lll*llllllllllllllll'llillll qaern Lhurc iilllillfc n Haynes Holmes / BV 600 .H72 1912 Holmes, John Haynes, 1879- 1964. The revolutionary function of the modern Church The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church MOV 1 3 1912 By ^^m^ John Haynes Holmes (Minister of the Church of the Messiah, New York) " The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Tennyson : I(/y//s of the King. G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London 1912 Copyright, ign BY JOHN HAYNES HOLMES •Cbe mnfcfterbocfter fitees, ■«ew Sorft ^0 THE GLORIOUS MEMORY OF THEODORE PARKER " The religious faculty is the natural ruler in all the commonwealth of man. Therefore have I always taught the supremacy of religion and its commanding power in every relation of life, both the life of the individual and the life of the state." PREFACE THIS book is at once a survey, an argument, and a plea. It is a survey of much of the best thought of our time upon many of the phases of what is known as the social question ; it is an argu- ment for the essential identification of religion and the social question; and it is a plea for the recog- nition of this identification upon the part of those who control the church. Many books have been written during the last few years upon the social aspects of religion, and this book may perhaps be regarded as only one more. No one of these books, however, so far as I know, (i) has gathered up the lessons learned of late in other fields of social experience and shown their meaning in terms of religion; (2) has shown that the question of the church is thus not something apart by itself, but only one phase of the modem social question as a whole ; (3) or has shown the one fundamental reason why, in dealing with the individ- ual, the church, like every other redemptive agency, must go behind the individual and grapple with the social organism itself. It is these three things that this book attempts to do ; and it may therefore not unjustly be described, perhaps, as breaking some new ground in this much-ploughed field. vi Preface The substance of this book has been stated many- times during the past year in public addresses in the pulpit and on the platform. The material, however, has been rearranged, and much new material added; so that the work, as here pre- sented, is practically new. It is sent forth to that larger audience of readers, which can never be reached by the spoken word, with much misgiving and many fears, but in the fervent hope that it may at least quicken some minds to a new understand- ing of religion, and awaken some hearts to a new service of the Kingdom of God on earth. J. H. H. Church of the Messiah New York City. PAGE I CONTENTS CHAPTER I.— Introductory— The Religious Unrest (A)— The New Theology — A New Creed (B)— The New ReHgion— A New Pro- gram of Action II-— The Work of the Church in the Past — Individualism • . . . (A)— The Individual and his Salvation (B)— The Methods of Salvation . . i8 (i) — Catholic . . . . i8 (2) — Protestant (3) — Liberal .... (C) — The Common Conception of Indi- vidualism Underlying these Methods . . ^e III.— What Is an Individual? ... 36 (A)— The Individual as a Social Creature ^y (B)— Modern Emphasis upon this Fact 42 (i) — The Law of Evolution . 42 (2)— Social Complexity of Civil- 13 13 20 22 isation vii 59 viii Contents CHAPTER IV. — The Social Question . (A) — The Individual Socialised . (B) — Physical Disease (i) — Disease Individual . (2) — Disease Social in its Con sequences (3) — Disease Social in its Causes (a) — Infant Mortality (b) — Tuberculosis . (c) — Hospital Social Ser vice (d) — Society of Medical Sociology (C)— Poverty .... (i) — Progress and Poverty Together (2) — Causes of Poverty (a)— The Will of God (b) — The Niggardliness of Nature (c) — Individual Frailty (d) — Social Conditions (3) — Poverty, a Social Crime V. — The Social Question in Religion (A) — Sin and its Causes (i) — Sin Individual — Total De pravity . (2) — Sin Social (a) — Human Natur( Good, not Bad Contents IX (b) — ' ' Sin is Misery ; Mis- ery is Poverty; the Antidote of Pov- erty is Income " . 138 (i) — Criminality . 143 (2) — Juvenile De- linquency . 146 (3) — Prostitution. 152 VI —The Church and the Social Question 167 (A) — Theodore Parker . . .167 (B)— Social Reform as the Modern Method of Individual Salvation 171 (i) — The New Conception of the Function of the Church . . . .177 (2) — The Indefinite Extension of the Field of Religious Activity . . .178 (C)— Jesus as the Prophet of Socialised Religion 182 VII.— Obstacles in the Way of the Social- ised Church 20^ (A)— The Philosophy of Individualism 205 (B) — Denominationalism . . . 206 (C)— Other-Worldliness . . .209 (D)— Dogma 211 (E) — Sacred vs. Secular . . .213 (F) — Class Consciousness . . .217 VIII.— The New Church .... 222 X Contents CHAPTER PAGE IX. — Objections 227 (A) — Human Nature cannot be Changed by Law ..... 228 (B) — How Change Society except through Good Men? . . 236 X. — Conclusion 250 (A) — Summary of Argument . . 250 (B)— The Final Outcome— The Ban- ishment of Sin — A Perfected Humanity — The Kingdom of God r 253 Appendix 259 " The Christian church should lead the civilisation of the age. It should lead the way in all moral enterprises, in every work which aims directly at the welfare of men. ... Its sacraments should be great works of reform. ... Its one great end should be the building of a state where there is honourable work for every hand, bread for all mouths, clothing for all backs, culture for all minds, and love and faith in every heart. " Theodore Parker. " The Christian church is designed, not to save individuals out of the world, but to save the world itself." Dean Freemantle. " Every question between men is a religious question — a ques- tion of moral economy before it becomes one of political economy — and makes all political, industrial, and social activities fimc- tions of a new church." — Henry D. Lloyd. " Christianity cannot be proclaimed and instituted apart from the social life of the community; it must seek a simple and natural expression in the social organism itself." — Jane Addams. " Sin is Misery; Misery is Poverty; the Antidote of Poverty is Income." — Simon N. Patten. '* You can't let men live like pigs, and expect them to be good citizens." — Jacob A. Riis. " The doom from which Christianity seeks to save the indi- vidual is the doom of moral individualism; the blessedness into which it seeks to lead him is the blessedness of love. "The church is in the world to save the world, — to secure in the world right social relations among men." Washington Gladden. " The church must either condemn the world and seek to change it, or tolerate the world and conform to it. . . . On this choice is staked the future of the church." Walter Rauschenbusch. xi THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF THE MODERN CHURCH CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY— THE RELIGIOUS UNREST TO say that we are living in an age of strange transition and disorder, is to repeat one of the most familiar commonplaces of the times; and yet no other statement is adequate as a description of the present day. It is to be supposed that cen- turies hence the historians of himian progress will be able to characterise our era with that same degree of exactitude with which contemporary historians characterise the various epochs of the past; but to-day it is impossible to say anything more precise than that the old is going and the new is not yet come. Institutions which we had come to regard as in some sense divinely ordained and thus destined to endure so long as humanity should exist upon the earth seem now to be crum- bling away before our very face and eyes, and we know not what institutions are to be planned and reared in their stead. Principles of government, education, and business which we had learned to 2 Function of the Church accept as ultimate achievements of human wisdom and hence as final formulations of social order, are falling daily into ever greater disrepute, and in our failure to discover any new and safer principles we seem to be drifting straight into a condition of general anarchy. Even our ethical and spiritual ideals are being called into question, and the demand is being heard upon every hand for new standards of individual and social morality. What it all means and where it is all going to take us, no man can say. But that the present state of chaos just as surely means the ending of one epoch of human history and the beginning of another as the great upheaval of the Renaissance meant the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of modem times, is perfectly evident to even the most casual observer of social evolution. (a) the new theology — ^A NEW CREED Sharing with every other institution in the trans- ition character of the age, is of course the church. In the realm of religion, as in every other realm of human activity, there are confusion and disorder, and the apprehension of impending change; but beyond the certainty that the old religion is no longer expressive of the thoughts and aspirations of modem times, and that a new religion must come to match the new age as the old religion matched the old, if religion in its organised form at least is not to disappear altogether, nothing Introductory — The Religious Unrest 3 seems to be at all sure as regards the future. That man is "incurably religious," and that religion is therefore destined to endure in some form or other, amid all vicissitudes and transformations, as "an everlasting reality," — to quote the famous phrase of John Fiske, — seems to be as firmly believed to-day as ever. And therefore are many of the acutest minds and bravest hearts of our time giv- ing themselves to the study of religion in the light of the new knowledge and new aspirations of this modem Renaissance, and attempting to formulate, as best they can, a new religion which shall be a vital expression of the present age and hence a worthy successor to the old. Quite naturally, as religion in the past has always been so closely identified with theology, it is in the field of thought that the new religion of our time is working itself out with the greatest degree of clearness and with the largest promise of success. "The New Theology," by Dr. R. J. Campbell, of the City Temple, London, "The Rebirth of Religion," by Dr. A. S. Crapsey, of the Brotherhood, in Rochester, New York, "The Coming Religion," by Dr. C. F. Dole, of Boston, and the famous address on "The Religion of the Future," by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard, are only a few of the more conspicuous and notable illustrations of the endeavours which have been made in this direction within recent years; and of all these revolutionary theological utterances, perhaps the last is the most radical and for that 4 Function of the Church reason the most characteristic of the intellectual unrest of the age. In this remarkable essay, Dr. Eliot enumerates the marvellous advances which have been achieved even during the comparatively brief period of his own lifetime. "My point of view," he says, in explaining why it is necessary for him to believe in a new religion of the future is that of one whose observing and thinking life covers the extraordinary period since " The Voyage of the Beagle" was published, anaesthesia and the tele- graph came into use, Herbert Spencer issued his first series of papers on evolution, Kuenen, Robertson Smith, and Wellhausen developed and vindicated Biblical criticism, J. S. Mill's " Principles of Political Economy" appeared, and the United States by going to war with Mexico set in operation those forces which abolished slavery on the American continent — the period within which mechanical power came to be widely distributed through the explosive engine and the applications of electricity, and all the great fun- damental industries of civilised mankind were recon- structed. In other words, as he puts it in another place, his address was written from the point of view of what had been accomplished by the nineteenth century, which "immeasurably surpassed all the preceding centuries in the increase of knowledge." Now the theology which was possible at the opening of this period is impossible to-day. With Introductory — The Religious Unrest 5 brilliant intellectual acumen, Dr. Eliot lays bare the fallacies of the old doctrinal beliefs — the impos- sibilities of the traditional teachings of the church — and shows how inevitable it is that "all of these former things shall pass away." A gardener prun- ing a tree of its dead and withered limbs, or a surgeon cutting away the diseased parts of a himian organism, could not proceed with greater precision or thoroughness. He shows, for example, how the old ideas of authority are no longer ac- ceptable to the modem mind, whether authority be lodged, as with the Catholic, in the hierarchy of the church, or, as with the Protestant, in the pages of a holy book. Identifying God with that "one omnipresent eternal energy, informing and inspir- ing the whole creation at every instant of time, and throughout the infinite spaces," he eHminates from the religion of the future every element of the supernatural or miraculous, contending that henceforth religion must be wholly natural, con- forming "like all else to natural law, so far as the range of law has been determined." With almost ruthless candour, he discards all the consolations which the church for untold ages has offered in times of sorrow and disaster. The idea of evil as preventive or curative or punitive, the idea of heaven as the abode of the blessed and the happy, the idea of interpreting all phenomena whether good or evil as expressions of the all-wise and all- beneficent will of God, — all of these cherished doctrines Dr. Eliot puts aside as superstitions 6 Function of the Church which can no longer bring satisfaction or comfort; and asserts that in the future the church will teach men not to bow down and submit to evil, but to rise up and conquer it, and will prepare men not to anticipate compensations for siiifering in some future world, but to accomplish the alleviation and if possible the destruction of the causes of this suffering in this present world. And lastly, Dr. Eliot shows that, in the ultimate analysis, religion does not consist of belief in the abstract truth of any theological dogmas but in the practice of the concrete ideals of "love toward God and brother- liness toward man"; and, in the supreme exalta- tion of this conception of spiritual goodwill, as contrasted with the traditional conception of intellectual conformity of opinion, he sees the hope of the realisation of that Christian unity for which the world has so long been waiting. These are radical utterances; and it is no wonder, perhaps, that they were met by wide-spread discussion and indignant protest. But they constitute a definition of the "religion of the future" which is being held in greater or less degree by all of the courageously progressive theologians of our time, and which is destined ultimately to be accepted, in its general outlines, by all of the Christian world. Even to-day we find as conservative a scholar as Prof. William Adams Brown, a member of the faculty of as conservative an institution as the Union Theo- logical Seminary, unfavourably contrasting "the theology which ignores the modem scientific Introductory — The Religious Unrest 7 movement and is unaffected in method by the re- sults of that movement" with "the new theology whose method is determined by the new scientific movement and which is hospitable to its results"; and showing, in a lengthy and weighty article/ how the latter is not only destined to supersede the former, but how this "new theology" itself is destined in due course of time "to give place to a newer." (b) the new religion — ^A NEW PROGRAM OF ACTION More important than the new theology of our time, however, is the new conception which is being formed of the kind of work which the church ought to accomplish as the organised expression of re- ligion. Not only is a new creed being written to-day for the intellectual acceptance of the church, but a new program is being laid down for its practical activity. For what the church thought yesterday about the concepts of theology is no more anti- quated to the modem mind than what the church did yesterday in the name of religious idealism. This new idea of the kind of work in which the church must be engaged is partly the result, of course, of the new theology of the time. New conceptions of God and the human soul, and of the relation existing between the two, have resulted in new conceptions of the particular task which * See "Harvard Theological Review," January, 191 1. 8 Function of the Church the church is set to perform in the world of men. But more important in this direction than the influence of the new theology has been the influ- ence of the age itself. A new world, brought into being within fifty years, has laid upon the church, as upon every other human institution, a new responsibility and challenged it to a new and un- familiar opportunity. The methods which were practised in the old world with success are proving to be failures in this new world by which we find ourselves confronted. The ends and aims which were sought yesterday with eagerness and avidity no longer arouse to-day even the most languid in- terest. The church, in its present condition, like every other traditional institution of organised society, seems more like a survival of the ages that are gone than a real and vital force in the age that now is. Everywhere is it coming to be recognised that the church, if it is not to perish utterly, must not only adapt itself to the new knowledge of the times, but to the new ways and means of the times as well, — that it must be reconstructed from the bottom up, — that it must adopt new methods, walk new paths, and seek new goals. Hence the flood of books which has been pouring from our printing-presses during the last half- dozen years or more, dedicated to the considera- tion of the great question of the church and the present age, of which Prof. Peabody's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question" was perhaps the first, Prof. Simon N. Patten's "The Social Basis Introductory — The Religious Unrest 9 of Religion" is for the moment the last, and Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch's "Christianity and the Social Crisis" by all odds the most remarkable. The hour seems to have struck for the churches, as for the other traditional institutions of society, when "new occasions teach new duties"; the moment seems to have arrived again, in the unceas- ing course of time, when "ancient good" is made "uncouth." With the marvellous advances of the last century in the knowledge of the material world, in the discovery and command and application of natural laws and forces, in the understanding of the powers and needs of the individual life, and in the organisation of political and industrial and social relationships, have come new ideas and ideals of truly revolutionary import. These new ideas and ideals, to-day as formerly, are reacting upon every instrument of human activity, both personal and institutional ; and the church, whether regarded as divine or human in its origin and character, is by no manner of means exempt. These new conceptions of our day, says Dr. Eliot, in his "Religion of the Future," "have modified and ought to modify not only the actual work done by the churches, but the whole conception of the function of the churches." Now right here, to my mind, and not at all in the field of theology, with its vexing controversies and dissensions, is the real storm-centre of present- day Christianity. The pressing problem of our time is not the writing of a new creed for the new 10 Function of the Church theology, but the formulation of a new plan of action for the new religion. The churches of our age, in their organisation and methods of work and principles of action, are not churches of to-day at all, but churches of yesterday. They are still performing old and traditional "functions," which may have accomplished something in the old world, but which can accomplish little or nothing in the new world in which we find ourselves at this hour. They are still carrying on a type of work which is as ill adapted to the conditions of contemporary life as the shoemaker's awl and hammer to the modem condition of boot and shoe manufacture. They are driving the stage-coach in the age of the steam railroad, and communicating by post-rider in the age of the telegraph and telephone. Take the typical churches in our cities and towns to-day with their antiquated buildings, their out-of-date equipment, their time-worn methods, and their medieval theory of practical action — and what hopelessly inefficient instruments of religion they really are ! If we were not used to them as we are used to a hundred and one out-worn and out- grown things which have not yet disappeared, we should recognise, as our descendants will surely recognise, that these churches are as out of place in the modem world as a knight of King Arthur on the modem battle-field, or a Gutenberg press in a modem newspaper office. It is for this reason, to my mind, far more than for its reluctance to rewrite its statements of theological behef in Introductory — The Religious Unrest ii accordance with the new science and philosophy of our time, that the church has forfeited the con- fidence of the majority of men, and thus lost its grip upon contemporary life. What wonder that churches are empty, that divinity schools are languishing for lack of students, that ministers are discouraged, and that the institution itself no longer wields any influence in society commensu- rate with its vast wealth and its estimated mem- bership! The churches of to-day are not worthy of support, for the simple reason that they are not doing twentieth-century work for a twentieth-cen- tury world. What we need is a waking up in the field of ecclesiastical practice as well as in the field of theological speculation. What we must have, if the church is to survive another hundred years, is a movement of "modernism" in the world of action as well as in the world of thought, and in Protestantism as well as in Catholicism. With a new theology which means thought, we must have a new religion which means life — a practical strug- gle for the establishment of justice, righteousness, and peace in human society. And this means, as I need not point out, a new church with new "func- tions" for the realisation of the new religion. It is these new and revolutionary "functions" of this new church of the new religion which I pro- pose to set forth in these pages. I propose to ask. What is the particular work which this new church must do in this particular period of human history? — and why? What are the ends which this new 12 Function of the Church church must try to achieve in the world of men as it exists and is organised to-day? — and why? What are the methods which this new church must employ for the practical achievement of these ends? — and why? That the church of our day and generation must do a wholly new work in a wholly new way is quite generally recognised, and has been asserted again and again in I know not how many recent addresses and books. But just what this new work is — just why this particular kind of work must be done in this particular kind of way — and just what relation all of these new "functions," to use Dr. Eliot's phrase again, bear to the general character of modem society, has not yet been adequately explained — at least to my knowledge ! To meet these questions, and thus to set forth the revolutionary function of the modem church, is the purpose of this Httle book! CHAPTER II THE WORK OF THE CHURCH IN THE PAST— INDI- VIDUALISM (a) the individual and his SALVATION IT is fortunate that, at the very opening of our discussion of this momentous problem, which is very hkely to lead to some more or less violent expression of opposition, we find a statement to which everybody can assent. For I imagine that there can be no disagreement, at this late day, as to what constitutes the real work in the world of the organised forces of the Christian religion. This work, if I mistake not, concerns itself first, last, and all the time with the individual soul ; and its fimdamental character is perhaps best simimed up in that great word which was so impressed upon the Christian imagination by the genius of St. Paul — the word, "Salvation!" The one specific work of the church, in all ages of its history, has rightly been to "save" the individual — and I venture to prophesy that this will continue to be the church's function so long as humanity endures. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ," wrote St. Paul to the Romans, "for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth"; and 13 14 Function of the Church from that day to our own, Christianity has always been regarded as this "power of God unto salva- tion," and the church as the instrument of this power ! This conception of the function of the church, as concerned with the individual and the problem of his moral and spiritual salvation, has its foun- dation in that which is distinctive of Christianity among all the great religions of the world — namely, its reverence for human nature, its faith in the per- fect dignity and eternal worth of the human soul per se. That this is a unique feature of the Chris- tian religion has of course been very frequently dis- puted; but it would seem that the great weight of critical and prophetic opinion was overwhelmingly in its favour. Thus, it is William Ellery Channing who says, that "he who has never looked through men's outward condition to the naked soul and there seen God's image commanding reverence, is a stranger to the distinctive love of Christi- anity." Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous Divinity School Address, declares that true Christi- anity means "a faith like Christ's in the infini- tude of man " ; and, in paying tribute to the prophet of Nazareth, he asserts that "alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man." Hegel, the German idealist, says that in Christianity "the individual has an infinite worth, as being the aim and object of God's love." James Martineau, in England, voices a similar opinion, when he de- clares that "the true meaning of the Christian Individualism 15 faith" lies'in its "reverential estimate of the hu- man soul" — its "sense of the infinite worth there is in man." Dr. Hatch, in his Hibbert Lectures, confirms these statements, when he refers to "the Christian doctrine of the inestimable value of each immortal soul" as the "distinguishing and tran- scendent characteristic of every society into which the spirit of Christianity has passed." And Prof. G. B. Foster, in his "Finality of the Christian Religion," adds the influence of his scholarly word in the assertion that "faith in the infinite worth of the human personality in the sight of God — if there was anything new in the thought of Jesus, it was this ! " ^ Here are only a few of the witnesses who might be cited in support of this assertion that faith in the eternal and infinite worth of the human soul — in other words, reverence for the individual — is the one absolutely distinctive feat- ure of Christianity. This was the one original thought perhaps which Jesus contributed to the world; it was the secret of the power which was behind his heroic life and those of his disciples; and it is the one great principle which has animated the Christian church from the beginning even until now. It cannot be too plainly indicated at the very start, therefore, that Christianity, in origin and essence, is the supreme religion of individualism, ' I am indebted for this admirable series of quotations to Rev. Charles A. Allen, of Waverley, Mass. See his article in the "Harvard Theological Review," April, 191 1, Page 266. i6 Function of the Church as Jesus was the supreme prophet of individualism. Starting with the Nazarene's subHme conception of the infinite and eternal worth of the individual soul, which constitutes in many ways the whole sum and substance of his message, Christianity has ever been inspired with reverence of that soul, and concerned with the practical problem of its salvation. To describe the teaching of Jesus and the gospel of Christianity in other terms than this of the absolute and everlasting worth of every man and woman born into the world and the immediate necessity of their salvation, would be an utterly groundless and therefore inexcusable misinterpretation of history. It is from this point of view that Christianity is primarily to be distin- guished from ancient paganism upon the one hand and from both ancient and modern orientalism upon the other. If there is anything which was pre-eminently characteristic of the civilisations of Greece and Rome it was the emphasis which was always placed upon the importance of the state as compared with the importance of the individual citizen. The practical philosophy of Greek Plato- nism, as exemplified by the "Republic," was at one with the practical philosophy of Roman Stoicism, as exemplified by Seneca and Aurelius, in its inter- pretation of life in terms of a social solidarity in which the individual played little or no part. It is common in these days to refer to the extreme individualistic tendencies of a Nietzsche or a Bernard Shaw, as seen in the doctrine of the Super- Individualism 17 man, as a recrudescence of paganism'; and yet, in"" many ways, such an extravagant exaltation of the rights and privileges of the individual is wholly foreign to anything ever known to the ancient world. And an even more complete submerging of the individual is seen in the mystic philosophies of the oriental world, which find their fruitage in the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana. Emphasis upon the dignity and worth of the individual as an indi- vidual is peculiar to our western and more modem civilisation; and that it is so peculiar, is because this civilisation is very largely the product of the religion which had its origin in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The distinctive feature of Christian thought, therefore, is its exaltation of the individual. And this being the case, it is of course inevitable that the distinctive work of the church should assume the form of seeking the salvation of this individual. ''The special work which awaited Christianity," says Dr. Matheson, in his "Spirit of Christianity," "was the transfusion into the mind of the world of its own distinctive principle of the value of the human soul . " To save the individual , whose worth was thus beyond all earthly computation, — to educate him if ignorant, to uplift him if degraded, to civilise him if barbarous, to moralise him if sin- ful, to redeem him if lost — this has been the work of the church from the day when Jesus was first called Saviour down even to the present moment. Nor can I conceive of the time ever coming when the 1 8 Function of the Church church shall find it necessary to alter its purpose or change the direction of its practical activities. With the weak, tempted, imperfect individual, the work of the church must begin; and beyond this weak, tempted, and imperfect individual, I cannot see that this saving work can ever go. When the church has said to the great host of individual men and women, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," it has spoken the last and highest word both of ethics and religion. (b) the methods of salvation It is perfectly evident, however, from the most casual reading of religious history, that while the work of the church has always been that of indi- vidual salvation, this work has never been regarded in the same way in all ages and by all branches of the organisation. On the contrary, salvation as the end to be achieved has been very differently apprehended, and the means of salvation very differently defined. Numerous as these differences are, however, we may classify them roughly under the three great historic heads of Catholicism, Pro- testantism, and modem Liberalism. (i) Catholicism To the Catholic, salvation has always meant membership within the one true church, reception of the sacraments, and, in its perfect form, with- drawal from the world of every-day affairs. At Individualism i9 the hour of birth the CathoHc receives the sacra- ment of Baptism; throughout all the years of his life he partakes regularly of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; upon his death-bed, before con- sciousness has wholly flown, he is given the sacra- ment of the Last Unction; and it is by means of these sacraments that his position within the church is maintained and his salvation secured. The person, however, who would win salvation in the most direct and certain way, retires wholly from the society of his fellows and enters a monas- tery or a convent ; and therefore is it that in these sects of monks and nuns we find the perfect expres- sion of the Catholic idea of individual salvation. In the Middle Ages, when the Roman church was the most powerful institution in the world, monas- teries and convents were scattered all over the face of Europe. Upon every highway were to be seen the Dominicans and Franciscans; at every cross- roads and in every forest glen was to be found the solitary cell of some devout hermit, who was reverenced by all who saw him as a holy man ; and in every royal court were the high dignitaries of these sacred orders. Even now, in most of our great cities, are to be seen the quiet sisterhoods and brotherhoods, which are the strange survival of the enormous medieval societies. And all of these monks and nuns, to-day as in former times, are held in especial esteem, because, according to the Catholic idea, they are the saved — those who have put away the world and entered upon complete 20 Function of the Church and perfect fellowship with God right here and now upon the earth. (2) Protestantism The Protestant idea of course is very different from this and marks a long step in advance. According to the great teachers of Protestantism, salvation is to be won not by such outward "works" as participating in the sacraments or joining the membership of the holy orders, but by inward "faith." It is a matter not of the hands but of the heart, not of outward performance but of inward attitude, not of the offices of the church but of the grace of God himself. According to this conception, the person who is to be saved must undergo that mighty spiritual experience of repent- ance and regeneration which is called "conver- sion." He must realise that he himself cannot achieve salvation by his own unaided efforts; he must understand that "mere morality" is in itself nothing; he must recognise that his sin must have atonement, and that nothing less than the atone- ment offered by the sacrifice of Christ is adequate. He must turn therefore to Jesus; he must recog- nise the Nazarene as his Lord and Saviour; he must open his heart freely to the inpouring of the divine grace; he must so completely surrender his own ideas and aims and purposes, that he can be wholly possessed by the Holy Spirit; he must empty himself utterly that God may enter into Individualism 21 his soul and there achieve his perfect work of regeneration and sanctification. It is when this work has been successfully achieved that the individual is said to be saved by "faith"; and it is the doing of this work which is called "conver- sion." Just as the monastery or the convent is the typical expression of Catholic salvation, so may the revival meeting with its mourners' bench be taken as the typical expression of Protestant salvation. Here in these great evangelistic cam- paigns which have swept the Christian world at periodic intervals, under the leadership of such men as Wesley and Whitefield, Moody and Finney, do we have the Protestant conception of salvation carried to its logical conclusion and appearing in its most characteristic form of expression. In many ways these two interpretations of the work of the church are very different, and the Pro- testant marks a great advance over the Catholic; but it is to be noted that fundamentally they are the same. The Catholic and the Protestant have different ideas as to how salvation is to be secured; they have different conceptions of the evil from which this salvation is necessary; they are as far apart in practical ideals as the Roman monastery and the New England revival meeting; but they nevertheless start from exactly the same point — the essential depravity of human nature ; and they move to exactly the same end — the miraculous redemption of human nature. Here before them they see a lost soul— a soul that is doomed to 22 Function of the Church eternal punishment because of the sin of its inherit- ance — and they understand their task to be that of saving this soiil from the doom prepared for it by the justice of God in the world to come. And it is just here, in the depraved condition of the soul which is to be saved and the abnormal methods which are to be used in accomplishing this work of salvation, that we find the starting-point of the opposition of the so-called Liberal Christian movement. (3) Liberalism It was about one hundred years ago or so that there came in all parts of the Christian world this great Liberal movement in theology, which has found its most logical expression in American Unitarianism, and which is remarkable, as I have said, in constituting an absolute break with this whole theory of salvation in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. This break is caused by the fact that the Liberal refuses to accept that low and repulsive estimate of human nature upon which every orthodox scheme of salvation has been founded. The Liberal believes that history and science in all its various branches unite in demonstrating that the story of humanity is not that of a fall but of a rise, and that the character of humanity is not that of total depravity but of ever-increasing virtue. He starts out upon the supposition, which he believes to be supported by Individualism 23 all of the best knowledge of our time, that human nature is essentially good and not bad. In each and every individual he finds that there are present the moral attributes of God. In each he sees the capacities of infinite affection, the possibilities of eternal progress, the qualities of honour, integrity, purity, sympathy, and consecration. Therefore to every child, once described as conceived in sin and bom in iniquity, does he find it possible to say, "Now art thou the child of God, and it doth not yet appear what thou shalt be ; but we know that when it doth appear thou shalt be like unto him." This being the estimate which the Liberal places upon the essential character of human nature, it becomes evident that he conceives the work of organised religion to be very different from that described by either the Catholic or the Protestant. Affirming without reservation that all men, as the children of God, are naturally good and not bad, and have no task in life other than that of making themselves what they can and really ought to be, he believes that there is no such thing as this work of salvation, in the old sense of the term, to be done at all — that the individual needs not to be saved but to be nurtured, not to be redeemed but to be educated, not to be supematurally converted but to be naturally developed. The problem of human life is not that of banishing from our souls an essen- tially evil nature, and by some strange miraculous process obtaining in its place a wholly new nature of which the rudiments were never possessed 24 Function of the Church before; but it is the problem of taking the nattire which we have to start with, and which is divine in all of its essential attributes, and developing it to the perfect fulfilment of all the latent possi- bilities of its being. The Liberal's life-problem, as he sees it, is not that of miraculously undergoing a second birth, but of working out successfully, by a wholly natural process of education, all the promise that was contained in his first birth. His problem is not that of undergoing any sudden change or conversion or transformation, but that of developing naturally all the divine powers that are latent within him as a human being. His pro- blem, in other words, is not that of salvation, in the old sense of the term, but that of nurture, edu- cation, cultivation. He needs simply to grow and expand along normal and healthful lines. His task is simply to fulfil the best that is within him ; to climb slowly but surely to the highest that is within human reach; to rise up and up, by the natural process of development, out of the de- grading things of earth to "the mark of the high calling of God" which is in the soul of every man born into the world. There is no such thing then, literally speaking, as salvation; and yet the old word still has its meaning ! Salvation, we may say, is still necessary, but in a new and better sense. We need to be saved, not in the sense that we are already lost, but in the sense that we may be lost through neglect, exposure, weakness, or unfaithful- ness. To be lost, is to be imperfect and incomplete, Individualism 25 to be stunted and undeveloped, to fall short by however so little of the divine possibilities that are within us ; and to be saved is to escape from the imperfect and the incomplete, and to rise to the fulness of the stature of our innate spiritual man- hood. To be saved is to grow — to grow steadily and in accordance with the laws of God — to grow naturally from childhood to maturity, from ma- turity to old age, without fears or forebodings, without moral questionings or spiritual convul- sions, even as the seed grows naturally from leaf to flower and from flower to ripened fruit. To be saved is simply to be what we can and ought to be — to redeem the measure of our promise — to be morally and spiritually whole — to have character ! Hence the Liberal doctrine of salvation by charac- ter, as contrasted with the Catholic doctrine of salvation by works and the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith! (C) THE COMMON CONCEPTION OF INDIVIDUALISM UNDERLYING THESE METHODS Here now are the various conceptions which have been held, in various periods of Christian history, of the work of organised religion. These conceptions are very different, as we have seen, and mark a distinct line of progress in their de- velopment from one to another. The advance from the Catholic conception of outward conformity to the practices of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to the 26 Function of the Church Protestant conception of the inward experience of conversion constituted a veritable revolution in religious standards and ideals ; but not more so than the advance from the Protestant conception of the miraculous transformation of the soul through spiritual faith to the Liberal conception of the na- tural development of the soul through moral edu- cation. But these differences in the theories of applied religion are by no means so impressive, to my mind, as the fact that these conceptions are all founded upon one uniform interpretation of human life, and therefore, in the last analysis, are the same. It would seem, at first glance, that nothing coiild be farther apart than the Catholic emphasis upon works, the Protestant emphasis upon faith, and the Liberal emphasis upon development ; and that nothing could serve to close the chasm between the orthodox conception of total depravity and the Liberal conception of the essential worth of human nature. And yet, whether it is the Catholic cele- brating the mass, or the Protestant evangelising an indifferent community, or the Unitarian plant- ing his schools and colleges, they are all at one in their attitude toward the individual whose life, in their several ways, they are striving to redeem. Always has the church, in all of its branches from the medieval Roman hierarchy to the twentieth- century Ethical Culture Society, looked out upon the world of men and seen not an organised society but a haphazard conglomeration of separated individuals, each individual having a certain re- Individualism 27 lation to his fellows and to the world at large, but a relation that was purely occasional and therefore devoid of any permanent significance. In the eyes of the Catholic and the Protestant churches alike, each individual has always stood as a wholly isolated entity, having no vital connection with anything that has gone before or anything that now is, and presenting a moral problem identical with that presented by every other individual. Here, in a word, is a human soul bom into the world in that condition of sin which is imiversally characteristic of mankind, and thus in crying need of salvation. Its condition is exactly that of every other living soul, and the problem of its redemp- tion is therefore the same. The external con- ditions of life are mere accidents and therefore do not affect the problem in the slightest degree. The individual may be black or white, rich or poor, ignorant or educated, — he may be bom in affluence or want, of tainted or pure blood, in the tenement or in the palace — still the problem of his redemption is in all cases the same. Men and women, that is, are all equal in the sight of God. Regardless of the chance circumstances of earthly life, they are all doomed by the same curse of inherited sin, all free to seek God's forgiveness and grace by accepting the sacrifice of Christ and thus win salvation, and all responsible for their ultimate fate. From this point of view, the pro- blem of redemption is one centring wholly about the individual as such. It is the problem of con- 28 Function of the Church vincing the individual personally of his state of sin, warning him of his impending doom, instruct- ing him of his opportunity of salvation, and con- verting him to the acceptance of that opportunity. The external circumstances of life, constituting the environment in which the soul is placed, do not enter into the matter at all. It is the soul alone that counts; and that soul can be redeemed by the same methods, whether it be the soul of the rich merchant or the starving "bum," the society matron or the street-walker, the trained college student or the barbaric and bloodthirsty Indian chief, Geronimo, who died, it is said, a good member of the church! Exactly the same conception of the individual has been characteristic of modem Liberalism. The individual, to be sure, in his essential nature, has been regarded from a very different point of view; and the problem of his redemption, as we have seen, has been treated in a very different way. But as regards the individual in his relation to society and to the world of nature, the Liberal church has been at one with the Catholic and the Protestant churches in asserting an almost complete absence of that relationship. To the former as to the latter, inheritance has counted for little, and environment for still less; and as for the fact of economic status, it has not been recognised at all. In other words. Liberalism is at one with Catholic- ism and Protestantism in seeing in each individual nothing but an isolated personal entity, having Individualism 29 little or no vital connection with anything or any- body external to itself. No better statement of this conception of the individual has ever been given than by Prof. Ephraim Emerton, in his recent book on "Unitarian Thought." Describing the doctrine of redemption as held by this extreme left wing of modem Liberalism, he says: Unitarianism fixes its attention primarily upon the individual. It does not conceive of man merely as an accident in the world-mechanism. It knows that he is that, but it thinks of him as related to the world process through the working of his own indi- viduality. It has its own lofty conceptions of the function of the family, the state, the church, mankind even, in bringing about that development which is to it the ultimate goal of humanity. It feels the force of the reaction of all these upon the individual in fixing his aims, setting his limitations, giving him his opportunities ; but still more powerfully it feels that these larger entities have meaning and value only as they are fixed by the character of the individuals who compose them. The individual, in other words, is a ding an sich; and he is related to the material environment and the social organism only as he, by his personal initiative, can mould and change them. The world is in the individual, if I may so put it in the classic phrase of the idealists, and not the indi- vidual in the world! Whatever their differences in practical method, 30 Function of the Church therefore, Catholic, Protestant, and Liberal all unite in their conception of the individual and his relation to the world. And this conception, as I need not emphasise, works out, in its practical con- sequences, into the crassest kind of individualism. The orthodox church, in all of its many branches both Catholic and Protestant, has thrown the indi- vidual back upon himself and focussed his religious attention upon the problem of his own eternal welfare. It has taught him to study the state of his own soul — to survey his sins and weaknesses — to save himself, even though all the rest of human kind remain unrepentant and unforgiven. "What shall I do to be saved?" — is the hopelessly individualistic question which has controlled the lives of countless generations of men in the past, and which the church in all ages has made it its express business to interpret. "Religion," says Prof. Francis G. Peabody, describing this charac- teristic aspect of Christianity in his "Approach to the Social Question," "was a gift to the indi- vidual, and the salvation of the single individual was the sufficient end of God's grace. ' The most vivid picture of this strictly individualistic con- ception ever given to the world is that portrayed by John Bunyan in the pages of his "Pilgrim's Progress." Warned by the angel of the Lord that he is living in the City of Destruction, Christian straightway abandons his family and friends, and flees with all speed from the doomed community in order to save himself. And when his wife and Individualism 31 children call to him to come back and deliver them also, he puts his fingers in his ears and runs the faster, says the pious writer, that he may not be persuaded by earthly compassion to turn back and thus forfeit his chance of salvation. And this insanely selfish man Bunyan made the hero of his tale and thus the model of Christian virtue! Of course, Christianity has never at any time been devoid of altruistic elements. The pages of both Catholic and Protestant history are crowded with the stories of noble men and pure women who lived and died "for others' sakes"; and the cru- sades of the Middle Ages and the great foreign missionary enterprises of more modern times are inspiring examples of vast movements of organised consecration. But the altruism is not the essential feature of the doctrine. At the bottom of it all is the challenge of personal salvation; and it is only when I myself have been saved — or perhaps as a help to my attainment of salvation — that I am permitted to launch out and save others who are lost! This same individualism is also characteristic, as we might expect, of modem Liberalism. The Liberals, to be sure, have always taken great com- fort in the thought that they have wholly emanci- pated themselves from all the traditional schemes of salvation, both Catholic and Protestant; and denounce, with much show of indignation, the familiar question, "What shall I do to be saved?" But when all has been said and done, it is as plain 32 Function of the Church as noon-day to the impartial observer, that this boasted freedom is more a matter of "words — words," as Hamlet says, than anything else; and that the religious philosophy of modern Liberalism, whether it be that of the Unitarian or the Ethical Culturist, the Christian Scientist or the New Thoughtist, is identical, in its fundamental aspects, with that of historic Christianity. The methods which the Liberal employs in his work of salvation, to be sure, are as far separated from the methods employed by the Catholic and the Protestant as the two poles from one another. In place of sal- vation by faith, he puts salvation by character; in place of salvation by the grace of Christ, he puts salvation by one's own achievement ; in place of salvation gained by the miraculous intervention of a divine being, he puts the salvation gained by the natural endeavours of his own soul. But the matter of methods is comparatively unimportant. The essential question is. What is the church really trying to do? And in the one case, as in the other, the answer comes back in unmistakable terms, — ■ It is trying to save the individual in and for him- self! When words are cast aside, that is, and the realities which they typify are examined, we find that the Liberal has simply been using white coun- ters instead of black. The game which he is play- ing is exactly the same game, and is controlled therefore by exactly the same rules. Liberalism, like all kinds of orthodoxy, in other words, is neces- sarily individualistic at the core. The church in Individualism 33 both cases is concerned with saving the individual as an individual. The Liberal, whether he admits it or not, feels himself confronted primarily by the problem of saving his personal soul. His sign of salvation is a pure heart — that of the Catholic is the sacrament and that of the Protestant, conversion; his method of salvation is natural, their method supernatural; his road of salvation is moral, their road statutory; he does something, they receive something. But the end is in all cases the same! Even when the Liberal's activities take the altru- istic form, as they so often do, of philanthropy — of charity to the poor, sympathy to the unfortu- nate, service to the helpless, downtrodden, and oppressed — his purpose is still very much the same. He is charitable and sympathetic and ser- viceable primarily because he believes that these virtues constitute character, and that through these virtues therefore he may acquire that char- acter which he ought to have as a decent man. His concern, in other words, is still primarily with himself! He asks, just as the Christian in all ages has asked, What shall I do to be saved? And the fact that he answers that question not in