there is regimentation of evil. It acts as a channel of tradition; the boy of fifteen teaches the boy of twelve what he has learned from the boy of eighteen.

How is the problem of evil affected when the powers of human society, which usually restrain the individual from vice and rebellion, are used to urge him into it? Should the strategy of the Kingdom of God be adjusted to that situation? It is not enough to win individuals away from the gangs. Can the gang spirit itself be christianized and used to restrain and stimulate the young for good? Has this been done, and where, and how? Is Christian institutional work sufficient to cope with the problem? What readjustments in the recreational and educational outfit of our American communities are needed to give a wholesome outlet to the spirit of play and adventure, and to train the young for their life work? Would such an outfit do the work without personal leadership inspired by religion?

Christian evangelism in the past has not had an adequate understanding of the power of the group. In what connections has the Church shown a true valuation of the social factor in sin and redemption? At what points has its strategy been ineffective in dealing with socialized evil? What contributions can social science make to the efficiency of evangelism? Would a correct scientific analysis of the constructive and disintegrating forces in society be enough to do saving work?

III

The bad gangs of the young are usually held together by [pg 161] a misdirected love of play and adventure. The dangerous combinations of adults are consolidated by “the cohesive power of plunder.” That makes them a far more difficult proposition.

Any local attack on saloons and vice resorts furnishes a laboratory demonstration of socialized evil. The object of both kinds of institutions is to make big profit by catering to desires which induce men to spend freely. Music and sociability are used as a bait. The people who profit by this trade are held together by the fear of a common danger. Since the community uses political means of curbing or suppressing the vice business, the vice group goes into politics to prevent it. It seeks to control the police, the courts, the political machines by sharing part of its profits. Lawyers, officials, newspaper proprietors, and real estate men are linked up and summoned like a feudal levy in case of danger. Drugstores, doctors, chauffeurs, messenger boys, and all kinds of people are used to bring in trade and make it secure. The exploded fictions of alcoholism are kept circulating. Like a tape-worm in the intestines, these articulated and many-jointed parasitic organizations of vice make our communities sick, dirty, and decadent.

We have learned to read the sordid trail of the drink and vice traffic in American communities. There is another kind of organized evil, even more ancient, pervasive, and deadly, which few understand, though it has left a trail sufficiently terrible.

Wherever we look in the history of the older nations, we see an alignment of two fundamental classes. The one is born to toil, stunted by toil, and gets its class characteristics by toil. The other is characterized by the pleasures and arts of leisure, is physically and mentally developed by leisure, and proud and jealous of its leisure. This class is always class-conscious; its groups, however antagonistic, always stand together against the class of toil. Its combination of leisure and wealth is conditioned on the power of taking tribute from the labor of many. In order to do this [pg 162] with safety, it must control political power, the military outfit, the power of making, interpreting and executing the laws, and the forces forming public opinion.

Before the advent of industrialism and political democracy, it secured its income by controlling the land and the government of nations; and the effects of its control can be read in the condition of the rural population of Russia, Austria, Eastern Germany, Italy, France before the Revolution, England, and especially Ireland. The development of industry has changed the problem of economic and political control; but the essentials remain, as we can see in the condition of industrial communities and the history of labor legislation.

The fundamental sin of all dominant classes has been the taking of unearned incomes. Political oppression has always been a corollary of economic parasitism, a means to an end. The combination of the two constitutes the largest and most continuous form of organized evil in human history.

Jesus used the illustration of pegs maliciously driven into the path to make men stumble and fall. It would require some illustration drawn from modern machinery to express the wholesale prostration of bodies and souls where covetousness has secured continuous power and has been able to get in its full work. Anyone who has ever looked with human understanding at the undersized and stupid peasants of countries ruled by their landlord class, or at the sordid homes and pleasures of miners or industrial workers where some corporation feared neither God nor the law, ought to get a comprehension of the power of evil that has rested like an iron yoke on humanity.

We think most readily of the children of the poor as a product of exploitation; underfed and overstimulated, cut off from the clean pleasures of nature, often tainted with vice before knowledge has come, and urged along by the appetites and cruel selfishness of older persons, they are a standing accusation against society itself.5 Jesus would have [pg 163] felt that the children of the rich are an even worse product of exploitation than the poor. When “society” plays, it burns up the labor of thousands like fireworks. The only possible justification for the aggregations of wealth is that the rich are to act as the trustees and directors of the wealth of society; but their children—except in conspicuous and fine exceptions—are put out of contact with the people whom they must know if they are to serve them, so that it takes heroic effort on the part of noble exceptions to get in contact with the people once more, and to discover how they live. In all nations the atmosphere of the aristocratic groups drugs the sense of obligation, and possesses the mind with the notion that the life and labor of men are made to play tennis with. The existence of great permanent groups, feeding but not producing, dominating and directing the life of whole nations according to their own needs, may well seem a supreme proof of the power of evil in humanity.