terms of sacramental observances or of conversion experi- ences, but in terms of that moral and spiritual attainment which we call character and which often takes the form of the finest self-sacrifice and devotion, does not alter the fundamental truth, that this question is the same as that of his pre- decessors. • In other words. Liberalism is a religion 3 34 Function of the Church which, in its practical operation, is essentially individualistic. The Liberal seeks to save himself by culture, education, and development as an indi- vidual; and he seeks to save other people in the same way as individuals. Beyond this single indi- vidual and his need, he does not go. In Liber- alism, that is, as in all forms of orthodoxy, religion is still "a gift to the individual, and the salvation of the single soul the sufficient end of God's grace"! The crowning illustration of the essentially individualistic character of Christianity, in all its branches, is its doctrine of social reform, which has long since become classic and therefore is backed to-day by all the authority of dogma. It is almost an absurdity to talk about Christianity and the problem of social reform, so remote and accidental has been the relation between the two in all ages. Now and again, however, the two interests have seemed to come together. But only in rare and accidental instances has the church touched the social question at all, save through the individuals who together may be said to make up society. Society can be saved, says the church, only as the individuals who compose it are themselves saved one by one. All attempts at changing conditions and reconstructing social arrangements by legis- lative enactment are futile, so long as men and women remain the same weak and vicious indi- viduals that they have always been. Nothing can be done for society excepting as something is done for the persons of all classes and conditions who Individualism 35 make up the social aggregate. Change these and society will change ; and when all men and women, as individual personalities, have been so changed, the Kingdom of God will be established upon the earth — and not before! Prof. Emerton's recent book on "Unitarian Thought" gives expression to this classic doctrine of individualism as it appears in its most extreme form in modem Liberalism. The redemption of the race [he says] comes only through the redemption of individuals, and that comes only through the redeeming force of personal character. . . . Every man at once contributes to and shares in the race redemption when he, in his own personal conflict, comes out victorious. . . . Redemption by character, first of the individual, and then, through the natural groupings of individuals, of society as a whole; this is the ideal that to the Unitarian embodies the most elevating, the most stimulating, and the most rewarding of human conceptions. Here, as is obvious enough, is the Christian philosophy of individualism in its perfect fulfil- ment. What wonder that the disciple of this philosophy, whether Catholic or Protestant or Liberal, has found it difficult to get beyond the question of his own individual salvation! — and that we see in all orthodoxies that typical product of its decadence, the canting "saint," who is none other than brother to that similar product of decadent Liberalism, the self-righteous Pharisee! CHAPTER III WHAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL ? IT is just here, in this conception of the isolated individual which gives a uniformity to the prac- tical work of the church amid all of its diversity of method, that we find that necessity for a revolu- tionary transformation of function which consti- tutes the supreme religious problem of our time. For we are face to face to-day with a wholly new conception of the significance of the individual and the character of the life which he has to live. It is this fact, as I need not point out, which is making our age to be one of strange transition and disorder, which is shaking the whole structure of our organised society to the very foundations, and effecting that radical transformation of all our social institutions, including of course the church, which is the most striking feature of mod- ern history. Men are asking to-day, almost for the first time. What is an individual? — and they are working out an answer to this question which promises to be revolutionary in its consequences. The answer to this inquiry, in other words, has suddenly raised the social problem; and the solv- ing of this problem is changing the character of the church along with that of every other part of 36 What is an Individual ? 37 the social order. "New ideas," says Dr. Eliot, as we have already seen, "have modified and ought to modify not only the work done by the churches, but the whole conception of the function of the churches" ; and these "new ideas" all centre about this single fact of our changing interpretation of the essential nature of individuality. (a) the individual as a social creature In the past, largely because of those traditional influences of Christianity which we have just been discussing at some length, the individual has been thought of simply as an individual — as an isolated personal entity, having no essential connection with any other individual nor with the natural environment of the world in which he lived. The individual, that is, has been regarded as a kind of spiritual phenomenon, existing wholly apart in a vacuum of his own creating; and pre- senting a political or industrial or educational or religious problem, to be considered on its own particular merits, without any relation whatsoever to any extraneous circumstances or conditions. Everywhere do we find this tendency to "deal with the individual as though he were alone. . . . Physiology examines the individual as body ; logic, the individual as mind; ethics, the duty of the individual; metaphysics, the ideals of the indi- vidual. All these inquiries seem to detach the person from the mass, as though he occupied a 38 Function of the Church little universe of his own." John Smith, from all these various points of view, is John Smith — an individual man, and that is all! Within the last few years, however, we have gradually been awakening to the fact that "the universe of the isolated self is an imaginary uni- verse"; that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an individual at all; that what seems to be an isolated personal entity, embodying its own individual attributes and presenting its own indi- vidual problems, is in reality a social creature, embodying social attributes and presenting social problems. John Smith, in other words, is not John Smith at aU. First of all, he is the offspring of a long line of progenitors ; the blood which flows in his veins is not his blood, but that of his ances- tors for generations back — and it makes all the difference in the world whether this blood is of the Jukes or the Edwards type. Then too, this same John Smith is a citizen of a certain country, reared under the influence of the customs and traditions and legal regulations of that country ; and it makes much difference as regards the education and training of the individual as to whether this coun- try is Russia or England. Again, this man is a member of a certain race, with a difference from all other races as great in thought and emotion as in the color of the skin; and the state and the church, as well as the school and the factory, in their dealings with John Smith, are vitally concerned as to whether he is a member of the What is an Individual ? 39 Mongolian or the Negro or the Caucasian tribe. Furthermore John Smith, in whatever country he resides and to whatever race he belongs, is living from day to day in constant and intimate associa- tion with his fellows; in his home and college and church and business influencing their society by his personal activities, but himself in turn much more deeply and permanently influenced by their society. In other words, as we can readily see, there is in reality no such thing as this individual of whom we have been speaking. John Smith is a social animal, and therefore must be considered from the social and not from the individual point of view. Physiology may study his body, "but that body is the product of ages of social history, and becomes the symbol of the social heredity and environment from which it has sprung. . . . Logic may study his mind, but that mind and its order of thought are the product of centuries of intellectual development of which the individual mind is the witness and expression." Ethics may study his conduct, but there is no problem of con- duct save as a man is required to live in association with his fellows. Metaphysics may concern itself with his personal ideals, "but these personal ideals are inextricably involved in the larger unity of a social idealism, and open into a doctrine not of the soul of the person but of the soul of the universe." All the problems of the individual are thus at bottom social problems. "Round the problem of the individual," says Prof. Francis G. Pea- 40 Function of the Church body, in his "Approach to the Social Question," "like an ocean environing an island, there is the larger circle of social relations and needs." There is no such thing therefore, I say, as an individual, for what we call the individual can only be understood from the standpoint of his social relations. Individuals exist not alone but as members of a society; and it is this member- ship in a society which constitutes their reality as individuals. Therefore is Dr. Cooley right, when he says, in his "Human Nature and the Social Order," "A separate individual is an abstraction not known to experience."^ I have said that this revolutionary conception of the social nature of man is a discovery of our own time. In one sense this is true ; but in another sense, as Prof. Peabody points out, this conception is as old as human society itself. The social ques- tion really appeared when a man was born "not alone, but into a community of three — his parents and himself"; and it became a question of vital consequence just as soon as men entered upon the task of Hving together in an organised society. Nor was this interpretation of the individual as a social phenomenon unknown to the great think- ers of the past. Plato based his greatest book, "The Republic," on the fact of the dependence of the individual soul upon the material and social conditions of the environment. Aristotle, in his * Quoted in Peabody 's "Approach to the Social Question." What is an Individual ? 41 "Politics," affirmed that "man is by nature a political animal." "The individual," he said, "when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and there- fore he is like a part in relation to the whole. He who lives not in society, who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."' Indeed, as we have already seen, the whole philosophy of ancient paganism, as contrasted with the Christianity which succeeded it, may be said to have been char- acterised by a sense of social solidarity which prac- tically disappeared with the passing of ancient and the rising of medieval thought. Even in Christianity, however, with its extreme emphasis upon individualism, this conception of the social nature of man was strong in the beginning, as a reflection of the social genius of the Hebrew pro- phets. Jesus, with his great dream of the Kingdom and his masterly conception of human brother- hood, was supremely a prophet of a social religion, as we shall have occasion to discover more par- ticularly later on. And I surely need not point out that this was the idea which Paul had in mind when he described his Christian comrades as one body in Christ. ' * The body is not one member but many," he said. "The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee, nor again the head 'Quoted in Peabody's "Approach to the Social Question." See also: " Man is truly a more social animal than bees or herd- ing cattle. — The state is prior to the family or the individual." — Aristotle's " Politics," book i., chapter 2. 42 Function of the Church to the feet, I have no need of thee. For they are many members, but one body."^ All of which means that the individual is a social creature, and lives only as that society lives of which he is a part. (b) modern emphasis upon the social nature OF man But while "this truth of the social nature of man," as Prof. Peabody points out in his book, ''has never been without its witnesses, it has received such fresh momentum from the circum- stances of modern life as to become a practically new force in contemporary thought." Two facts of extreme significance unite to explain this sud- den recognition in our day of the social nature of individuality. (i) The Law of Evolution In the first place there is the development within the last half -century of the world-shaking conception of evolution, which has not only revo- lutionised all existing human knowledge, but created the wholly new science of sociology, and thus helped as much as anything perhaps to make our age peculiarly the age of the social question. The great contribution of Charles Darwin to the doctrine of evolution was his theory of "natural selection" — or, as Spencer called it, "the survival ' See Peabody 's "Approach to the Social Question "for an admirable presentation of this fact. What is an Individual ? 43 of the fittest," — which for the first time provided an adequate explanation of the various phenomena of development which had for so long been baffling the biologists of the world. For a time it was believed that this was the sufficient cause of all the phenomena observed — that "natural selection" was the sole factor of organic evolution — although Darwin himself was careful to point out that other factors, such as the Lamarckian theory of the in- heritance of acquired characteristics, no doubt had a vital part in the process. But it was left to Her- bert Spencer to point out, and I believe to demon- strate beyond all peradventure of a doubt, that there was one factor in the situation deeper and more fundamental than natural selection, or any other operating cause of evolution which had been mentioned by any of the investigators of the day — namely, the factor of the influence upon an organism of its environment. In his great essay entitled "The Factors of Organic Evolution," which Prof. William James has well described as "the greatest thing" that Spencer ever did, the philosopher describes this point as follows: Bodies of every class and quality, inorganic as well as organic, are from instant to instant subject to the influences in the environments — are from instant to instant being changed by these in waj^s that are mostly inconspicuous; and are in course of time changed by them into conspicuous ways. Living things in common with dead things are, I say, being 44 Function of the Church thus perpetually acted upon and modified; and the changes hence resulting constitute an all-important part of those imdergone in the course of organic evolution. Indeed, he continues, it is these "primary and universal effects," achieved upon an organism by the influence of environment, "which give the fundamental characters to all organisms." In order to make this point perfectly clear, Spencer then cites a striking analogy. He describes "an observant rambler" along the seashore, studying the stones which lie upon the beach. He finds that these stones are different from any that he has ever discovered inland, in that the waves of the ocean, advancing and receding with the ebb and flow of the tides, "have so broken off their most prominent parts as to pro- duce in all of them more or less rounded forms; and then, further, the mutual friction of the stones, simiiltaneously caused, has smoothed their sur- faces." In other words, these stones have been made what they are by the peculiar action of their environment — they have all undergone certain fundamental modifications in character as a result of the moulding influences of the medium in which they exist. The waters of the sea have flowed about these particular stones for unnumbered ages, rounding their edges and smoothing their siurfaces, much as a sculptor moulds his clay ; and they have thus all of them been fashioned by their environ- What is an Individual ? 45 ment into so fundamental and universal a form that a stone from the sea-shore can be instantly distinguished from all others. Now it is this moulding of living organisms by the external conditions of their environments, of which the action of the ocean upon the pebbles of the shore is a striking illustration, which Spencer declares lies at the bottom of the whole process of evolution. In this wonderful essay of which I have spoken, he shows at length how "the direct action of the medium (or environment) was the primor- dial factor of organic evolution" — the one, that is, with which the evolutionary process began ; and he shows also how the constant operation of this factor, through all the stages of advancing life, has worked those fundamental changes in living organisms which have made possible the more con- spicuous and immediate and specific changes which have been achieved by natural selection and hered- ity and variation. The whole process of evolving life, says Herbert Spencer, — and this, affirms John Fiske, is "one of the greatest contributions ever made to scientific knowledge" — is nothing but "the continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations," the moulding of the organism into some sort of harmony with the external con- ditions of the environment in which it is placed. Life began upon this planet as a minute cell of simple protoplasm, with but a single attribute — that of extension and contraction. But gradually this original form of life has developed and ex- 46 Function of the Church panded, grown in variety of type and complexity of structure, until we have the well-nigh infinite diversity of life which is about us at the present mo- ment ; and while natural selection and its attendant factors have been the immediate causes here at work, it has yet been the action of the environment upon the plastic organism which has been at the bottom of the entire process. It was the environ- ment of water which developed the fins and scales of the fish and fashioned that wonderfully beauti- ful and efficient breathing apparatus which we call the gills. It was the action of the terrestrial environment which transformed the fish into the reptile, and the action of the atmosphere which changed the reptile into the bird and made possible the coat of feathers and wings as a mode of loco- motion. Every form of life, again, was originally blind — there was no such thing as sight ; but rays of light were in the environment, and they fashioned that wonderful instrument of vision which we call the eye. Every form of life was originally deaf — there was no such thing as hearing; but acoustic vibrations were everywhere stirring the atmos- phere and, beating constantly upon the sensitive surface of the organism, hammered into shape at last that instrument for catching sound which we call the ear. In the gradual evolution of life upon this planet, that is, with its growing complexity of structure and its ever-increasing variety of attri- butes, "every stage of enlargement has had refer- ence to actual existences outside, . . . everywhere What is an Individual ? 47 the internal adjustment has been brought about so as to harmonise with some actually existing ex- ternal fact." In other wordF, the organism has been made what it is, in each and every case, funda- mentally by the conditions of its environment. This overshadowing importance of environment as the basic factor in the evolutionary process is frequently forgotten, if it is ever noticed at all, owing to the fact that it almost never works alone and its own particular consequences therefore are almost never apparent as such. Being what Spen- cer calls "the primordial and fundamental factor" of organic evolution, it acts almost always as the mere preparation for the much more decisive and apparent influences of such factors as natural selection, heredity, and variation. The very "primary and universal" quality of most of the effects achieved by the action of the environment pure and simple, makes most "changes of its class," says Spencer, "pass entirely unnoticed." It is only when the environment suddenly changes, or a living organism is placed in an environment with which it is totally unfamiliar, or we see dif- ferent environments acting through long periods of time upon organisms of the same kind, that the remarkable changes due to the external action of the surrounding medium become plainly apparent. Two striking instances of this kind are given by Charles Darwin in his "Origin of Species," and are cited by Spencer in his "Factors of Organic Evolution." The first is that of several varieties 48 Function of the Church of maize which were native "to the hottest parts" of the American continent. These varieties were transplanted to the northern portion of Germany — a much colder region — and "in the course of only- two or three generations," says Darwin, "the grain was utterly transformed" in appearance and in character, presumably by the action of the changed environment. And the second instance is that of a Mr. Meehan, who wrote "a remarkable paper comparing twenty-nine kinds of American trees, belonging to various orders, with their European prototypes." In the comparison, Mr. Meehan found striking differences between the American and the European varieties — differences which "must have been caused," says Darwin, "by the long-continued action of the different climate of the two continents upon the trees." Or compare, from our own knowledge, the ever- green-trees of northern New England with the palm-trees of Arabia — the moss and lichens of Labrador with the rank vegetation of the Amazon- ian forests; or climb a mountain in any part of the world, and watch how the vegetation changes step by step from the grass and flowers in the val- ley, up to the stunted and shivering shrubs of crags and chasms, and finally to the barren wastes which are covered by nothing but snow and ice — and we have definite illustrations of the direct influence of the environment upon plants and trees. Or turn to the animal kingdom for similar examples ! "The fur of mammals," says Dr. David Starr What is an Individual? 49 Jordan, in his recent book entitled "Evolution and Animal Life," "always fits them to their surroundings" — or, reversing the statement, the environment has very largely determined the hide of the polar bear as compared with the skin of the African lion. If the change from one climate to another is too sudden or too extreme, the in- fluence of the environment will be so strong as to be fatal ; as in the case of the native sheep of Eng- land which have developed a long wool fitted to protect them in a cold, damp climate. "Such sheep, transferred to Cuba," says Dr. Jordan, "died in a short time, leaving no descendants." A Mr. Gould, quoted approvingly by Darwin in his "Origin of Species," believes that birds of the same species are more highly coloured under a clear atmosphere than when living near the coast or on islands ; while a Mr. Wollaston, quoted by Darwin in the same passage, is convinced that residence near the sea affects the colours of in- sects. Or, for a particularly striking example of the direct influence of environment, take the whale which, as we know, is not a fish at all, but a mammal or land animal. Compelled by some peculiar combination of circumstances to take to the water as its permanent abode, the whale has been so moulded by its utterly changed en- vironment, that to-day it has all the superficial aspects of a bona fide fish ; and it is only when we come to examine its structural characteristics with care that we discover its true mammalian 50 Function of the Church nature. Its body has become elongated and nar- row like that of a fish and ends in a decidedly fishy tail; its hide has been transformed into a skinny sort of covering like a fish's scales; its front legs have been changed into fins; and its hind legs have almost wholly disappeared, a mere rudiment being tucked away in the lower part of the body to reveal where these legs once appeared. Or again, let me recall the discovery which was made in the Mammoth Cave in Ken- tucky, where the fishes in the subterranean lakes and rivers of this mighty cavern were found to have fully-formed eyes like any animal, but these eyes absolutely blind ! Centuries of utter darkness in the environment have simply destroyed the sight, leaving the dead and useless organs as a proof that vision once existed. Now these are some of the instances which may be cited to show the direct action of the environ- ment upon the existing organism. This action, as I have said, is so seldom found uncomplicated by the more immediate action of the other factors in the evolutionary process, of which natural selection is of course the most important, that "it is very difficult," as Darwin has put it, "to decide how far changed conditions have acted in a definite manner. But there is reason to believe," he con- tinues, "that in the course of time the effects have been greater than can be proved by clear evi- dence." And it is just this belief which Herbert Spencer took up in his great philosophic study of What is an Individual? 51 life as the adjustment of the inner relations of the organism to the outer relations of the surrounding environment, and transformed into the positive demonstration that the influence of environment is the one decisive condition of the whole evo- lutionary process. It is this, says Spencer, in the passage already quoted, which is "primor- dial and fundamental," determining the final characteristics of all organisms. "This," says John Fiske, "is the deepest law of life that science has been able to detect." "The lowest and most fundamental factor of evolution," say Profs. Jordan and Kellogg, in "Evolution and Animal Life," "and therefore the first introduced, was the pressure of the physical environment. Adaptation to environment is a thing basic. . . . The adaptability of life stuff, its plasticity and capacity of advantageous reaction, is a funda- mental fact in organic nature, like gravitation or chemical affinity in inorganic nature." And Prof. Drummond sums it all up in one sweeping state- ment, in his "Ascent of Man," when he says: The secret of evolution lies with the environment. In the environment — in that in which things live and move and have their being — is found the secret of their being and especially of their becoming. Every- thing that lives, lives in virtue of its correspondence with its environment. . . . The supremest factor in aU development, therefore, is environment.^ ' The most recent statement of this theory comes from Prince Kropotkin, in his article in the "Nineteenth Century" for July, 52 Function of the Church Now here in this fact of the influence of environ- ment as the fundamental factor of the evolutionary process — here in this interpretation of life as an "adjustment" between the inner relations of the individual organism and the outer relations of the surrounding medium — do we find the most impres- sive and significant lesson that evolution has to teach; and here do we find what has done more than all else to change the whole attitude of the thinking world toward the problem of the indi- vidual, and made forevermore impossible the tra- ditional view-point of church and society for unnumbered generations. Here in the past, as we have seen, we have been committing the stupen- dous blunder of considering the individual as an isolated entity, wholly separated from the environ- ment in which he is placed. We have been re- garding the "evolving object as a self-sufficient whole," developing in some sort of a vacuum. Here — ^like the old-fashioned natural psychology, which Prof. William James berates so soundly in his great work on "The Principles of Psychology," on the ground that it "treated the soul as a detached existence, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and proper- ties," failing utterly to see, as the new evolution- ary psychology now makes evident, that the mind 19 10. He here states that "experiment reveals the direct action of surroundings as the main factor of evolution." Environment, in other words, plays the chief r61e in the great drama of the building of character. What is an Individual ? 53 must be taken "in the midst of all its concrete relations," — here in this same way we have been treating the individual members of the social aggre- gate as detached existences, sufficient unto them- selves, and have assumed to consider only their nature and properties, forgetting that the indi- vidual man, like the brain, cannot be understood at all, unless he be taken "in the midst of all his concrete relations," as an inhabitant of a material universe and a member of human society. And in this attitude the Christian church, as we have seen, has certainly been at all times one of the chief offenders. It has declared, as has been pointed out at length, that a soul was a soul, re- gardless of all the merely external conditions of birth, inheritance, and environment. One soul was exactly like another soul from the standpoint of its spiritual destiny. It made no difference under what conditions it was bom or of what strain of blood it bore the heritage; it made no difference what kind of a body it inhabited, whether healthy or unhealthy, clean or unclean, weak or strong; it made no difference in what physical surround- ings it lived and toiled from day to dsiy, whether surroundings of beauty or ugliness, of squalor or luxury, of vice or virtue. All these things, from the standpoint of the church's saving work, were of no account or interest. Not the outward en- vironment but the inward spirit, not the material surroundings of the world but the spiritual state of the soul — this was the church's sole concern; 54 Function of the Church and to be absorbed by such purely worldly con- siderations as bodily health, tolerable conditions of labour, fresh air, clean food, pure water and milk, adequate wages, equality of industrial opportunity, even emancipation from chattel slavery, was to be diverted from its main task, which was "the cure of souls." It is as though we should take the pebble upon the shore and regard it apart from the surging tide which has rounded its edges and smoothed its surfaces and thus made it what it is. It is as though we should view the plant wholly apart from the soil in which it is rooted, the tem- perature of the atmosphere in which it spreads its leaves, and the sunshine or the darkness in which it grows. It is as though we should regard the fur of the polar bear apart from the rigour of its arctic home, or explain the blinded eye of the fishes in the Mammoth Cave without any knowledge of the pitch-black darkness of that subterranean vault. It is as though we should study the bird apart from the air in which it spreads its wings for flight, or the fish apart from the water in which it swims ; or explain the eye with a total disregard of the rays of light which penetrate the atmos- phere, or the ear without any concern for the acoustic vibrations which beat upon its drum. But all this isolation of the soul from the envi- ronment in which it is placed has been made impossible once and for all by the discoveries of evolution. We know to-day that the individual man cannot be considered apart by himself, any What is an Individual ? 55 more than the animal or plant can be so consid- ered. We know to-day that "in the environ- ment — in that in which things live and move and have their being — is found the secret of their being and especially of their becoming," — and that this great scientific fact is as true of you and me and of all men bom into the world, as it is true of any plant or tree, of any bird or mammal. "How little have the best of us in acquirements, in position, even in character, that may be credited entirely to ourselves," says Henry George, in his "Progress and Poverty," "how much to the influences that have moulded us ! . . . How little does heredity count as compared with conditions!" How many of us do not know that we are what we are to-day, because we were bom in the nineteenth century, in the United States of America, in material comfort and not in poverty; were granted an education and not left in ignor- ance; were guarded by the shelter of home and school and church from exhausting labour, vicious example, and degrading influence — that we are what we are, in short, because of the environment into which we were bom and in which we have always lived? Suppose that we had been bom and reared not in America but in China — and is it not true that, "but for the angle of the eye or the shade of the hair," we should have grown up as those around us, "using the same speech, think- ing the same thoughts, exhibiting the same tastes"? Suppose that we had been bom not in a home of 56 Function of the Church moderate material comfort, but in the barren poverty of an East-Side tenement, and would we not have been now even as those who languish and toil in ignorance and want and crime in the cruel slums of New York City? Suppose that you should cast your little girl into the gutter, to live as best she could, unguarded by any of the sacred influences of home or school; and in her place in your nursery you laid down some wretched child, snatched from the misery of some cellar room; and in due course of time, would not your girl be walking the streets at night, and the outcast child, nourished and cherished in your home, be the sweet and pure and lovely woman? "Change Lady Vere de Vere in her cradle with an infant of the slimis," says Henry George, "and not all the blood of a hundred earls will give you the refined and cultured woman." We are very largely crea- tures of our environment, every one of us. The abiding racial and national and class distinctions of this world are not to be accounted for on the basis of different ability or character, but primarily on the basis of different surroundings. We are moulded in speech, in manners, in habits, in abilities, in morals, in ideals, by the external cir- cumstances which wrap us round, just as the head of a Flathead Indian is flattened by the stone which is bound from earliest infancy to the top of his plastic skull, or the feet of the Chinese women are distorted by the unyielding bandages in which they are tightly wrapped. The great majority of What is an Individual? 57 men and women in the world are enclosed in the fetters of material conditions which make impos- sible a healthy body, an active mind, or a pure soul. Some of us, perhaps, are strong and happy and moderately virtuous, and again and again we take credit to ourselves for our condition, and wonder that all men are not as we are. But sup- pose that, from our fifth or sixth or seventh year, we had laboured in a tenement making paper flowers, or in a factory weaving cotton cloth, or in a coal mine picking coal — would our physical condition be what it is to-day? Suppose that from childhood on we had been denied an adequate mental and moral education — and would we feel the inspiration of art and literature and music, of good impulses and high ideals, as we do now? Suppose that we had been cast upon the world with hands unskilled to any industry and brain un- trained to any profession — and would we find the problem of getting a living as easy as we find it at this present moment? Suppose that we had never known the meaning of even decent comfort, but had always been struggling under the remorse- less grind of hopeless poverty — and would we be quite the kind of good citizen that we are to-day! Put a growing plant in a cold, damp cellar — refuse the blessing of the sunshine and the grace of well- nourished soil — and behold the withered and ugly shrub which such an environment produces! Put a little bird just released from the shell in a narrow cage — deny it fresh air, wholesome food, and a 58 Function of the Church chance to spread its wings — and lo, if the bird lives at all, see how feeble are its wings, which cannot soar to heaven even though freedom is at last gained, and how empty is its little throat of the divine melody of song ! It is the environment which is ' ' the secret of being and becoming"; it is the world which makes us what we are, even as the ebbing and rising tide upon the beach moulds the rolling stones. And we should never forget that this great fact is just as true of men as it is of plants and animals. Here now is the discovery which has done as much as anything else perhaps to open our eyes to the truth of the essentially social nature of the individual. It is obvious, however, that at the heart of all that I have just been saying about the evolutionary law of dependence upon environment, there is one great fallacy of which I have not spoken at all or even given any indication of being conscious. I refer to the fact that while this law undoubtedly holds of all forms of animal life below the line of human, it does not hold at all of men. Here, as in the field of ethics, where Thomas Hux- ley pointed out the fact with such irrefragable logic in his famous Romanes Lecture, the law of evolution suddenly ends — or, to put it more accu- rately, it becomes transformed into something quite other than it ever has been before. It is true, that is, that all organic forms of life, both vegetable and animal, are determined in character very largely by environing conditions ; but it is the glory of human forms of life, in distinction from all others. What is an Individual? 59 that they are able to mould their own environ- ment and thus escape the bondage of its tyranny. Man alone, of all living creatures, can change the world to suit himself — master its forces, conquer its terrors, soften its rigours, banish its perils, in a word, make his own world according to his own least whim and fancy. Heredity is important — environment counts for much; but in the life of man, whatever may be said of the lower orders of existence, the will is the supreme factor. By the exercise of this will, man can make the desert to blossom like the rose, and blast the Garden of Eden into an arid waste. He can turn malignant swamps into abodes of health, and make sweet prairies and abundant hillsides to reek with pesti- lence and death. He can tame the winds and harness the floods. He can chain the lightning and make it carry his messages from continent to con- tinent. The world is his — and life is what he makes it. He is his own creator and the master of his own destiny. What madness to assert that he is the helpless victim of his environment, and must bow obediently to the decrees of nature! This great law of evolutionary development may be true of life in general; but here, as in everything else, man is the grand and unique exception. (2) The Social Complexity of Civilisation All this of course is very largely true, and I should be the last to seek to deny it or ignore it. 6o Function of the Church But it was truer yesterday than to-day, and is truer to-day than it will be to-morrow. Man's will, by the initiatory power of which he has been able to make his own world and to decide his own destiny, has always been more or less limited in operation by those "two kinds of determinism," upon which Prof. Simon N. Patten lays such stress in his recent remarkable book entitled "The Social Basis of Religion" — namely, the "biologic deter- minism" which "covers the whole range of hered- ity," and that "external determinism" of which the most prominent if not the sole form is what is familiarly known as "economic determinism" — in other words, the social environment! The human will, powerful as it has been, and still is, has yet never been able to emancipate itself from this twofold restriction, and has thus been only a very partial factor in the determination of man's development. The exaggeration of man's power to conquer his environment by the sheer mastery of his will has been, according to Prof. Patten, one of the commonest errors of historic interpretation. "To call an act one of will," he says, "when the forces of biologic selection or economic pressure are operative, confuses what otherwise would be a plain problem. If these two great forces cover the whole field, there is no will in any sense worth investigating. The will is a reality only when there are acts free from the pressure of either of these two forces." But that such acts have been possible only in the rarest instances and What is an Individual? 6i in the most favoured lives is one of the most familiar generalisations of experience. Man therefore has never been quite as masterful in his relation to his environment as many persons have imagined. Pressed upon on the one side by heredity and on the other side by economic neces- sity, his life has been to a very large extent deter- mined for him and not fashioned by him. And this, which has always been very largely true in the past, is overwhelmingly true to-day. Heredity remains what it has always been; but economic determinism is looming up every day as an ever- growing factor in the determination of htunan pro- gress and personal character. With the increasing complexities of modem social relationships, eco- nomic necessity is becoming more and more the dominant influence over vast areas of human life; and we see rapidly approaching that time defined by Prof. Patten, when "economic determinism" with heredity will "cover the whole field," and there will be "no will in any sense worth investi- gating." Whatever may have been true of man's power of self-determination in what may be called the frontier stage of civilisation, that power is rapidly disappearing to-day before the infinite ramifications of the social organism; and so far from being the master of the social environment, man is very fast becoming its helpless victim. It is almost unbelievable to what extent the multi- plying complexities of modem industrial society have caught the individual in their toils and re- 62 Function of the Church duced him to utter impotence. In the old days, when the frontier was still a reality upon the out- skirts of every civilisation, it was to some extent possible for a man to live his own life and create his own environment, and thus fulfil the glory of his individuality. l!f society pressed too closely upon him and denied him that opportunity for free expression which he craved, then his course of action was simple. Packing all of his goods and chattels into a van, and swinging an axe over his shoulder and a gun under his arm, he marched away into the virgin wilderness. There he pre- empted a piece of land, cleared an open space for his garden, built a house; and there he lived for a generation perhaps, asking nothing of society and giving nothing to society — an isolated indi- vidual sufficient unto himself. If he wanted water, he sought the spring or the brook ; if he needed fuel, he gathered underbrush or chopped down a tree; if he desired food, he killed a pig, shot a deer, or pulled some vegetables. His clothing was spun upon the wheel in the kitchen, his light by night came from the home-dipped candles, and his fur- niture, tools, and implements of all kinds were of his own rude manufacture. But all this kind of individual independence is now forever a thing of the past, save in a few hid- den comers of the world. The frontier has prac- tically disappeared, never to return. Society has everywhere developed and expanded, until men must live together, dependent upon one another. What is an Individual? 63 or not at all. And it is this gradual covering of the whole field of humanity by the complexity of the modem social organism which has forced upon our attention, as never before, the essentially social character of the individual. A man to-day must be a social creature whether he wants to or not. Speaking of the "new varieties of sin" which have become conspicuous of late. Prof. Edward A. Ross, in his "Sin and Society," remarks wisely : Modern sin takes its character from the mutualism of our time. Under our present manner of living, how many of my vital interests I must entrust to others! Nowadays the water-main is my well, the trolley-car my carriage, the banker's safe my old stocking, the policeman's billy my fist. My own eyes and nose and judgment defer to the inspector of food or drugs or gas or factories or tenements or insurance companies. I rely upon others to look after my drains, invest my savings, nurse my sick, and teach my children. I let the meat-trust butcher my pig, the oil-trust mould my candles, the sugar-trust boil my sorghum, the coal-trust chop my wood, the barb-wire company split my rails. . . . Interdependence puts us, as it were, at one another's mercy. And this is true, we may add, of every smallest detail of modem social life. Absolutely dependent upon society for the satisfaction of my slightest needs, I am the helpless victim of society. Getting my water not from my well but from the municipal 64 Function of the Church water system, I am subject to the pollution which again and again vitiates the stream. Getting my milk not from my own cow but from the distribu- ting company or corporation, I must endure all the perils of dirt and disease which swell profits and assure big dividends. Procuring my food not from my own garden but from the public market, I am the victim of every cheat and adulterator in the community. Earning my living not by labour in my own home or on my own land, but in the factory or on the ranch or in the mine, I earn such wages and toil such hours and work under such conditions of light and air and sanitation and safety from fire as the greed of the capitalistic sys- tem of industry may permit. In other words, ''under our present manner of living," my life is not my own life at all, but the life which is deter- mined for me by society. I am the victim and not the creator of the social organism of which I am an almost infinitesimal part. Miss Jane Addams describes this truth most impressively in her essay on "Woman's Conscience and Social Ameliora- tion" in the volume entitled "The Social Appli- cation of Religion." Speaking particularly of women, she says: We have been accustomed for many generations to think of woman's place as being entirely within the walls of her own household. , . . There is no doubt, however, that many women to-day are failing to discharge their duties to their own families and What is an Individual? 65 households simply because they fail to see that, as society grows more complicated, it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home, if only to pre- serve that home in its entirety. One could illustrate [she continues] in many ways. A woman's simplest duty, we would say, is to keep her house clean and wholesome, and to feed her children properly. Yet, if she lives in a tenement house, as so many of our neighbours do, she cannot fulfil these simple obli- gations by her own efforts, because she is utterly dependent upon the city administration for the con- ditions which render decent living possible. Her base- ment will not be dry, her stairs will not be fireproof, her house will not be provided with sufficient windows to give her light and air, nor will it be equipped with sanitary plumbing, unless the Public Works Department shall send inspectors who constantly insist that these elementary decencies be provided. These same women who now live in tenements, when they lived in the country, swept their own doorways, and either fed the refuse of their tables to a flock of chickens or allowed it innocently to decay in the open air and sunshine; now, however, if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities, no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed, she may see her children sicken and die from diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded ; she cannot even secure clean milk for her children, she cannot provide them with fruit which is untainted, unless the milk has been properly s 66 Function of the Church taken care of by the City Health Department, and the decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale in the tenement districts, shall have been properly destroyed in the interest of public health. In short, if a woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her home, and rearing her children, she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs . . . and take part in the movements looking toward social amelioration. In other words, the problem of life to-day is no longer the problem of the individual but the prob- lem of the society which environs the individual and determines the conditions of his life. "Under our present manner of living," as Miss Addams points out with splendid emphasis, our affairs are undergoing "the process of socialisation," and must be handled therefore from the social and not from the individual point of view. Miss Addams in this passage is dealing of course with the tenement dweller in the great city; and it may well be imagined perhaps that the conquest of the individual by society is limited to the great areas of modem municipal life. Vast as these areas undoubtedly are, there are yet vaster realms of undeveloped country, which approximate more nearly to the frontier stage of civilisation than to the city stage, of which the tenement-home is the climacteric and therefore the most terrible expres- sion; and in these more or less rural districts, this "process of socialisation" cannot as yet be very far advanced. This assertion, I grant, seems What is an Individual? 67 plausible enough on the surface; and yet, closely examined, it is easily discovered that nothing could be farther from the truth. With our modem methods of transportation and communication, with the ever-increasing tendency toward special- isation of occupation and production, with the rapid development of our modem industrial sys- tem with its trusts and corporations, with the exploitation of the natural resources of new coun- tries or regions by capitalists coming from older countries and equipped with unmeasured re- sources of wealth, the "process of socialisation" — or "mutualism," as Prof. Ross calls it — has become well-nigh universal, and even the most isolated individual in the most remote region has been successfully entrapped in its coils. No more striking illustration of this fact could be given than that cited by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, in his recent book on "The Conflict between Individual- ism and Collectivism in a Democracy." "The individual citizen," he declares, "has become much less independent than he was before 1850." And then instead of turning to the congested cities for his illustration, he turns to a remote district in the state of Maine, where the people might seem to have maintained their individuality if anywhere. Thirty years ago, [he says], the people on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, enjoyed an extraordinarily independent life. They got their food from the sea and from their own farms and gardens on the shore, 68 Function of the Church and their fuel from their own wood-lots. They raised their own sheep, spun their own yarn, and wove their own cloth, except that they had recently acquired the habit of buying cotton warps which they filled with wool. They built their own vessels from the island timber, and were masters of their own carrying-trade. They exported salt-fish, lumber and granite products of their own labour; and imported very little except sugar, tea, and coffee, cotton goods, metal tools, and crockery. A Mt. Desert householder in those days was an extraordinarily independent and self-contained individual, who was touched by the collective action only at the annual town-meeting, in the proceedings of which he took an active part. He personally owned all the instruments of production which he needed; and if he went fishing in a vessel larger than he and his boy could manage, he went on shares in an equitable co-operative fashion. The situation of the Mt. Desert householder to-day is utterly changed. He now imports almost everything he eats, drinks, or wears, and almost all the material with which his shelters are built. He has become dependent upon other people and their industries for the necessaries of life — as much so as the inhabitant of a closely-built city. He must do just what city people have to do — sell his labour, skill, judgment, or experience, for money with which to buy the necessaries of life. He has perhaps more health, comfort, and enjoyment of life than he used to have; but he is no longer an apt illustration of extreme individualism, and has become subject to collectivism. By such facts as these has it now been deeply impressed upon the modem mind that a new inter- What is an Individual? 