IV

If evil is socialized, salvation must be socialized. The organization of the Christian Church is a recognition of the social factor in salvation. It is not enough to have God, and Christ, and the Bible. A group is needed, organized on Christian principles, and expressing the Christian spirit, which will assimilate the individual and gradually make him over into a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Salvation will rarely come to anyone without the mediation of some individual or group which already has salvation. It may be very small and simple. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” That saying recognizes that an additional force is given to religion by its embodiment in a group of believers. Professor Royce has recently reasserted in modern terms the old doctrine that “there is no salvation outside of the Church,” calling the Church “the beloved community.” Of course the question is how intensively Christian the Church can make its members. That [pg 164] will depend on the question how Christian the Church itself is, and there's the rub.

The Church is the permanent social factor in salvation. But it has cause to realize that many social forces outside its immediate organization must be used, if the entire community is to be christianized.

In the earliest centuries Christianity was practically limited to the life within the Church. Being surrounded by a hostile social order, and compelled to fence off its members, it created a little duplicate social order within the churches where it sought to realize the distinctively Christian social life. Its influence there was necessarily restricted mainly to individual morality, family life, and neighborly intercourse, and here it did fundamental work in raising the moral standards. On the other hand, it failed to reorganize industry, property, and the State. Even if Christians had had an intelligent social and political outlook, any interference with the Roman Empire by the low-class adherents of a forbidden religion was out of the question. When the Church was recognized and favored under Constantine and his successors, it had lost its democratic composition and spirit, and the persons who controlled it were the same sort of men who controlled the State.

The early age of the Church has had a profound influence in fixing the ideals and aims of later times. The compulsory seclusion and confinement of the age of persecution are supposed to mark the mission of the Church. As long as the social life in our country was simple and rural, the churches, when well led, were able to control the moral life of entire communities. But as social organization became complex and the solidarity of neighborhood life was left behind, the situation got beyond the institutional influence of the churches. Evidently the fighting energies of Christianity will have to make their attack on broader lines, and utilize the scientific knowledge of society, which is now for the first time at the command of religion, and the forces set free by political and social democracy. We can not restrict the modern conflict [pg 165] with evil to the defensive tactics of a wholly different age. Wherever organized evil opposes the advance of the Kingdom of God, there is the battle-front. Wherever there is any saving to be done, Christianity ought to be in it. The intensive economic and sociological studies of the present generation of college students are a preparation for this larger warfare with evil. These studies will receive their moral dignity and religious consecration when they are put at the service of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

I

Evil is socialized, institutionalized, and militant. The Kingdom of God and its higher laws can displace it only by conflict. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.” This clash involves suffering. This suffering will fall most heavily on those who most completely embody the spirit and ideas of the Kingdom, and who have the necessary boldness to make the fight.

In most men the eternal moral conflict gets only confused [pg 176] understanding. Sometimes they are aroused by sentimental pity or indignation, but soon tire again. If their own interests are affected they fight well. But there are men and women whose minds have been made so sensitive by personal experiences or so cleansed by right education and by the spirit of God that they take hold of the moral issues with a really adequate understanding. Living somehow on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Heaven, they have learned to think and feel according to its higher ways, and when they turn toward things as they now are, of course there is a collision; not this time a collision of interests, but a clash of principles, of justice with wrong, of truth with crafty subterfuges, or of solidarity with predatory selfishness.

The life and fate of these individuals anticipates the issues of history. This is the prophetic quality of their lives. Working out the moral and intellectual problems in their minds before the masses have realized them, they become the natural leaders in the fight, clarify the minds of others, and thus become, not only forerunners, but invaluable personal factors in the moral progress of the race. “The single living spirits are the effective units in shaping history; all common tendencies working toward realization must first be condensed as personal forces in such minds, and then by interaction between them work their way to general recognition” (Lotze). Lowell's “Present Crisis” is perhaps the most powerful poetical expression of the prophetic function in history.

II

During the centuries when the Church was herself in need of redemption and her purification was resisted by the dominant ecclesiastical interests, such prophetic spirits as Arnold of Brescia, Wycliffe, Huss, and Savonarola were most frequently found battling for the freedom of the Church from the despotic grafters inside and outside of the hierarchy, and for the purity of the gospel. The Church was a chief part of the social order, and the reform of the Church was the preeminent social problem. Today the Church is on the whole free from graft, and as openminded as the state of public intelligence permits it to be. Therefore the prophet minds are now set free to fight for the freedom of the people in political government and for the substitution of cooperation for predatory methods in industry, and the clash is most felt on that field.

The law of prophetic suffering holds true as much as ever. Probably no group of men have ever undertaken to cleanse a city of profit-making vice without being made to suffer for it. In the last thirty years this country has watched eminent men in public life in various great cities making a sincere drive to break the grip of a grafting police machine, or of a political clique, or of public service corporations. For a while such a man has public sentiment with him, for all communities have a desire to be moral. But when it becomes clear that he really means what he says, and that important [pg 178] incomes will be hurt, powerful forces set on him with abuse and ridicule, try to wreck his business or health, and sidetrack his political ambitions. An eminent editor in the Middle West, speaking before the Press Association of his State several years ago, said: “There is not a man in the United States today who has tried honestly to do anything to change the fundamental conditions that make for poverty, disease, vice, and crime in our great cities, in our courts and in our legislatures, who, at the very time at which his efforts seemed most likely to succeed, has not been suddenly turned upon and rent by the great newspaper publications.” A volume of truthful biographical sketches of such leaders would give us a history of the cross in politics, and would tell us more about Christianity as an effective force in our country than some church statistics.

III

Jesus took the sin of throttling the prophets very seriously. It is sin on a higher level than the side-stepping of frail human nature, or the wrongs done in private grievances. Since the Kingdom of God is the highest thing there is, an attempt to block it or ruin it is the worst sin. Our hope for the advance of the race and its escape from its permanent evils is conditioned on keeping our moral perceptions clear and strong. Suffocating the best specimens of moral intelligence and intimidating the rest by their fate quenches the guiding light of mankind. Is anything worse?

Jesus held that the rejection of the prophets might involve the whole nation in guilt and doom. How does the action of Caiaphas and a handful of other men involve all the rest? By virtue of human solidarity. One sins and all suffer, because all are bound together. A dominant group acts for all, and drags all into disaster. This points to the moral importance of good government. If exploiters and oppressors are in control of society, its collective actions will be guided and determined by the very men who have most to fear [pg 179] from the Kingdom of God and most inclination to stifle the prophetic voices.

But the same solidarity which acts as a conductor of sin will also serve as a basis to make the attack of the righteous few effective for all. If the suffering of good men puts a just issue where all can see and understand, it intensifies and consolidates the right feeling of the community. The suffering of a leader calls out passionate sympathy and loyalty, sometimes in a dangerous degree. In the labor movement almost any fault is forgiven to a man who has been in prison for the cause of labor, and death for a popular cause will idealize the memory of very ordinary or questionable characters. But if the character of a leader is pure, suffering accredits him and gives him power. The cross had an incomparable value in putting the cause of Christianity before the world. It placed Jesus where mankind could never forget him, and it lit up the whole problem of sin and redemption with the fire of the greatest of all tragedies.

IV

But not all righteous suffering is socially effective. A good man may be suppressed before he has won a following, or even before he has wrought out his message in his own mind, and his suppression leaves only a few bubbles on the waters of oblivion. In that case his life has failed to discharge the redemptive force contained in it. It only adds a little more to the horror and tragedy of a sinful, deaf, and blood-stained world. Many of the men whose lives ebbed away behind the cruel silence of the walls of the Spanish Inquisition, were such men as Spain needed most. What saving effect did their death exercise? The uncounted patriots whose chains have clanked on the march to Siberian exile, have not yet freed Russia from its blind oligarchy. Our faith is that their [pg 180] lives were dear to God, and that their sorrows and the bitter tears of those who loved them are somehow part of an accumulating force which will one day save Russia. But this is religious faith, “a conviction of things not seen.” We can not prove it. We can only trust.