69 pretation of the individual is necessary. Great minds have always understood, as we have seen, that behind every problem of the individual stands the overshadowing problem of the whole ; but never until to-day has this truth been apprehended in all of its real significance. Through the development, on the one hand, of the philosophy of evolution, with its emphasis upon heredity and more especiallyupon the influence of environment, and with its inter- pretation of society in terms of what Spencer has called "the social organism"; and through the development, on the other hand, of modem civil- isation, with its miracles of intercommunication and interdependence, its vast industrial enter- prises uniting thousands of men in the doing of a common work, its multiplying complexities of social utilities and mechanisms arising wholly from the conscious endeavour of men to live and work together, its amazing expansion of knowledge and sympathy making us see more truly than St. Paul ever saw that "whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it," — mainly through this twofold development has the social character of the human person become a demonstrated fact, and "a new interpretation of individual life a necessity of rational thought." We are obliged to-day to think in terms not of the part but of the whole, not of the member but of the body, not of the individual but of the social organism. Hence "the transition from a philo- 70 Function of the Church sophy bounded by the individual to a philosophy concerning the social order," which constitutes the epoch-making phenomenon of the present age. This transition in thought, says Prof. Peabody, in the book already quoted, can be compared with nothing less than the trans- ition in astronomy, when the Ptolemaic conception of the universe was supplanted by the Copernican conception, and the earth which had seemed the centre of a system was discovered to have its orbit as one of many planets around a larger sun. So the philosophy of individualism, with its Ptolemaic con- ception of the individual life, is supplanted by the philosophy of the social order, where the individual finds himself within the Copernican system of a larger world. CHAPTER IV the social question (a) the individual socialised SUCH is the answer which our age has made to the question, What is the individual? The individual is a member of the organic body of society, and hence essentially social in his nature. The individual is an epitome of the society of which he is a member. Behind every individual are the physical, political, industrial, economic, so- cial conditions which have very largely made him what he is; and behind every individual, there- fore, the all-embracing problem of the social whole. And it is this answer, spoken in imperative tones, which has created what we have learned to call the social question, which, as we have seen, is the one all-absorbing problem of our time. The charac- teristic features of the present day are the new social vision which for the first time in himian his- tory has cast its gaze full upon the misery, the ig- norance, and the vice of the great masses of the population, and sees things as they really are; the new social conscience which has at last awakened to the essential wrong which is involved in a social condition which dooms the millions to hopeless 71 72 Function of the Church poverty, wretchedness, and sin, and which promises to remain ill at ease so long as that social condition endures; the new social ideahsm which dreams its dreams and sees its visions, like the prophets of ancient days, and looks forward confidently to the establishment of God's Kingdom upon the earth; and the new social consecration which is moving thousands of eager yoimg men and women to give themselves — body, mind, and soul — to the task of bringing in this Kingdom as the noblest and divinest work which their hands and their hearts can find to do. The concrete problems of our age are social problems — capital and labour, wealth and poverty, the wage-system, industrial accidents; the overshadowing question of our day is the social question — the relations of men with one another in the world that now is; the domi- nating passion of our age is the social passion — the desire to serve those who are in need, to heal those who are bruised, to liberate those who are bound by the chains of ignorance and want; the controlling ideal of our day is the social ideal, which embodies itself in practical endeavours after ma- terial comfort, mental efficiency, moral strength, and spiritual happiness for all men and women upon the earth. It is perfectly true that social in- justice has always existed in the world — manifest- ing itself under more hideous aspects of inequality and misery yesterday than to-day — and is there- fore nothing in any sense new. But what is new is the burning consciousness that this social injustice The Social Question 73 exists — that it exists unnecessarily and not at all in the natural order of things — and that it must therefore be done away with at once, if our society, like the fabled cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, is not to merit the curse of God. And it is just because of this new consciousness of our time that this age is rightly to be described not as the age of material development, or scientific progress, or industrial achievement, but as distinctively the age of social reform. "Behind all the extra- ordinary achievements of modem civilisation," says Prof. Francis G. Peabody, in his "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," its transformation of business methods, its miracles of scientific discovery, its mighty combinations of political forces, there lies at the heart of the present time a burdening sense of social maladjustment which creates what we call the social question. ... It is the age of the social question. Never were so many people, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, philo- sophers and agitators, so stirred by this recognition of inequality in social opportunity, by the call to social service, and by dreams of a better social world. And what is this social question, as we have said, but the attempt to act upon our new dis- covery of the significance of the individual? What is it but the endeavour to translate our social philosophy into social action — the endeavour of humanity to readjust its various practical activi- 74 Function of the Church ties, so that they shall be in harmony with the transition which has already taken place in its thought. We have already learned to think of the individual as a social creature; now we are trying to act toward him as a social creature — which means that we are to-day going through the throes of a social revolution, just as we have already been through the throes of an intellectual revolution. We see the signs of this readjustment or social revolution in every field of human en- deavour. We see it in modem industry, where men are struggling to do away with competition in favour of combination, and to end the warfare between capital and labour on a basis of mutual co-operation. We see it in modem politics, where the government is concerning itself less and less with the mere machinery of administration, and more and more with the concrete problems of as- sociated life. We see it in modem education, which is to-day trying to solve the problem of making the individual not merely cultured, but socially ef- ficient. We see it in modem ethics, where conduct is more and more being defined not in terms of the private virtues and vices of the individual, but in terms of the relation of that individual to the needs and aspirations of the common life. We see it in modem medicine, where physicians are busied not so much with curing individuals who are ill, as in abolishing the conditions of social life which make disease to-day inevitable. We see it in modem criminology, which refuses to condemn the indi- The Social Question 75 vidual offender as an individual, but condemns the society which has made him what he is. We see it in modem charity and philanthropy, which has abandoned the field of individual relief for that of social prevention, and interprets poverty and neg- lect in terms of social rather than of individual responsibility. Everyivhere to-day is society in the process of readjusting its activities in the light of its new conception of the individual. We find ourselves face to face, in industry, in politics, in education, in philanthropy, not with this individ- ual and that individual and the other individual, but face to face simply with the social whole. It is the body with which we have to deal and not the members. Hence has our age under the compul- sion of this new thought become absorbed in the problem of the social organism, which constitutes what we have agreed to call, as we have seen, the social question! So revolutionary is this new conception of the in- dividual, especially in its social consequences, — so complete a * ' right-about-face " does it achieve in all our practical ways of reaching and grappling with the problem of the individual life through the in- stitutions of school and church and state, — that I venture to consider here at some length two of these fields of human endeavour in which the most startling and thorough-going changes of method have taken place. I refer first to the field of medicine; and second to the field of charitable relief. 76 Function of the Church (b) physical disease Few better illustrations of the essentially social character of our age, as contrasted with the ram- pant individualism of a generation or so ago, could be given perhaps than the revolutionary concep- tion of the significance of physical disease which has within a comparatively few years captured the leaders of the medical profession. (i) Disease Individual Within the easy memory of people now living, disease even of the most contagious nature was regarded as a purely individual matter, concerning only the person afflicted, or at most the immediate members of his household. An interesting instance of this fact is given in William De Morgan's charm- ing novel, "AHce-For-Short," a story depicting life in London a half century ago. In the course of the tale, a little child is stricken with small-pox; and, to the modem reader, accustomed to modern medical practice, the indifference of everybody concerned to the contagious character of this viru- lent disease is almost unbelievable. The house, in which the patient lies ill, is not isolated or guarded by any action of the municipal authorities. The father of the child goes directly from the bedside of the invalid to his work in another part of the town, walking freely in the streets and riding in the public conveyances. And one evening this same father is described as taking Alice, who was The Social Question 'J^ acting as the child's nurse, for a ride in a cab, in order that she might breathe a Httle fresh air for a few mo- ments ; and when the cabman is informed that one of his fares has come directly from the bedside of a small-pox patient, he offers no objection whatsoever. Such conduct as this is to-day so inconceivable as well-nigh to persuade us that the novelist, like another Homer, has in this case been nodding. Indeed, De Morgan, anticipating such scepticism as this in the minds of his readers, goes out of his way at this point of the narrative to bear witness to the fact that he himself was living in the city of London fifty years ago, and therefore knows what he is talking about. For within a comparatively few years our whole attitude toward physical diseases of all kinds has been wholly changed. In this age we recognise that disease presents what is at bottom a social and not merely an individual problem. "The pubHc health," says Dr. Lyman Abbott, in his "Spirit of Democracy," "is seen to be something more than the health of individuals." The physician, standing by the bed of illness, knows to-day that he is dealing not merely with the indi- vidual patient, but — what is infinitely more import- ant — with the whole organism of the social fabric. And this, because of two epoch-making discoveries ! (2) Disease Social in its Consequences In the first place, we have come very clearly to understand, that, in many instances, disease is 78 Function of the Church social in its consequences. The man who is dying of the cholera in India is a menace to every person in the United States; the yellow-fever patient in Havana is a peril to every citizen in the port of New York; and the little girl languishing of tuber- culosis on the lower East Side is of very immediate concern to every pampered and coddled child in the white palaces on upper Fifth Avenue. Disease, in other words, from the standpoint of conse- quences, is very frequently a social phenomenon. Its ravages cannot possibly be confined to the individual organism. "Therefore," says Dr. Lyman Abbott again, "we have Health Boards, beginning in our great cities, extending through our states, and now. . . soon to be organised into a bureau of the federal government, for the purpose of compelling obedience to sanitary laws and stamping out epidemics." So clear is our under- standing of the inevitable social consequences of disease, that when such disease enters my house- hold, I am at once deprived, by common consent, of all those rights and privileges which, under ordinary circumstances, I am guaranteed as an individual. My boy, who is ill of the small-pox, is snatched from my arms by the public authorities and consigned to a pest-house. My house is iso- lated from all communication with the outer world ; and I and all members of my family are held as prisoners, regardless of personal inconvenience and possible business ruin. When a contagious disease appears, in other words, no individual has any The Social Question 79 rights which society is bound to respect. The social welfare takes precedence over every indi- vidual consideration; and this because disease, from the standpoint of its consequences at least, presents at bottom a social problem. (3) Disease Social in its Causes More epoch-making, however, than the dis- covery that disease is social in its consequences, is the much more recent discovery that disease is also social in its causes. Disease, in other words, does not begin with the individual any more than it ends there. In the vast majority of cases it is simply a product of our modem civilisation. We manufacture invalids to-day, just exactly as we manufacture boots and shoes, or cotton cloth. Weakened limbs, broken-down organs, disordered functions, infectious ailments, chronic invalidism, to say nothing of such specific industrial diseases as "phossy jaw" or the "bends," — all these are something more than the concern of the individual for the simple reason that, traced to their ultimate origins, they are found to be the result of certain conspicuous and preventable causes which inhere in nothing other than the social structure. The individual is ill, not because of a faulty physical inheritance, not because of exposure to contagion, not even because of excesses or vices of unwise per- sonal habit; but because, in the majority of cases, he is obliged to live and labour under material 8o Function of the Church and social conditions which render bodily health impossible. And this means of course, that, if we would cure the individual when stricken — and still more, if we would prevent the individual from being stricken in the first place — we must move from the individual to society, proceed from the sick chamber in the home or from the ward in the hospital to the tenement, the street, the factory, the city, — the whole social environment of the indi- vidual, — and seek so to change existing conditions that health and not sickness, strength and not weakness, shall be fostered. The physician must be not merely a general practitioner but also a social reformer — he must heal his patient not merely by the application of drugs to the ailing individual, but also by the application of progres- sive legislation to the unjustly organised social whole. Physical disease, in other words, is at bottom a problem of social justice ; and the healing of disease at bottom a problem of social reconstruc- tion. Make society what it ought to be, and dis- ease, we are told, will practically disappear. Nor are illustrations in support of this startling con- tention by any means few. For example ! (a) Infant Mortality One of the most pitiful problems with which the physician has to deal is that of children's diseases; and in this problem no one fact is so conspicuous as the great difference in the amount of illness and The Social Question 8i mortality of children in the different orders of society. Dr. L. Emmett Holt, the eminent special- ist of New York, remarks upon this fact in an article in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" for February 26, 1910. All who practise medicine among children [he says] and who study the question of infant mortality statistically are struck with the marked contrast between the death-rate of the children of the poor and those of the rich. Clay estimates that in England in the aristocratic families the mortality of the first year is 10%; in the middle class, 21%; and in the labouring class, 32%. This difference in the infant mortality of the various classes [he continues] is most striking in the case of acute intestinal disease. Haller states that of 170 deaths from this cause investigated in Graz in 1903 and 1904, there were 161 among the poor, 9 among the well-to-do, and none among the rich. Similar conditions have been made famihar from investigations in New York. Thus a re- cent study of the New York Health Depart- ment records for two typical summer weeks showed the remarkable facts: (i) that in 28 fash- ionable blocks with a population of 7,561 people, no babies died during the last two weeks of July, 1907; (2) that in five fairly well-to-do blocks, with a population of 7,696, no babies died during the same period; (3) that in three tenement blocks, with a population of 7,858, sixteen babies died 6 • 82 Function of the Church during this same period. If this rate had con- tinued, every baby bom in these three blocks during the entire year would have perished ! Now facts like these mean something in terms not merely of physical disease but also of political economy. Eight thousand babies die every year in New York of preventable diseases, so we are told by the Department of Health ! And preventable — why? Not because the infants are neglected by the parents, or maltreated by nurses, or unskil- fully treated by physicians — but simply and solely because the diseases themselves from which the children die are the results of social conditions which can be and ought to be cured forthwith. These deaths are preventable because they are caused more or less directly by social injustice which is itself preventable. "You can kill a man with a tenement just as well as with an axe," said Jacob A. Riis at one time — and this same thing is even truer of a baby. Dr. L. Emmett Holt cherishes few illusions as to the meaning of exces- sive mortality among the children of the poor. It may not be true in adult life [he writes in the article referred to above] but in infancy money may purchase not only health, but it may purchase life, since it puts at the disposal of the infant the utmost resources of science, the best advice, the best food, and the best surroundings for the individual child. To relieve, or even greatly to diminish infant mor- tality, these basal conditions of modern city life — poverty and ignorance — must be attacked. The Social Question 83 ^ Even more direct in his diagnosis of the situa- tion is Mr. Phillips, the recent Secretary of the New York Milk Committee. The great crime of infant mortality in New York City [he writes] is that eight thousand babies die because of poverty. If the mothers of the working class were able to buy enough good food for them- selves, they could feed their babies at their breasts and then their babies would not die. . . . These mothers do not feed their babies at their breasts because they are compelled to work in sweat-shops and factories to help their husbands get enough money to keep their children and themselves alive. That this statement is something more than a theory is graphically set forth in a story told by Miss Jane Addams in her ''Twenty Years at Hull House." I was detained late one evening [she says] in an office building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the corridor of the 14th floor a woman whom I knew on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened to greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to feed her baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water with which she scrubbed the floors, until she should return at midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with what remained within her breasts. 84 Function of the Church In such a story as this, if not in the statements of such experts as Dr. Holt and Mr. Phillips, do we see the real meaning of the problem of infant disease and mortality. Here is not a case of indi- vidual weakness or ill-health or contagion at all; but a case simply and solely of economic inequal- ity — of imjust social conditions. Tell me how much money the father earns, says Dr. Holt in effect, and I will tell you what chance the child has to live ! The children can be saved only as fast and as far as society itself is saved. The physi- cian, battling with the problem, cannot stop with the child who is perishing, but must go behind him to the society which has murdered him. The very question of saving this one individual child, to say nothing of saving the unnumbered thousands yet unborn, involves the larger social question of get- ting the child out of the tenement into a place where it can get sunlight and fresh-air, of freeing the mother from day-labour so that she can watch and feed her offspring, of providing the father with a living wage so that he can provide a home and nourishing food and medical advice for his family. It is not enough, in other words, to care for this one afflicted child as an isolated individual. This one little patient means the dirty tenement — the dirty tenement means poverty — poverty means the inequitable distribution of wealth — the inequi- table distribution of wealth means political cor- ruption, industrial oppression, special privilege! Each dying child, that is, opens up the whole The Social Question 85 problem of organised society; and presents the physician with the task of reconstructing society as the very condition of restoring the child to health. (b) Tuberculosis ^ A still more striking illustration of the expan- sion of the problem of individual disease into the infinitely larger problem of social injustice is given by tuberculosis which, by reason of much intelH- gent and persistent pubHc agitation, is now gen- erally recognised as one of the most stupendous social problems of our time. I well remember the day when I entered the great Tuberculosis Exhibit which was held in New York in 1908; and saw over the entrance-hall the sign, upon which was inscribed the legend-' 'Tuberculosis is Prevent- able and Curable! The Remedies are Fresh Air bunlight. Nourishing Food, and Rest!" Here was the official pronouncement of one of the epoch- makmg discoveries of modem times— that the great White Plague, which takes its awful toll of hundreds of thousands of dead every year can be prevented and can be cured-that there is no conceivable reason why one more individual should ever be afflicted with the disease, and no reason also why those individuals already so af- flicted to-day, and not yet in the last stages of dissolution, should not be cured. And best of all what IS needed to effect this prevention for the 86 Function of the Church futtire and accomplish this cure to-day, is not drugs or herbs or balms of any kind — ^not physician's skill or nurse's care — nothing that is expensive or unusual and hence within reach only of the favoured few, — but only those things which God has granted freely and generously to all the sons of men — air and light, food and rest! What could be more wonderful than this? And yet, as I gazed upon that sign in the entrance-hall of the Exhibit, — placed there, I imagine, as a sign of hope for all to see and to rejoice at, — it suddenly changed as if by magic before my eyes, and I read the old famil- iar words, "Abandon hope, all ye that enter here!" For suddenly it flashed across my mind, like a stab in the heart, that these absolutely common- place things that are alone essential for the pre- vention and cure of tuberculosis are just the very things which the vast majority of those stricken with the plague cannot have. Nine out of every ten tuberculous patients cannot by any possibility secure a breath of fresh air, a ray of sunlight, a mouthful of nourishing food, or an hour's rest, because society decrees that these things shall be among the luxuries of existence and therefore open not to the many but only to the few. Millions of people cannot have air and sun- shine, because society forces them to live in tene- ments and toil in sweat-shops — they cannot have nourishing food, because society denies to them a living wage — they cannot enjoy any rest or recreation, because they must toil early and late The Social Question 87 in order to keep body and soul together. And these are the very people who are dying of tuberculosis — and dying not because there is any- thing physically wrong with them as individu- als, but because they have been forced by the social system of our day, to live and labour under conditions which breed the tubercle bacilli as a stagnant pool breeds mosquitoes! All of which means that when a physician is brought to the bedside of one stricken by the great White Plague, he is in reality brought face to face with all the political, industrial, and social conditions of the time. Behind every tuberculosis victim is the chaotic, corrupt, and unjust social organism of this present age; and the cure of this victim is to be found not merely in the healing of his individual body, but fundamentally in the reconstruction of the social environment which has destroyed that body. The essentially social causes of this most terrible of diseases are clearly enough seen by all modem physicians. Says Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, the leading tuberculosis expert of America and upon this subject one of the great consulting experts of the world, in his famous prize essay entitled "Tuberculosis as a Disease of the Masses and How to Combat It," which has gone through seven American editions and twenty-seven foreign edi- tions in twenty-four different languages, summing up the whole message of the essay on its closing page — "Let us always remember that tuberculosis as a disease of the masses has a large social aspect 88 Function of the Church and that without improving the social condition of the people, the disease will never be eradicated." Enlarging upon this essential fact in a pamphlet on "Tuberculosis and Congestion," Dr. Knopf says more specifically: What we must do [to diminish tuberculosis] is to improve the living conditions of the masses. . . . Not until we insist upon lower buildings and wider streets, permitting more sunlight to enter our habi- tations — not until all our old tenement houses and particularly our murderous ' ' lung-blocks " are replaced by model tenement houses with roof-gardens on each of them — not until we have interspaced even these model tenement houses with multiple parks and play- grounds — not until this fearful congestion which is now the curse of our civilisation has been done away with — not until the suburbs of our large cities are utilised for individual homes of the masses — not until the child, while a child, shall have a chance to play out-doors without being obliged to make a play- ground of the overcrowded streets — not until our traffic facilities will enable the labourer to travel in comfort and with rapidity to his sanitary home — not until we have given him the opportunity to live modestly and decently in a home somewhat closer to nature than the dark, dreary tenement houses of our over-congested cities, will tuberculosis be a thing of the past. . . . Not until we have given every labourer fresh, pure air to breathe, not only once a week as we have done heretofore and for which he had to leave his home and his workshop, but all the time, — not until even the humblest of workers and The Social Question 89 his family have a place which he calls "home" — in short, not until we give him in return for his labours all to which he is entitled, . . . will we be able to contradict the words of the poet, who said "God lent his creatures light and air. And waters open to the skies. Man locks them in a stifling lair, And wonders why his brother