Meanwhile it is our business to see that no innocent blood is wasted. Pain is a merciful and redemptive institution of nature when pain acts as an alarm-bell to direct intelligent attention to the cause of the pain. If pain does not force the elimination of its own cause, it is an added evil. The death of the innocent, through oppression, child labor, dirt diseases, or airless tenements, ought to arrest the attention of the community and put the social cause of their death in the limelight. In that case they have died a vicarious death which helps to redeem the rest from a social evil, and anyone who utilizes their suffering for that end, shows his reverence for their death. We owe that duty in even higher measure to the prophets, who are not passive and unconscious victims, but who set themselves intelligently in opposition to evil. The moral soundness of a nation can be measured by the swiftness and accuracy with which it understands its prophetic voices, or personalities, or events. The next best thing to being a prophet is to interpret a prophet. This is one of the proper functions of trained and idealistic minds, such as college men and women should possess. The more the Kingdom of God is present, the less will prophets be allowed to suffer. When it is fully come, the cross will disappear.

V

The social principle of the cross contains a challenge to all who are conscious of qualities of leadership. Let the average man do average duties, but let the strong man shoulder the heavy pack. It is no more than fair that persons of great natural power should deliberately choose work involving social hardships. At present the theory seems to be that the strong have a right to secure places where they will [pg 181] be freed from the necessity of exerting themselves, and can lay their support on the shoulders of the poor. That is the law of the cross reversed. Our semi-pagan society has always practiced vicarious suffering by letting the poor bear the burdens of the rich in addition to their own. Instead of encouraging the capable to hunt after predatory profit and entrusting public powers to those who have been most successful in preying, we ought to encourage solidaristic feeling, and give both power and honor to those who are ready to serve the commonwealth at severe cost to themselves.

What has the principle of the cross to say to college men and women? If they have an exceptional outfit, let them do exceptional work. A knight in armor was expected to charge where others could not venture. A college education entitles a Christian man to some hard knocks. It seems contemptible for us to walk off with the pleasures and powers of intellectual training, and to leave the work of protecting children and working girls against exploitation to men and women without education, without leisure, and without social standing, who will have to pay double the tale of effort for every bit of success they win. In some European countries foreign mission service has been left mainly to men and women of the artisan class. In our country college men and women have volunteered for it. That is as it ought to be. On the other hand, in the struggle for political liberty the European universities have taken a braver and more sacrificial part than has ever fallen to our lot.

Those who are conscious of a prophetic mission have a redoubled motive for a clean, sober, and sincere life. Especially in its initial stages an ethical movement is identified with its leaders and tested by their character. A good man can get a hearing for an unpopular cause by the trust he inspires. His cause banks on his credit. The flawed private character or dubious history of a leader is a drag. It is worse yet if a man whose name has long been a guarantee for his message, backslides and brings doubt upon all his previous professions. Cases could be mentioned where noble [pg 182] movements were wrecked for years because a leader forfeited his honor. Constant fighting against evil involves subtle temptations. To stand alone, to set your own conviction against the majority, to challenge what is supposed to be final, to disregard the conventional standards—this may lead to dangerous habits of mind. If we propose to spread a lot of canvas in a high wind, we need the more ballast in the hold. Through the thin partitions of a summer hotel, a man heard Moody praying God to save him from Moody. Imagine what it must be to lose standing and honor among your fellow men by secret weakness. Imagine also the poignant pain if your disgrace pulls down a cause which you have loved for years and which in purer days you vowed to follow to its coronation.

I

We have seen that three convictions were axiomatic within Jesus, so that all his reasoning and his moral imperatives were based on them, just as all thought and work in physics is based on gravitation. These convictions were the sacredness of life and personality, the solidarity of the human family, and the obligation of the strong to stand up for all whose life is impaired or whose place within humanity is denied.

It can not be questioned that these convictions were a tremendous and spontaneous force in the spirit of Jesus. That alone suffices to align him with all idealistic minds, [pg 191] to whom man is more than matter, more than labor force, a mysterious participant of the spiritual powers of the universe. It aligns him with all men of solidaristic conviction, who are working for genuine community life in village and city, for a nation with fraternal institutions and fraternal national consciousness, and for a coming family of nations and races. It aligns him with all exponents of the democratic social spirit of our day, who feel the wrongs of the common people and are trying to make the world juster and more fraternal.

The best forces of modern life are converging along these lines. There is no contradiction between them and the spirit of Jesus. On the contrary, they are largely the product of his spirit, diffused and organized in the Western world. He was the initiator; we are the interpreters and agents. Nor has he been outstripped like an early inventor and discoverer whose crude work is honored only because others were able to improve on it. Quite the contrary; the more vividly these spiritual convictions glow in the heart of any man, the more will he feel that Jesus is still ahead, still the inspiring force. As soon as we get beyond theory to life and action, we know that we are dependent for the spiritual powers in modern life on the continued influence of Jesus Christ over the lives of others.