dies." Here, in this concluding verse is the whole of the law and the prophets of modem preventive medi- cine. Release God's creatures from the stifling lairs into which social injustice has locked them, and the problem of disease and premature death will be solved. Not the individual, in other words, as we have seen, but society ! (c) Hospital Social Service It is the recognition of this fact which is to-day transforming the methods and the ideals of the medical profession, and leading to some of the most revolutionary developments that the world has seen since the early days of Hippocrates and Galen. I must mention at least two of these as conclusive demonstrations of this thesis of the social nature of disease. I would refer in the first place to the remarkable social service work which has become, within a few years, a regular part of the activity of the modem hospital. This work, I believe, was initiated by Dr. Richard C. Cabot, 90 Function of the Church at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston; and came as a result of his observation, in the regular course of his dispensary work, of the essen- tially social nature of the individual. It was a great step forward in the conquest of disease and the furtherance of human happiness when public hospitals were established and entered upon their beneficent work of healing. Until a comparatively short time, however, these hospitals were content to receive patients only as they came knocking at their gates, one knew not whence, cure them of their ailments, and then send them back into the world, one knew not whither. All this, now, is rapidly changing, as the result of the genius of one observing and sympathetic man. As Dr. Cabot went through the routine of his daily work of diag- nosing and prescribing in the out-patient depart- ment of the hospital, he began little by little to awaken to the fact that persons once cured and sent away, returned again and yet again; and always in the same condition of weakness or dis- ease as before. Something was obviously wrong — and investigation soon led to the discovery that these persons were weakened or diseased to such an extent by their hideous homes and inhuman places of labour, by the cruel stress and strain of their individual occupations, by their struggle day in and day out, year in and year out, to obtain a sufficient wage to keep the home together or even to live at all, as to make their individual cure by hospital treatment alone impossible. What was The Social Question 91 needed by these people was not diagnosis of symp- toms and prescription of drugs, which were neces- sarily limited to the individual organism afflicted, but a radical transformation of the character of the social organisation, which made these people the victims of its cruelty and corruption, and hence invalids for the care of the physician. Dr. Cabot has best defined the philosophy of hospital social service in his book entitled, "Social Service and the Art of Healing." We physicians [he says] are prone to scoff at the habit of taking a drug for a eymptom like headache, without looking deeper to find the underlying disorder of which this headache is the symptom. We point out very truly that only by finding and removing the cause of this headache — an eye-strain perhaps or a stomach trouble — can its recurrence be prevented. . . This is as it should be ; but we need to carry the same habit further. Why should we not push on and find why this patient has the stomach trouble? The head- ache is only the symptom of stomach trouble, we say. Yes, but the stomach trouble itself may be only a symptom of chronic worry, and the worry a symptom of deficient income. The patient's expenses turn out to be a trifle larger than his wages, and one of the many bad results of this fact is the worry which causes the stomach trouble, which in turn causes the head- ache. If we are really to treat that patient [he continues] and not merely smother one of his symp- toms under a dose of medicine, we must push on into the background of his case, and see what disease in the body politic — perhaps in the organisation of 92 Function of the Church industry — is behind his individual suffering. Not that we should lose sight of him. On the contrary, we can do much better for him, if, instead of stopping at the first stage, headache, or at the second stage, stomach trouble, or even at the third stage, worry, we go into the matter of his income and outgo, and see if the two ends cannot be made to meet. I have heard physicians giving advice to patients not to worry, advice that wotdd be laughable if it were not so pathetic: "Just stop worrying [you might just as well say. Stop breathing], and take a long rest. Avoid all mental and physical strain." What his wife and children are to do meantime never occurs to this type of physician. The wife and children are in the background, out of range of his vision, and so for him they play no part in the case. Now it is this social "background," against which every individual must be seen, which consti- tutes the all-important element of disease. The physician is worse than foolish — he is almost crimi- nal — if he fails to understand that his patient is a social creature, and that nine times out of ten it is not his body but "the body politic" which is diseased. "The man who has a clear sense of the individuality... of each person... will yet run into confusion and disorder," says Dr. Cabot again, "unless he backs his foreground view with a vista of the distant, the past and the future, the back- ground of the community life out of which this individual has emerged and to which he belongs." To let the patients in a hospital "shoot by us like The Social Question 93 comets, crossing a moment our field of vision, then passing into oblivion," is simply to make its work of none effect. ''When the doctor looks for the root cause of most of the sickness which he is called upon to help, he finds social conditions, such as vice, ignorance, overcrowding, sweat-shops, and poverty." This means that "the art of healing" is at bottom social, and therefore the wise physician must, whether or no, become a social reformer. Hence the establishment of the social- service departments in our hospitals to-day as an essential part of its specific work of healing indi- vidual cases of disease. {d) Society of Medical Sociology Even more remarkable, as an indication of the changing character of medical activity, is the re- cent organisation in New York City, under the leadership of Dr. William J. Robinson, of the American Society of Medical Sociology. This Society has been organised, says its official circular, because of the recognition by the profession of the intimate relationship between disease and the social-economic system under which we live, that many diseases are caused directly by our social and economic conditions, that the efficiency or the ineffi- ciency of treatment often depends upon the economic condition of the patient, and that there are many problems deeply affecting the welfare of mankind which are left practically untouched by any existing medical society. 94 Function of the Church This organisation has enHsted the co-operation of between seventy and one hundred of the most distinguished physicians of New York alone — and all because these men recognise that it is simply futile for the profession to continue any longer with individuals merely as individuals. The strug- gle of Mrs. Partington with the Atlantic Ocean was scarcely less farcical than the struggle of the physicians against the flood of disease pouring in upon them from the Atlantic Ocean of modern social life. These doctors realise that if they are ever to heal this man and that woman and the other child, they must go right behind these to the society which has wrecked and ruined them. In other words, they see that they must not merely study symptoms and prescribe drugs, but they must pass legislation for the reform of housing conditions and labour conditions ; they must deal at first hand with the problems of wages and hours of labour; they must even go perhaps to the very bottom of our whole "social-economic system," and grapple with the problem of reconstruction. And hence have they organised this society for the furtherance of that strange phenomenon called "medical sociology." It is in such facts as these that we see the great change that has recently come over the work of the medical profession because of the changed con- ception of the character of the individual. The individual is at bottom social — and hence the problem of physical disease is seen to be similarly The Social Question 95 social. The ''great new idea" behind this revo- lution in medical practice, says Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, in his illuminating little book on "New Ideals in Healing," is "the extension of the sphere of influence of the medical profession from the mere bodily healing to the treatment of the whole man." He must be treated [continues Mr. Baker] not merely as an unrelated and individual sick man, but as a component and essential part of our close-knit social life. ... At the root of the great destroyers, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, children's diseases, in no small measure lie malnutrition, hunger, wretched housing conditions, dirty streets, — in other words, poverty and social neglect. . . Medicine is thus inti- mately bound up with all sorts of new sociological, political, ethical, and economic problems. All of which he sums up in the basic affirmation that "most, if not all, diseases are not merely individual but social." (c) POVERTY The second great field of human activity which I desire to discuss as illustrating the change which has taken place in our methods and ideals, owing to our new conception of the individual as a social creature, is that of organised charity — which is best discussed perhaps from the standpoint of the problem of poverty. 96 Function of the Church (l) Progress and Poverty Together If any one should desire to undertake to prove that the world, in spite of all appearances, is not growing better with the passing years, he would find at least one unanswerable argument in support of his contention, — namely, the wretched fact of poverty. That this evil should continue imabated into modern times is one of those enigmas of his- tory which seem to defy explanation. We are not surprised, when we read the history of the Jews, as it is recorded in the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament, to find that poverty was everywhere present throughout ancient Israel, and that the poor constituted one of the specific classes of the population to which Jesus felt that he had a definite mission. We are quite unmoved when we read of the wretched beggars and slaves of Periclean Athens, and find Plato discussing poverty in his "Republic" as one of the most stu- pendous problems of human life. We take it as quite in the natural order of things when we read of the squalid misery of the poor in Rome for whom the Gracchi led their revolt, and in whose eyes the later emperors won favour by their lavish gifts of bread. Nor are we very deeply stirred when we learn of the dreadful misery of the peasant classes of Medieval Europe, which assumed its most hideous aspects perhaps in Bourbon France just before the outbreak of the blood and fury of the Revolution. We accept this poverty of the ages The Social Question 97 past just as we accept the famines and pestilences which devastated the populations at periodic inter- vals, — or just as we accept the sailing vessels upon the seas and the stage-coaches upon the land, by which our ancestors journeyed from place to place. But it is a wholly different matter, when we look about us in our own day and generation, when famines have been banished to such primitive lands as India and China and pestilences have altogether disappeared, when the sailing vessel has given place to a Mauretania and the stage coach to a Twentieth-Century Limited — and discover in this age that poverty is still with us in aspects which seem more terrible than ever! In Russia, poverty prevails at the present time under circumstances which seem to reproduce the most dreadful conditions of ancient times. In Italy the poverty is so terrible and so wide-spread that no less than four millions of the subjects of Victor Emmanuel II. have come to this country in the last eight years, hoping to escape its clutches. In England, the richest country in the world, which has for centuries led mankind in the production of material wealth, and whose colonies are to be found in every quarter of the globe, the poverty is unspeakable. In the slums of London, in the manufacturing centres of Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds, even in those lovely rural villages which so charm the eye of the American tourist, are depths of misery such as can scarcely be matched in the whole history of humanity. And even in 98 Function of the Church this country, with its boundless natural resources, its millions of acres of uninhabited and unculti- vated land, its wonderful mines and farms and manufactories, with a civilisation so new that it nuis back less than three hundred years into the past and thus is burdened with none of the inherit- ances of ancient days, — even here the spectre of poverty is rising before our affrighted gaze, and is already taxing the genius of our wisest statesmen and the beneficence of our most generous philan- thropists. Says Prof. Richard Henry Edwards, of the University of Wisconsin, " It is not extravagant to estimate that certainly not less than three and perhaps as many as ten millions of persons in America are in various stages of poverty"; and Prof. Chapin, of Beloit College, is so appalled by the situation in this coimtry that he asks the start- ling question, "How near are we to the state of affairs in England in 1889, when Charles Booth estimated that 39% of the people of England were living in poverty?" Whatever progress mankind has made in other directions, here at least mankind seems not to have moved forward at all. We have the poor with us to-day, exactly as the Hebrews and the Romans had them three centuries before the birth of Christ. They are suffering to-day as they have always suffered ; they are dying to-day as they have always died. Said a well-known social reformer some years ago, when reminded by an optimistic friend of the recent improvements in the living condi- The Social Question 99 tions of working-men, of the general rise in the level of material comfort, and of the great increase within recent years of the consimiption of goods: "All this is true; but I have lived in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Chicago, and in all of them the misery of the masses is as acute as ever."' It was this appalHng failure of civilisation to solve this problem of poverty which aroused the conscience of that great prophet of a generation ago, Henry George. He it was who first awakened the world to a conscious realisation of the fact that, whatever progress himianity might be mak- ing in other directions, it was not moving forward in this direction a single step. He it was who first impressed upon the minds of men the serious fact that the marvellous advances of civilisation during the centuries gone by in nearly every conceivable line of human activity had still not succeeded in extirpating poverty or lightening the burden of those compelled to toil. He it was who taught us that here the world was actually moving backward rather than forward ; that progress meant poverty, and poverty progress; that "where the conditions to which material success everywhere tends are most fully reahsed, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed, there we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness." "Pov- ' Quoted in Patten's " New Basis of Civilisation." 100 Function of the Church erty simply widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus." Here [he continues] in the association of pov- erty with progress, is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political diflBculties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilisation, and which not to an- swer is to be destroyed. " (2) The Causes of Poverty Now for this amazing phenomenon there must of course be some explanation. There must be some cause for the failure of the world to solve this problem — some reason why a race which has dispelled the fear of famine, conquered pestilence, and harnessed the natural forces of the universe to do its bidding, has not banished poverty from the homes of men. — To this inquiry as to the cause of poverty, several answers have been given in times past and are still being given to-day. (a) The Will of God In the first place there is what may be called the theological explanation of poverty. According to this idea, poverty is the work of God — as the Old Testament writer puts it, in the second chap- The Social Question loi ter of I. Samuel: "The Lord maketh poor and maketh rich; he bringeth low and lifteth up"; a sentiment repeated by the Psalmist, when he says, "God is the judge; he putteth down one and set- teth up another." This idea of the responsibility of God for the existence of poverty is, of coiu-se, all of a piece with that theological dogma which teaches that everything that happens in this world is the imme- diate work of God, and which is all summed up in the canting phrase, "It is the will of God!" To the invalid, languishing on a bed of illness — to the stricken mother, whose heart breaks as she bends over the dead body of her only son — to the father who sees his children crying for the bit of bread which he has not the wherewithal to purchase, — to the thousands overwhelmed by earthquake and flood and volcanic eruption — to all of these who suffer, the priest has always come with his word of pretended consolation — "Be patient; this is the will of God!" But while this explanation of poverty may have served very well in those ages of superstition which saw the hand of God in all things strange or ter- rible, it no longer serves to-day. We still find extraordinary survivals of this idea that "the Lord maketh poor and maketh rich," in the occa- sional references of pious clergymen to "God's poor," and in such occasional utterances as that of the President of the Reading Railroad, a few years ago, that the mines of Pennsylvania belonged 102 Function of the Church to him and his associates by divine right. But we are slowly beginning to understand to-day that to ascribe such matters as disease and untimely death, pestilences and earthquakes, wealth and poverty, to the will of God, is nothing less than blasphemy. It is not the will of God that hundreds of thousands of persons in this country should be afflicted with tuberculosis; it is not the will of God that the mother should mourn the child who has been snatched from her embrace by the dread angel of death; it is not the will of God that thousands should perish in the ruins of a Messina ; and it is not the will of God that millions should be over- whelmed by that dire poverty — worse than any disease and more terrible than any cataclysm — which saps the body, dulls the mind, deadens the affections, and quenches the inward light of the spirit. President Eliot, in his address on the "Religion of the Future," did no greater service to human thought than when he shattered this theological explanation of life's tragedies. "By no appeal to the will of God," he says, "will the new religion attempt to reconcile men and women to present ills. Such promises have done infinite mischief in the world, by induc- ing men to be patient under sufferings and deprivations against which they should have incessantly struggled. The advent of a just freedom for the masses of mankind has been delayed for centuries" by just this doctrine of the church. The Social Question 103 (b) The Niggardliness of Nature Another explanation of poverty which is much more satisfactory and which contains a certain Hmited measure of truth, is what may be termed the economic explanation. I refer here to what Prof. Simon N. Patten calls the "theory of de- ficit" — the theory, namely, that poverty is caused by a lack of material resources sufficient to satisfy the legitimate needs of men. Nature, as John Stuart Mill put it, is "niggardly"; and great masses of men must siiffer and even perish for lack of sustenance, for the simple reason that there is not enough to go around. Now it is undoubtedly true that this "theory of deficit " is on the whole an adequate explanation of much of the poverty which has existed in the world up to within a comparatively few years ; but it is also true that it is no explanation of the pov- erty of our own day, and therefore not a final solu- tion of the problem of misery at all. The dreadful poverty of Israel and Rome and Greece, as is per- fectly evident from the historical accoimts which have come down to us, was very largely caused by the niggardliness of nature. The population grew out of all proportion to the increase in the develop- ment of natural resources, and poverty of the great masses of the people was therefore inevitable. Nor do we have to return to ancient times to illus- trate this fact. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, thirty thousand persons perished in Ireland in a 104 Function of the Church single year, simply because there was nothing whatsoever for them to eat. And even in the reign of Victoria, vast numbers of the Irish people abandoned the Emerald Isle and sought new hom.es across the seas, where they hoped that nature might be more propitious. Spain, in the sixteenth century, when the Armada had been destroyed, the industrious Moors expelled, and the rich gold and silver mines of America exhausted, foimd that her resources were wholly insufficient for her people, and poverty of the most dreadful kind was the result. The poverty of Italy to-day is simi- larly to be explained. In spite of the enormous emigration from her shores during the last few years, her population is still out of all proportion to her resources. The civilisation of ancient times, the civilisation of the Middle Ages, and the civil- isation even of certain countries to-day, is a civil- isation based upon deficit, and upon such a basis of existence poverty is inevitable.^ But while this "theory of deficit" may be a partial explanation of much of the poverty of cer- tain ages and certain places, it is not an adequate explanation of the phenomenon itself; for within a comparatively few years, as Prof. Patten points out, in "The New Basis of Civilisation," we have passed from a period of deficit to a period of surplus. From having not enough to go around, man to-day has more than he knows what to do 'See the discussion of this point in Patten's "New Basis of Civilisation," The Social Question 105 with. Nature is no longer "niggardly" but gener- ous; and yet poverty still continues, abated but little from its early horrors. To-day, I repeat, we are living in a period of surplus and not of deficit — • and this because of the marvels of scientific achievement during the last fifty or one hundred years. Says Prof. Patten : Many of the obstacles in the way of the full development of natural resources which were insuper- able a century ago are falling before the young genius of this mechanical age. Ground that lay barren be- cause of ignorance and scarcity of capital and tools is fertile now, because there are capital and tools for every foot of agriculture. Agriculture has now be- come a science, our food grows in conquered habitats, the desert is sown, and waste land is everywhere made fertile. Stable and progressive farming is destined henceforth to control all the terror, disorder, and devastation of earlier times. The fact of the matter is, by new engineering devices, by new methods of development and con- servation, by the application of newly discovered scientific truths, we have been forcing nature to yield to us her stores of boundless wealth. We have made nature to pay to us her tribute, and thereby have added to the quantity of goods to be consumed by society and have lessened the labour necessary to produce them. Said Prof. Shailer, a few years before his death, "We can double the food supply of the world with only a slight increase io6 Function of the Church of the population, and then can double this still again by the application of new inventions." What wonder that Prof. Patten claims that our "new agriculture means a new civilisation — a new civilisation which shall banish poverty forever"? "... The problem of our old civilisation," he says, "was to keep the deficit as small as possible and eventually to overcome it." But the problem of the new civilisation is "to utilise the surplus for the common good — to distribute the surplus in ways that shall promote the general welfare." Nature therefore can no longer be regarded as "niggardly"; deficit is transformed into surplus; and yet, as we have seen, poverty is as hideous and as wide-spread in our age as any other. Which means but the one thing — that "the theory of deficit," while it seemed to explain the misery of humanity in ages past, never in reality did explain ; and that we must look farther and deeper for that ultimate cause of poverty which we are seeking. (c) Individual Frailty Putting aside the economic explanation as well as the theological, we come to that theory which to-day enjoys the widest acceptance among the most intelligent people, and is generally regarded as having solved the problem. I refer to the moral theory, which is the direct outgrowth of the indi- vidualistic philosophy of the last one hundred years, and which, in accordance with the teachings The Social Question 107 of that philosophy, throws the responsibility for the existence of poverty back upon the individual who is poor. This theory asserts that people are poor simply because they deserve to be poor — that vast masses of persons are starving and freez- ing, inhabiting foul tenements and suffering from unclean diseases, sunk in all the wretchedness of material want, simply and solely because of their own intellectual deficiencies and moral imperfec- tions. Misery, according to this idea, is but "the natural working out of human character" ; the inevitable consequence of natural depravity; the punishment, in a word, of sin. If a family is poor, there is somewhere weakness or folly or immor- ality. There is ignorance or stupidity, there is drink or debauchery, there is shiftlessness or laziness, there is dishonesty or vice — there is some- thing essentially abnormal or wrong with the indi- viduals involved. Their material poverty is but the interest which they have earned upon the moral principle which they have invested; their misery is but the harvest which must always be reaped from the sowing of the seeds of idleness or depravity; their wretchedness is but the punish- ment which their faults have visited upon their own heads. The problem of poverty, therefore, is a moral, and not an economic or theological prob- lem ; it is a problem of the character of the indi- vidual man or woman who is concerned; and if we want to solve this problem, we must make over these individuals morally — dispel their igno- io8 Function of the Church ranee, banish their shiftlessness, and cure their vices. This is the theory of poverty which is most pre- valent at the present time — the orthodox theory, it has been called — a theory which is interwoven with most of our literature, and imderlies most of our charitable activities. But is it a theory which is really any more sound than the others which we considered above? Is it really true that people are poor because they are ignorant or weak or inef- ficient or morally depraved.? Is the whole matter of social misery, after all, only one of the manifold aspects of that larger ethical problem of individual responsibility? Is it, at bottom, nothing but a question of the individual, or is there something infinitely deeper and wider involved? That the theory of individual frailty is not the final answer to our question is suggested by at least two serious considerations. In the first place there is the eloquent testimony of many of the greatest religious prophets that the world has ever seen. What for example are we to say about this theory in the face of the words of the mighty prophets of ancient Israel? These great teachers of religion were very largely concerned with the poverty which afflicted the great masses of the Hebrew people of their day, and were full of denun- ciation and wrath at its existence. But all of their wrath, it will be noticed, was directed not against the poor themselves, where it manifestly should have been directed if they were themselves respon- The Social Question 109 sible for their condition, but against their oppres- sors. Nowhere can we find Amos or Hosea or Isaiah calling the poor to account, as individuals, for their moral delinquency, and urging them to put away their sins if they ever hoped to escape from the misery of want. On the contrary, do we not find Isaiah condemning in unmeasured terms the princes who had in their houses the spoils which they had wrested from the poor, and denouncing the rich who were "grinding the faces of the poor " ? Do we not find Jeremiah constantly demanding that justice and righteousness be executed, in order that the poor may be delivered out of the hand of the oppressor? Here is Amos talking about the poor being sold for silver, and referring to the powerful who tread the poor beneath their feet! Evidently these great prophets had an infinite compassion upon the poor, and were inclined to explain their poverty as the result of social oppression, and to seek its cure in the establish- ment of social justice. "Let justice run down as water," said Amos, "and righteousness as a mighty stream." And when we come to Jesus, we find that exactly the same thing is true ! Jesus announces at the very beginning of his ministry, that he has come to "preach the gospel to the poor, to preach deliver- ance to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are bruised." We find him deliberately seek- ing out the poor to give them comfort and conso- lation; and pouring out the vials of his wrath upon 1 10 Function of the Church those who devoured widows' houses and were guilty of all manner of extortion and excess. Above all, we find him promising the coming of a time when all those who were in misery and want should be relieved. "Blessed are ye poor," he said, "for yours is the Kingdom of heaven; blessed are ye that hunger now, for ye shall be filled; blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh." Evidently Jesus of Nazareth, like the older pro- phets of Israel, had compassion upon the poor, and looked for the causes of their misery somewhere else than in the secrets of their own hearts. And then, as a more modem instance of this same kind of testimony, there is the great sermon by Theodore Parker upon "Poverty," preached in Boston in January, 1849. Here, in his treat- ment of the causes of poverty, this prophet of our own time makes occasional references to the moral shortcomings of the poor, in keeping with the pre- vailing ideas of his generation, but on the whole he places astonishing emphasis upon the social conditions, of which he declares the poor are the helpless victims. * ' The causes of poverty, ' ' he says, "are organic, political, and social. . . . Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, gaunt and grim — treading the feeble under his feet, for no fault of theirs, only for the misfortune of having been bom in the army's rear." But not only does such testimony as this contro- vert our comfortable theory of individual frailty The Social Question iii as the explanation of poverty, but the very facts of poverty themselves. — Here for example is a family which comes to the Associated Charities for relief. What is the trouble? The husband, a man of good character, is ill with tuberculosis, is lying helpless in a hospital, and is thus unable to work. The wife, also of good character, is a frail woman, weakened by inadequate nourishment and hard work, and unable therefore to earn enough to support her family. There are three children, but one of them of working age. Here is poverty — poverty of the worst description! — but wherein are these sufferers in any remotest way responsible for their condition? Here again is a case with which I chanced to have an intimate personal connection. The family consisted of a railroad brakeman, who was a faith- ful and efficient workman, an excellent wife, and five little children. They had always lived in com- fort, though not in luxury, until one day the brake- man was terribly injured in an accident and later died. The railroad corporation refused to pay damages on the ground that the brakeman had been negligent and therefore was responsible for his own death. Suits at law instituted by the widow yielded nothing and exhausted what money she had saved or received from insurance policies. In a year or so poverty in its most dreadful aspects was knocking at her door; but wherein was she herself responsible? Again, here are an aged man and woman, neither 112 Function of the Church able to work, with no children to support them, and with no accumulated savings. Both have been persons of average good character, and faith- ful workers during all of their active years. Crip- pled now by old age, however, they are deliberately cast out upon the world, doomed either to beg, to subsist upon charity, or to enter the poorhouse. Wherein are persons such as these, brought face to face with poverty after a lifetime of self-respect- ing independence, to be held morally responsible for their condition? And so the cases might be multiplied indefi- nitely, for these which I have cited are peculiarly typical. And they all confirm the testimony of the great prophets of the past, that the moral theory of poverty, which places the blame for his misery upon the individual concerned, is false — that while there are undoubtedly certain cases wherein moral weakness and depravity can be held to accoxmt for poverty, there are thousands of other cases where it plays no part at all; and that there- fore this moral theory, while it does undoubtedly explain a few isolated instances of material want, and is a contributing factor in many more, never- theless offers no general explanation of poverty as a social problem. People are not poor because they deserve to be poor; poverty is not a natural working out of human character; misery is not a punishment of weakness, idleness, or sin. Moral shortcomings may aggravate poverty — may increase its wretchedness and deepen its degrada- The Social Question 113 tion; but the essential cause is elsewhere than in the character of the persons involved. "Against this conception," says Dr. Edward T. Devine, the Secretary of the New York Charity Organi- sation Society, and perhaps the most expert social worker in this country to-day, "every religious teacher should lift his voice in indignant protest, and every scientific observer should record his testimony. . . . For I have come to believe," he continues, "after some years of careful, candid, and open-minded consideration of the subject, that this entire view of poverty is one which rests upon an unproved and unfounded assumption." (d) Social Conditions The moral theory of poverty, therefore, must be put aside along with the theological and eco- nomic theories ; and we come at last to that theory which is rapidly finding acceptance to-day with all scientific social workers, and which has been suggested in all that I have been saying above. I refer to the theory of "social conditions," which has received its most recent and most authoritative expression in Dr. Edward T. Devine's remarkable book, "Misery and its Causes." — "I wish to present the idea," says Dr. Devine, in one of the opening paragraphs of this essay, "that misery is the result of social maladjustment; that defective personality is only a half-way explanation, which 114 Function of the Church itself restilts directly from conditions which society- may largely control." Poverty, that is, is primarily the resiilt of adverse social conditions— "conditions," says Dr. Devine, in words which sum up the whole truth in this regard, "over which the individual who suffers is unable to exercise effective control, but which are not beyond social control." The cause of pov- erty, in other words, is social. It is not the will of God that poverty should blight the lives of mil- lions of our fellow creatures, any more than it is his will that pestilence should devastate the race or famine exact its dreadful toll of death. It is not the "niggardliness of nature" which is respon- sible for poverty, for nature is now yielding more than is necessary to satisfy the needs of men. It is not our weak and imperfect human nature which makes poverty keep pace with progress, for poverty is by no means coincident with defective personality. Poverty inheres neither in the will of God nor in the constitution of the material world nor in the nature of humanity. Poverty, like disease, is an accident — a result of injustice and oppression, an offspring of social maladjustment, a social crime, and therefore, like disease, a thing which can be abolished just as soon as society makes up its mind to aboHsh it. "Misery," says Dr. Devine again — and here he lays down the principle upon which nearly all modem scientific charity is based — "misery like tuberculosis is preventable and curable. It lies not in the nature The Social Question 115 of things, but in our human institutions, and social arrangements, in our tenements and streets and subways, in our laws and courts and jails, in our religion, our education, our philanthropy, our poli- tics, our industry, and business." Poverty, in short, is the result of nothing else than a society imperfectly organised, and its ctue is to be found in nothing else than a society reorganised upon the basis of perfect justice and in the light of luii- versal good-will. In setting forth this general conclusion as to the cause of poverty. Dr. Devine does not confine himself to such sweeping generalisations as have just been cited. On the contrary, he gives num- erous facts and figures drawn from the abundant records of the Charity Society of New York, where the problem of poverty in this country is perhaps most acute. In the array of statistics presented in demonstration of his thesis, there is nothing more significant than the table of the "principal disabilities present in five thousand dependent families in New York." Five thousand families, chosen at random from the many thousands which have sought relief from the Society diu-ing the last few years, were studied from the standpoint of the disabilities which made the application for public relief necessary, — in other words, the disa- bilities which created a condition of poverty too serious to be endured without assistance. These disabilities, when analysed, were grouped under twenty-five headings, which included all the ii6 Function of the Church adverse conditions which were known to be present at the time of the application for reHef , and in- cluding also all the defects of individual character which were considered an element in the situation. The result is interesting. Of all of these twenty- five disabilities which have led to poverty, only five occurred in 20% or more of the five thousand families, and of these five all were strictly social in their character. In 69% of the cases, unemploy- ment appeared; in 45%, overcrowding; in 30%, widowhood; in 27%, chronic physical disability, due to disease or permanent injury; and in 20%, temporary physical disability. It is only when we go below 20% of the families investigated that we find any disabilities which ought fairly to be de- scribed as defects of individual character. Of these, intemperance is the most common, appearing in 16% of the cases; and then follow laziness, 12%; immorality, 5%; mental disease or deficiency, 4x7%; criminal record, 3%; violent temper, 2%; and gambling less than ii%. What wonder, in the face of these figures, that Dr. Devine asserts that poverty is essentially due to social maladjustment and not to individual defects — that poverty is due to adverse conditions "over which the individual who suffers is unable to exer- cise effective control, but which are not beyond social control"?' ' As this book is going through the press, there appears a statement from the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor regarding the conditions surrounding the The Social Question 117 Poverty, in this age as in every age, in our country as in every country, is primarily due to the fact of social injustice — that employment cannot be had by those who are ready to work; that employment even when regular is not paid enough to enable even the faithful and efficient workman to guard against illness, to protect his widow from dependence, or to provide for his own old age; that insufficient wages force thousands of families to crowd into unhealthy tenements, to eat insuf- ficient food, and to wear insufficient clothing, thus paving the way for physical weakness and disa- bility ; that accidents rob the wage-earners without compensation from society; that taxes are inequi- table, throwing the chief burdens upon the poor instead of upon the rich; that natural resources, which are the basis of all wealth, are in the hands of a few instead of under the control of society at large, and are thus exploited for the benefit of the few and not for the sake of the common welfare ; that the distribution of wealth is grossly unfair and dis- proportionate ; — in the last analysis, that society is families that have been relieved during the past summer (191 1): " The two most striking points were the large number of families reduced to poverty by sickness, and the insignificant part played by intemperance as a contributing cause. Of the 1573 cases in the Association's care, sickness was the cause of poverty in 681 cases, or 43%. Intemperance caused a trifle less than 2%. Unemployment was the second most important cause, with 25%. Insufficient income led 12% to seek relief; death and accident, 4%; old age, 1%. Other contributing causes were imprison- ment, fire, mental deficiency, immorality, and insanity." ii8 Function of the Church organised upon a basis of injustice and not of justice, and is permeated by the spirit of selfishness and not of love. Defects of individual character are of course contributory factors in numberless cases of poverty — intemperance, criminality, immoral- ity, gambling, all play their part, as we have seen, although in an amazingly smaller percentage of cases than most of us perhaps had ever imagined. But even in these facts, we must not forget that there is more often than not ultimate social respon- sibility. For is poverty caused by intemperance, or is intemperance caused by poverty; is a man poor because he drinks, or does he drink to intoxi- cation because he is poor? There is not much doubt in Dr. Devine's mind at least as to the answer to this inquiry, for he goes out of his way, as it were, to raise the question in his book, as to whether "the poor who suffer in their poverty are poor because they are shiftless, because they are undis- ciplined, because they drink, because they steal, or whether they are shiftless and undisciplined, they drink and steal, because our social institu- tions and arrangements are at fault"! Poverty, in other words, is not caused fundamentally by personal defects of character, but personal weak- ness and wickedness and sin are more often than not caused by poverty. As Theodore Parker pointed out over fifty years ago, in his great ser- mon upon " Poverty," the poor constitute the neg- lected classes of society and therefore the classes which degenerate and never rise above the level The Social Question 119 of their own degradation. It is the poor who, because of their poverty, cannot educate their children and therefore are forced to perpetuate ignorance and inefficiency. It is the poor who, because of their poverty, cannot learn the virtues of thrift and diligence, or teach them to their children. It is the poor who, because of their poverty, cannot protect themselves against dis- ease and accident and physical disability. It is the poor who, because of their poverty, are most easily tempted to drink, debauchery, and vice. It is the poor who, because of their poverty, are first led to the committing of crime. " Everything is against the poor man," said Parker. "He pays the dearest tax, the highest rent for his home, the dearest price for all he eats and wears. He has the most numerous temptations to intemperance and crime, and the poorest safeguards from these evils. He is the most liable to disease, and his children are the most unhealthy, neglected, and untaught." Thus does poverty breed poverty; thus does the poverty of one generation itself create and perpetuate the poverty of the next ; thus, as the wise proverb-writer put it, "is the destruction of the poor their poverty. ' * Talk about the weaknesses and vices of the poor as we may; emphasise their ignorance and inefficiency and immorality as much as we please; the fact still remains that they are what they are because so- ciety has made them — that they are where they are because society has placed them there — that they 120 Function of the Church are not offenders but victims, and victims of con- ditions for which society is almost alone respon- sible. Thus at bottom is social injustice the cause of poverty; and thus was the prophet Amos right when he declared eight centuries before the birth of Christ, that "justice must run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream," ere poverty and all of its attendant ills could be overthrown. (3) Poverty, a Social Crime Poverty is thus explained upon the basis not of the individual but of society. And this being the case, we must agree that poverty, not being a divine decree or a natural ill or a moral penalty, must be ultimately described as a social crime, like infant mortality and tuberculosis. There is no longer any conceivable reason to-day why poverty should continue to shame the civilisation of which we boast. There is no longer any reason under heaven why progress and poverty should continue to be associated together. So long as men believed that poverty was the work of God, or were taught to attribute it to the inability of nature to supply the wants of a rapidly increasing population, or thought it due to the inherent weakness and de- pravity of human nature, they were justified in re- garding poverty as one of the necessary ills of life, which must be endured because it cannot be cured. But to-day this attitude toward poverty is inex- The Social Question 121 cusable. We know to-day that these explanations of poverty are unsound. We know that the cause of poverty must be traced back not to God nor to nature nor even to the individual, but to the artificial, unjust, and changing conditions of social organisation. And we know therefore that pov- erty, like all other ills of the social order, is both curable and preventable. Poverty, from this point of view, is to be classified, as Dr. Devine actually does classify it, with tuberculosis. We have learned within recent years, as we have seen, that tuberculosis, like the great majority of bodily diseases, is social in origin — that it inheres not in the tissues of the body but in the living and work- ing conditions of society — that it can be banished if all men can be given fresh air, warm sunshine, nourishing food, and periodic rest and recreation — that these things lie to-day within the gift of the social organism, and that therefore the continuance of tuberculosis is nothing less than a social crime. And what is true of tuberculosis is also true of poverty ! And now what does all this analysis of the causes of poverty mean as regards the methods and prac- tices of our organised charity societies? Modem charities may be said to have gone through three definite periods of development. Until within comparatively recent times charity was a mere matter of indiscriminate alms-giving to the afflicted individual. We passed a beggar on the street — we flung him a coin — and the thing was 122 Function of the Church done ! Within the last fifty or sixty years, however, it came to be clearly recognised that this was a wasteful and not seldom dangerous method of procedure; and with the recognition of this fact there came the second period, which may be de- scribed as the period of charity organised on the basis of individual service. "Not alms, but a friend," became the cry. The philosophy of this type of charity, which is still overwhelmingly in favour at the present time, is of course based upon the idea that the pauper, like the hospital patient, is in some way responsible for his condition, and that the cure is therefore to be effected by the healing of his individual weaknesses and disorders. More recently, however, as I have pointed out above, there has come the recognition of the fact that poverty like disease is "not merely individual but social" — that in the case of the pauper, as in the case of the invalid, "the whole man must be treated," — which means that one must go behind the poverty-stricken individual to the "close-knit social life" of which he is "a component and essen- tial part." In other words, the eradication of poverty is to be found not merely in friendship for the individual who is afflicted, but in the mili- tant reform of the social organisation afflicting. Not charity but justice is the remedy! Poverty can be banished not by transforming directly the moral character of the individual, but by changing the unjust social conditions which breed poverty, even as foul tenements, dirty streets, and exhaust- The Social Question 123 ing labour breed tuberculosis. Provide employ- ment for every willing worker ; give the labourer a due share of the wealth which he creates; protect him from industrial accidents and shelter him from the physical weakness and disability which come from dirty streets, congested slums, disease-laden tene- ments, exhausting hours and intolerable conditions of labour; banish his inefficiency by industrial training; shelter his old age by liberal pensions; guard his women from industrial oppression and his children from untimely labour; destroy the liquor which is his besetting temptation; emanci- pate him from all kinds of industrial exploitation ; relieve him of the crushing burden of a protective tariff; distribute equitably the burden of taxation by income-taxes, inheritance-taxes, and land-taxes; confer upon him the ownership of all natural resources and all public utilities and all industrial enterprises which are essentially public and not private in their nature ; give him justice instead of charity; crown him with the fruits of industrial as well as political democracy — do these things, and poverty will disappear like a wasting pesti- lence! Behind the individual the social fact — behind the man the social organism, — behind the member the body, and behind the part the whole — this is the great lesson of our time ! And what does this discovery of the social "background" of the individual life not mean from the standpoint of htiman progress? For ages we have believed with the writer of Deuteronomy 124 Function of the Church that "the poor shall never cease out of the land"; and now we learn that the poor shall cease to- morrow if we so will ! With this discovery of our modem social science, the world enters upon a new era of progress and enlightenment — mankind enters upon a new field of conquest, which means uplift, happiness, abundant life, for miUions of wretched human beings — civilisation enters upon a new epoch of its history, more fateful of human good than any single epoch since the birth of Christ. Poverty has for ages been the world's great curse, the one ciu-se which society has not conquered. It has been the hotbed of disease, the breeding place of crime, the destroyer of virtue, the source of ignorance and lust, the foster-mother of human wretchedness, the one awful hell of torment that really exists within the universe of God. It is the poor who suffer and miserably die. It is the poor who know not happiness or peace. It is the sons of the poor who crowd our courts, tenant our jails, and occupy our gallows; it is the daughters of the poor who fall victims to vice and prey like harpies upon the souls of men. Poverty is the one dark side of modem society, the one monstrous ill which civilisation has not over- thrown. Cannibalism has been banished to the remote comers of the earth; human sacrifice no longer pollutes the altars of the gods; chattel slavery has been destroyed ; the despotism of kings and bishops crumbles before the assaults of politi- cal and religious liberty; war shall soon cease and The Social Question 125 the rumours of war be stilled; disease is fleeing before the advances of modem medicine. Only poverty is left untouched in all its pristine horror; and now this shall go, we are told, the way of every other ill. And all because we have at last discovered the true nature of the individual life — all because we have at last uncovered the essential relation existing between the individual man and the social whole — all because we have at last discerned the social backgroimd of individual phenomena! CHAPTER V THE SOCIAL QUESTION IN RELIGION HERE, in this study of the new methods of treat- ing physical disease and material poverty, do we see the practical consequences of our new conception of the individual. Our thought of individuality has suddenly become socialised, and with this has come inevitably the socialisation of all of our practical relationships with the indi- vidual. In medicine, in philanthropy, in education, in politics, we have learned to see what Dr. Cabot calls "the background" of each individual, and thus have learned that the environing society and not the isolated personality presents the immediate point of contact and the real problem of action in every enterprise of redemption. Here is a man who is ill. Formerly, as we have seen, the physician studied only the man himself — investigated his symptoms and applied his remedies. To the modern physician, however, the sick man is him- self only a symptom of the larger "disease of the body politic"; and he proceeds therefore to apply his remedies, in the form not of drugs but of cam- paigns