II

We saw in the second place that Jesus had a social ideal, the Reign of God on earth, in which God's will would be done. This ideal with him was not a Utopian and academic fancy, but the great prize and task of life toward which he launched all his energies. He called men to turn away from the evil ways of the old order, and to get a mind fit for the new. He set the able individuals to work, and put the spirit of intense labor and devotion into them. He proposed to effect the transition from the old order to the new by expanding the area of moral obligation and raising the standards of moral relationships.

By having such a social ideal at all, he draws away from all who are stationary and anchored in the world as it is; from all who locate the possibility of growth and progress in the individual only; and from all whose desire for perfection runs away from this world to a world beyond the grave.

By moving toward the new social order of the Kingdom of God with such wholeness of determination, he is the constant rebuke for all of us who are trying to live with a “divided allegiance,” straddling between the iniquities of force, profit, and inhumanity, and the fraternal righteousness of the Gospel we profess to believe. Jesus at least was no time-server, no Mr. Facing-both-ways, no hypocrite; and whenever we touch his elbow by inadvertence, a shiver of reality and self-contempt runs through us.

III

We saw in the third place that Jesus dealt with serious intelligence with the great human instincts that go wrong.

The capacity for leadership and the desire for it have fastened the damning institutions of tyranny and oppression on humanity and tied us up so completely that the rare historical chances of freedom and progress have been like a tumultuous and brief escape. Yet Jesus saw that ambition was not to be suppressed, but to be yoked to the service of society. In the past, society was allowed to advance and prosper only if this advanced the prosperity and security of its ruling classes. Jesus proposed that this be reversed, so that the leaders would have to earn power and honor by advancing the welfare of society by distinguished service at cost to themselves.

The desire for private property has been the chief outlet for selfish impulses antagonistic to public welfare. To gain private wealth men have slaughtered the forests, contaminated the rivers, drained the fertility of the soil, monopolized the mineral wealth of the country, enslaved childhood, double-yoked motherhood, exhausted manhood, hog-tied community [pg 193] undertakings, and generally acted as the dog in the manger toward humanity. Jesus opposed accumulation without moral purpose, the inhumanity of property differences, and the fatal absorption of money-making. Yet he was not ascetic. It is probably safe to say that he would not be against private property in so far as it serves the common good, and not against public property at all.

Like ambition and the property instinct, the religious impulse may go wrong, and subject society to its distortions or tyranny. Jesus always stood for an ethical and social outcome of religion. He sought to harness the great power of religion to righteousness and love. With a mind so purely religious we might expect that he would make all earthly and social interests subservient to personal religion. The fact that he reversed it, seems clear proof that he was socially minded and that the Kingdom of God as a right social organism was the really vital thing to him.

IV

We have seen, finally, that Jesus had a deep sense of the sin and evil in the world. Human nature is frail; men of evil will are powerful; organized evil is in practical control. Consequently social regeneration involves not only growth but conflict. The way to the Kingdom of God always has been and always will be a via dolorosa. The cross is not accidental, but is a law of social progress.

These conceptions together seem to shape up into a consistent conception of social life. It is not the modern scientific scheme, but a religious view of life. But it blends incomparably better with modern science than the scholastic philosophy or theology of an age far nearer to us than Jesus. It is strange how little modern knowledge has to discount in the teachings of Jesus. As Romanes once pointed out,8 Plato followed Socrates and lived amidst a blaze of genius never since equalled; he is the greatest representative of [pg 194] human reason in the direction of spirituality unaided by revelation; “but the errors in the dialogues reach to absurdity in reason and to sayings shocking to the moral sense.”

The writer of this little book has come back to an intensive study of Jesus at intervals of years, and every time it was like a fresh revelation, leaving a sense of mental exhilaration and a new sense of joy in truth. Never was there a feeling that Jesus was exhausted and had nothing more to say.

For a true valuation of his intellectual contribution to mankind we must remember that we have not a page of his own writing. We are dependent on the verbal memory of his disciples; so far as we know, nothing was written down for years. The fragments which survived probably had to stand the ordeal of translation from the Aramaic to the Greek. Simply from the point of view of literature, it is an amazing thing that anything characteristic in Jesus survived at all. But it did. His sayings have the sparkle of genius and personality; the illustrations and epigrams which he threw off in fertile profusion are still clinchers; even his humor plays around them. Critics undertake to fix on the genuine sayings by internal evidence. Only a mind of transcendent originality could win its way to posterity through such obstructions.

But we ought not to forget the brevity of our material when we try to build up a coherent conception of his outlook on society. There is little use in stickling on details. The main thing is the personality of Jesus, his religious and ethical insight into the nature and needs of the social life of mankind, the vital power of religious conviction which he was able to put behind righteousness, and the historical force which he set going through history.

From the indirect influences which Jesus Christ set in motion, no man or woman or child in America can escape. We live on him. Even those who attack the Christian Church, or who repudiate what they suppose Christ to stand for, do so with spiritual weapons which they have borrowed from him. But it does make a great difference whether the young men and women of our day give their conscious and [pg 195] intelligent allegiance to Christianity or hold aloof in misunderstanding. Without them the Christian movement will mark time on old issues. With them it will dig new irrigation channels and string the wires for new power transmission.

In return, Christianity can do more for students than they themselves are likely to realize in youth. Men grow tired. Their moral enthusiasm flags. Scientific sociology may remain academic, cold, and ineffective. We need inspiration, impulse, will power, and nothing can furnish such steady accessions of moral energy as living religion. Science and the Christian faith combined are strong. Those who succeed in effecting a combination of these two without insincerity or cowardice are the coming leaders.

If a student's mind has given inward consent to the teachings of Jesus in this course of study, that constitutes an appeal for personal discipleship. Can we go with Christ in living out these principles, and meanwhile draw on his spiritual wealth to build up our growing life? If there is a student who can not at present affirm all that the Christian Church holds concerning the nature of Christ, why should he not approach him as the earliest disciples did, by personal love and obedience, following him and cooperating with him in the business of the Kingdom of God, and arriving in time at full faith in his Messiahship? A great and firm faith is the product and prize of a lifetime of prayer and loving action. “Light is sown to the righteous.” As we gather the wisdom of life, and find that while we move from knowledge to knowledge, we are also advancing from mystery to mystery, many of us will be ready and glad to join in the highest affirmation of faith about Jesus Christ, in whom we have learned to see God.

If Christianity henceforth is to discharge its full energy in the regeneration of social life, it especially needs the allegiance of college men and women who have learned to understand to some degree the facts and laws of human society. The development of what is called “Social Christianity” or “the social gospel,” is a fusion between the new understanding created by the social sciences, and the teachings and moral ideals of Christianity. This combination was inevitable; it has already registered social effects of the highest importance; if it can win the active minds of the present generation of college students, it will swing a part of the enormous organized forces of the Christian Church to bear on the social tasks of our American communities, and that will help to create the nobler America which we see by faith.

Christians have never fully understood Christianity. A purer comprehension of its tremendous contents is always necessary. Think what it would signify to a local community if all sincere Christian people in it should interpret their obligation in the social terms which we have been using; if they should seek not only their own salvation, but the reign of God in their own town; if they should cultivate the habit of seeing a divine sacredness in every personality, should assist in creating the economic foundations for fraternal solidarity, and if, as Christians, they should champion the weak in their own community. We need a power of renewal in our American communities that will carry us across the coming social transition, and social Christianity can supply it by directing the plastic force of the old faith of our fathers to the new social tasks.

Jesus was the initiator of the Kingdom of God. It is a real thing, now in operation. It is within us, and among [pg 197] us, gaining ground in our intellectual life and in our social institutions. It overlaps and interpenetrates all existing organizations, raising them to a higher level when they are good, resisting them when they are evil, quietly revolutionizing the old social order and changing it into the new. It suffers terrible reverses; we are in the midst of one now; but after a time it may become apparent that a master hand has turned the situation and laid the basis of victory on the wrecks of defeat. The Kingdom of God is always coming; you can never lay your hand on it and say, “It is here.” But such fragmentary realizations of it as we have, alone make life worth living. The memories which are still sweet and dear when the fire begins to die in the ashes, are the memories of days when we lived fully in the Kingdom of Heaven, toiling for it, suffering for it, and feeling the stirring of the godlike and eternal life within us. The most humiliating and crushing realization is that we have betrayed our heavenly Fatherland and sold out for thirty pieces of silver. We often mistake it. We think we see its banner in the distance, when it is only the bloody flag of the old order. But a man learns. He comes to know whether he is in God's country, especially if he sees the great Leader near him.