for social reconstruction, to "the social- economic system under which we live." Here is a man who is poor. Even to-day, in most quar- 126 Social Question in Religion 127 ters, the organised charity agencies give the man a friend to study his individual habits, uncover his individual weaknesses and vices, and by curing these seek to cure his material distress. Now how- ever we are beginning to learn that in every prob- lem of poverty there is involved the infinitely larger problem of the social organism; and our more efficient and courageous charity- workers, dissatisfied to deal longer merely with "cases," are turning rather impatiently to the social con- ditions which produce "cases" as surely as a dung- heap produces flies. And this brings us directly to the problem with which this book is immediately concerned. For what is true in all other fields of human endeavour is true also in the great field of organised religion. The new ideas of our time in regard to the individual have made necessary, as we have seen, a complete revolution in our whole attitude toward human life and the problem of its redemption, and have wholly changed the direction of our manifold activities. And it was these same "new ideas," I believe, which Dr. Eliot had in mind when he declared that their coming had modified "not only the actual work done by the churches, but the whole conception of the function of the churches." In religion, that is, exactly as in politics, industry, education, and philanthropy, our attention must be shifted from the individual to society — from the members of the body to the body itself; and this means as great a revolution in the function of 128 Function of the Church the church as in that of every other established institution. (a) sin, and its causes For nineteen hundred years, as we have seen, the church has been concerned with men and women as individuals. These men and women have presented the church with the one great problem of sin, as they have presented medicine with the problem of disease, philanthropy with the problem of economic dependence, and educa- tion with the problem of ignorance; and back of the fact itself, of course, the ultimate question of its causes. (i) Sin Individual — Total Depravity Obsessed with its philosophy of individualism, which appeared as an extreme reaction from that consciousness of social solidarity which was one of the glories of ancient pagan thought, and which has dominated every remotest phase of thought throughout the entire history of our Christian civilisation even until now, the church has sought for the origin of this sin within the individual him- self, just as we have seen that the physician simi- larly sought for the origin of disease and the philanthropist for the explanation of poverty. If the individual is vicious and immoral, then there is something wrong with* himself as an individual — just as there is supposedly something wrong with Social Question in Religion 129 him as an individual if he is physically disordered or economically poor. Indeed, looking exclusively at this isolated individual and never for a moment thinking to look at his industrial, political, and social "background," and seeing how miserably weak and vicious he really was, the church was driven to devising the doctrine of total depravity as the only possible and adequate explanation of the facts. Human nature, the church has insisted, is vile and degraded. It is natural for a man to do wrong, and unnatural for him to do right. The natural man is selfish, mean, sensual, quarrelsome, and cruel. He believes in falsehood, and not in truth ; he practises deceit, and not honour ; he hates his neighbour, and refuses to love him. The upright and noble life, on the other hand, is wholly unnatural and can be achieved only by a kind of miracle. If a man would be good, he must not follow the native instincts of his own spirit, which are sure to lead him astray, but he must be born again and be baptised not of water but of the grace of God. The old Adam, or the natural man, must die; and the new Adam, or the unnatural man, be bom. If we would live a good, true, and pure life, we must become something other than we are, either through the saving influence of the church or through the atoning power of Jesus Christ. We must rise superior to the natural depravity of human nature — we must "put off" our human nature altogether and assume an- other nature which is divine — we must be 9 130 Function of the Church renewed by the transforming of our spirits. No language is adequate to describe the extremes to which this conception of the essential depravity of unspoiled human nature has been carried. Bishop Heber, surveying the world, in his famous hymn, "from Greenland's icy mountains (to) India's coral strand," found that [". . . every prospect pleases And only man is vile." "Toads" and "worms," "vipers" and "scorpions" are some of the attractive phrases applied to men and women by the classic theologians of the church. And even the innocent baby, sleeping quietly in its mother's arms, has been regarded as a thing accursed of God. This conception of human nature, as it is thus defined without quali- fication of any kind, seems almost blasphemous to us to-day; and yet we ought never to for- get that this is the only logical hypothesis of a thorough-going philosophy of individualism, like that of classic Christianity. Once start out with "that abstraction unknown to experience," a separate individual, devoid of essential social relationships, and nothing else is adequate to explain the undoubted facts of human experience. It should further be noted that it is just this conception of humanity which lies at the bottom of all the persecutions and oppressions, all the slaveries and tyrannies, which have been since Social Question in Religion 131 the world began. Says Henry D. Lloyd, in his "Man, the Social Creator": "The people have been degraded and enslaved by the theologies which have told them that they were bad, and that, do their utmost, they could not organise their lives on any nobler belief." It is this con- ception of the essential evil of human nature which has placed princes upon their thrones and popes upon their curule chairs, which has perpetuated the tyranny of church and state, and prostituted the common people to the wilful authority of emperor and priest. It is this conception which has established and maintained slavery — both the chattel slavery of yesterday and the industrial slavery of to-day. It is this conception which has burdened man, degraded woman, and robbed the little child of freedom and delight. It is this con- ception which has built our prisons, forged our chains, reared our crosses and our gibbets. It is this conception which has divided mankind into the few upon the one side who are rich and strong and nobly bom, and the many upon the other side who are poor and weak and meanly born. It is this conception, in the last analysis, which has persuaded men to believe that they must organise society upon the basis of hate and not of love, of war and not of peace, of privilege and not of brotherhood; and in their political and industrial existence together, never obey any higher law than that of appetite or passion. "All the wickedness and cruelty and waste," says Mr. Lloyd again, "of 132 Function of the Church wars, of despotisms, and of the popular slaveries of the world of common toil, are kept vested by the atheistical doctrine that the heart of humanity is so bad that Tennyson's golden year can never come when 'the good of all shall be the rule of each."* (2) Sin Social To-day, however, all this is changed by our new conception of the individual as a "social creature." These dreadful facts of weakness, shame, and vice, which we commonly sum up in the one word, sin, are just the same to-day as they have always been. The reality of human depravity cannot be denied or escaped. But with our new conception of the individual, a new conception of this depravity is now possible. No longer do we look merely to the individual himself for the explanation of these facts. Behind him we see his "background." We see him a part of the social whole — a member of an organic body. And we pass from the man him- self to the remoter realities of heredity and envi- ronment for the sources of his sin. Our social vision, in other words, turns our problem com- pletely about. Here are the facts of moral deprav- ity to explain. Instead now of beginning with the bad man and thus justifying the social tyrannies of institutional control which subdue and bind him, we begin with those social tyrannies them- selves and explain thereby the bad man. In other Social Question in Religion 133 words, instead of assuming the hypothesis that man is naturally bad, we assume the equally credi- table hypothesis that he is naturally good; and find the explanation of his weakness and his sin partly in heredity no doubt, but principally in the repressive and corrupting influences of his political and industrial environment. This, as we have seen, is the inevitable point of view of the philo- sophy of socialisation wherever it has been worked out. Dr. Cabot tells us, without qualification, that "the root-cause of most of the sickness that (a doctor) is called upon to help" is found outside the patient altogether in "social conditions, such as vice, ignorance, overcrowding, sweat-shops, and poverty." And what can this mean but that, if "social conditions" were what they could be and ought to be, the great majority of people would not be sick at all? — in other words, that the normal physical condition is strength and not weakness, health and not disease! We find this very fact stated flatly by Dr. William J. Robinson, in his "Never-Told Stories," where he affirms that 90% of all illness is totally unnecessary; and draws an imaginative picture of a model social community, where the 10% of illness which is inevitable, as due to old age, accidents, or individual indiscretion, is so slight in extent and intensity as not to consti- tute any problem at all. In other words, say the physicians — make this world a decent place in which to live, and disease will practically dis- appear! — and they are proving their thesis in such 134 Function of the Church conspicuous cases as cholera, small-pox, yellow- fever, typhoid-fever, and tuberculosis ! The same truth is set forth, as we have seen, by the up-to- date charity worker as regards economic depend- ence. Banish the unjust political and industrial conditions of organised society, they say, and poverty will likewise disappear. The normal man, in other words, is not lazy and extravagant, intem- perate and vicious, but he is industrious, prudent, temperate, and careful. He can be trusted to take care of himself, if he has an equal opportunity with every other man. Says Miss Lillian Brandt, a social worker of recognized authority, "When exploitation of laboiu* and defective government regulation have been eliminated, the irreducible minimum of natural depravity, moral defects, or whatever else it may be called, will not be large enough to constitute poverty a serious problem." (o) Human Nature Good, Not Bad Now what is true of the new science of preven- tive medicine and the new philanthropy of social reform, is true also, I must believe, of the new religion of socialisation. As the physician assumes that, under proper social conditions, only the rarely exceptional individual would be ill, and as the charity worker assumes that, under these same conditions, only the rarely exceptional individual would be poor, so also must the prophet of modem religion argue that, under these same conditions Social Question in Religion 135 again, only the rarely exceptional individual would be morally depraved. We must believe, in the light of the new social philosophy of our time, that human nature is good and not bad, and that the native instincts of the soul therefore are uplifting and not degrading. We must declare, with the Chinese philosopher, Mencius, that "man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow down- ward." We must affirm with Christ that love, and not hate, is the original law of social life. Of course, we cannot deny the facts that are forced upon us by the careful observation of the seamy side of life. It is true that men lie and cheat and rob, quarrel and fight and kill. Selfishness and deceit and animalism are plainly enough present in human nature. All too evident is it that the history of the past has been the long and dreary record of crime and bloodshed, cruelty and suffer- ing ; and that even now, after centuries of develop- ment, we live in a world which is anything but civilised. But these facts no more prove that man is depraved, or that human nature is bad, or that goodness is not native to the normal life of the soul, than the present-day ravages of disease mean that man is at bottom physically corrupt, or the awful poverty of every age means that man is necessarily improvident and lazy. On the con- trary, these facts are not at all the essential facts of human phenomena. Look backward upon the dark eras of the ages past, and see the rays of truth and love gleaming faintly in the darkness, and 136 Function of the Church shining ever more and more unto the perfect day. See the numberless men who have been true and women who have been pure, amid infinite difficul- ties and myriad temptations. See the work that has been done, the service that has been rendered, the love that has been spent. See the pain that has been endured and the lives that have been sacri- ficed, as the purchase price of freedom. See "the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, and the glorious company of the apostles." See how, through all centuries, love has been growing stronger, unselfishness more common, sacrifice more natural. See how, little by little, the woman and the child and the labourer, all the last ones, are becoming first, and all the weak ones, strong. See how, in spite of crime and treachery and sin, in spite of cruelty and blood- shed and persecution, the progress of mankind has still been moving onward and upward forever. Human nature, you say, is bad! A great steam- ship, struggling with a mighty gale, comes upon a sister-ship in distress. Instantly the captain brings his vessel to, and calls upon his crew for volunteers to man a boat and save the passengers of the sinking ship. At once, every member of the crew leaps forward and fights with his comrades for a chance to risk his life upon the boiling seas. That is human nature! Two men, cleaning the interior of an engine boiler, are suddenly over- whelmed by a blast of live steam. Both leap for the door. One reaches there first, then steps aside Social Question in Religion 137 and pushes his fellow through, with the words, "You first, Jim — you've got the wife and the kids" — and then, at the next instant, falls dead upon the iron floor. That is human nature! A woman, dying of hunger and cold in a wretched tenement, is discovered by chance by a neighbour, who goes immediately to her own cheerless room, takes her last hod-full of coal and her last crust of bread, and gives them to her whose need is greater than her own. That is human nature ! " The picket frozen on duty, The mother starved for her brood, Socrates drinking the hemlock. And Jesus on the rood. And thousands who, nameless and humble. The straight, hard pathway trod — " That is human nature ! It is natural for men to be men and not animals, — children of God and not creatures of earth. Said William EUery Channing, in words that can never be forgotten: I cannot but pity the man who recognises nothing Godlike in his own nature. I see the marks of God in the heavens and the earth, but how much more in a liberal intellect, in magnanimity, in unconquerable rectitude, in a philanthropy which forgives every wrong and which never despairs of the cause of Christ and human virtue. I do and I must reverence human nature. Neither the sneers of a worldly scepticism nor the groans of a gloomy theology disturb my faith in its Godlike powers and tendencies. I know how it 138 Function of the Church is despised and how it has been oppressed, how civil and rehgious establishments have conspired for ages to crush it. I know its history. I shut my eyes on none of its weaknesses and crimes. I understand the proofs by which despotism demonstrates that man is a wild beast, in want of a master, and only safe in chains. But injured, trampled, and scorned as our nature is, I still turn to it with intense sym- pathy and strong hope. The signature of its origin and its end is impressed too deeply to be ever wholly effaced. I bless it for its kind affections, for its strong and tender love. I honour it for its struggles against oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are the marks of a divine origin and the pledges of a celestial inheritance. (b) "Sin is Misery; Misery is Poverty; the Antidote of Poverty is Income" This, and not the other, is the truth regarding human nature. And this means, if it means any- thing at all, that, in the majority of cases, a man is depraved for the same reason that he is sick or poor — because of "the social-economic system under which (he) lives." Look out upon the great hordes of the weary and the heavy-laden, the men and the women and the little children who toil from early morning until late at night for the miserable pittance of a starvation wage, the deni- zens of the slums and tenements and saloons, the Social Question in Religion 139 vagrants and the paupers, the outcast, the criminal and the insane. Look out, I say, upon these miser- able and unhappy people — and who dares say that they are bad, that they suffer because they are depraved and corrupt, that they are reaping only what they have themselves sown? Behind all this mass of wretchedness, I have no doubt, is many a tale of individual weakness and sin. But high above every personal lapse of this kind there looms the awful fact that most of these men and women, if not all, never had a chance — that the door of opportunity was locked and barred against them — that society has robbed them, enslaved them, exploited them, bound upon their stooping shoul- ders grievous burdens and heavy to be borne. If these unhappy thousands are inefficient, it is because they have been neglected by an indifferent and disordered society. If they are sick, it is because they have been forced to live in tenements and cellars, and been denied fresh air, sunlight, and nourishing food. If they are poor, it is because they have been denied the full product of their labour. If they are crippled, it is because society has bound them upon its whirling wheels of industry and broken them to pieces. If they are insane, it is because they have been worked to the point of exhaustion and denied all physical recreation and moral inspiration. If they are criminal, it is because society has abused them and hunted them and outlawed them, until like a cornered rat they have torn and rent the hand that is lifted against 140 Function of the Church them. These people are naturally good — they were once as innocent and responsive as the child- ren of our own hearts. But they have been persecuted and tortured out of all human sem- blance, until they are in reality little better than animals. Give these people a chance from baby- hood up. Open to them the doors of opportunity. Share with them the favours now granted to the favoured few. Strike from their limbs the chains of an unjust economic system. Train their hands that they may be efficient and their minds that they may be enlightened. Give them for their labour all and not merely a part of what that labour is worth. Make it possible for them to live in houses that are decent, in streets that are clean, in cities that are uncongested. Free them from the bondage of excessive hours of toil and the peril of industrial accident and disease. Shelter their old age and foster them in the hours of their misfortune. Relieve them from "the civil and reHgious estabhshments " that "conspire" to "crush" them. Treat them as brothers, not as slaves — as comrades, not as labour units — as fel- low-men, not as pack-animals or machines. Be- lieve in them, trust them, love them, serve them, emancipate them, co-operate with them. This do! — and lo! the ills of life will vanish and the terrors of society be no more. Our insane asylums will be dismantled and our prisons destroyed. Our police-force will be disbanded and our courts closed. Health will overcome disease, plenty will Social Question in Religion 141 come in place of poverty, and virtue will conquer sin. Violence will no more be heard in the land, desolation or destruction within its borders. Wars shall cease and rumours of wars be stilled. There shall be heard no more the voice of weeping and crying. They shall build houses and inhabit them ; they shall plant vineyards and eat of the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for calamity; for they are the blessed sons of the Lord — ^yea, and their children with them! Here then is the thesis which the socialised con- ception of the individual forces upon the religion of our time. Man is essentially good, and not bad ; and his sin, like his disease and his poverty, is to be attributed primarily to the "social-economic conditions" of his environment. This is the doc- trine of Prof. Charles P. Fagnani, of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, who says, "Human nature being fundamentally good, if things are wrong the trouble must be with society, with our maladjustments, with unfavourable environment."^ And it is this same startling idea which is set forth in convincing terms in Prof. Simon N. Patten's new book on "The Social Basis of Religion." The modern economist, he says, assumes that "man is good and nature perfect." This means that the cause of evil must be found somewhere else than in either man or nature. * Report of Sagamore Sociological Conference (1910). 142 Function of the Church Nothing else is left but social misery. "Sin," says Prof. Patten, "is a consequence of misery. Remove misery, and sin will disappear. It has no independent existence apart from the misery that bad conditions create. It is but a step from this," he continues, "to the thought that misery is the result of poverty, and thus dependent upon indus- trial conditions. Sin, misery, and poverty thus become one problem. ...All three can be wiped out by changes in industrial conditions." Further on in his book, he is even more explicit. Evil and sin [he states] are either the results of defects in human nature, and hence without a remedy, or they are due to external conditions that mar human nature by producing abnormalities. If the latter view is accepted, the word "economic " must be substituted for "external" in describing the con- ditions that originate evil and sin. While many good things are natural, most bad things are economic. The good is also the outcome of general laws; the bad is the result of local conditions that may be altered. Evils thus have specific causes that may be isolated and removed. They never arise from the general laws of nature nor from the native impulses of men. Neither nature nor man needs to have his laws altered. Nature is beneficent and man is good; they become malignant forces under local conditions that prevent the full expression of natural laws and keep men from following their better impulses. To remove the temptation to sin means to do away with starvation, poverty, disease, overwork, and bad condi- tions which depress workers and turn virtue into vice. Social Question in Religion 143 All of which he sums up in the striking aphorism, "Sin is misery; misery is poverty; the antidote of poverty is income." This, he con- cludes, "is the message of hope delivered by economic and natural theology when their prin- ciples are blended in one discipline. This is the method which should be used in determining what religion is and how it works."* All this soimds so strange in the ears of those who have so long been familiar with the appeals of the religion of the traditional individualism, that it may not be amiss to cite such concrete examples of crime or sin as may illustrate this doctrine of social or economic origin. (i) Criminality Early in May, 191 1, there appeared in the New York newspapers an authorised statement by Judge Thomas C. O'Sullivan, of the Court of General Sessions, on the remarkable increase in crime among young men in the city. In explaining this condition, the Judge laid some emphasis upon "the lack of moral or religious instruction in the schools"; but "the underlying cause," he said, ' "Under the whole scheme (of Plato's Republic) there lies the assumption that much can be done to abolish spiritual evils by the abolition of those material conditions in connection with which they are found. . . . Because material conditions are con- comitant with spiritual evils, they seem to him largely their cause, and since to abolish the cause is to abolish the effect, he sets himself to a thorough reform of the material conditions of life."— Barker's " Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle." 144 Function of the Church "was the general reduction of wages throughout the country, following the panic of 1907, whereby the workers were deprived of their customary comforts." Enlarging upon this explanation, Judge O' Sullivan is reported as saying: This condition is a sign of the times. The whole people are living beyond their means. The children have been taught to believe that they are entitled to all the comforts and luxuries their parents can give them. . . . Now labour is not getting a proper return. Prices for all commodities have gone up while wages have remained practically stationary. In conse- quence, families cannot command now the comforts they are used to. Thus we get the present tendency of the people to live beyond their means. The eco- nomic condition of a higher cost of living should be corrected. No doubt the tendency of young men to shun manual laboiu* and the trades (and thus drift into crime) is due to a realisation of the inadequacy ,of the wages in those occupations. It is to be noted that this long-experienced Judge, in his diagnosis of crime, says nothing about the personal responsibility of the criminals themselves. The nearest he comes to the alleging of any personal responsibility is his charge that parents have taught their children unwisely. Fundamentally, however, he reverts for his expla- nation of the situation to the "social-economic system," as indeed do nearly all students of crimi- nology at the present time. A striking confirma- Social Question in Religion 145 tion of this is found in a recent article by Mr. William E. McLennan, of Buffalo, who says: ** That there are many causes of crime goes without saying. Some criminals are insane; some — pos- sibly ten per cent. — are criminals by birth; it may even be shown that there is a disease of crime. But the crime of the great majority is due to the conditions under which they live — what we roughly call environment."' Similar, although comparatively moderate, is the testimony of Senator Robert M. La Follette in his "Autobi- ography." Surveying his record as district at- torney, he says: "I do not believe that I should make as good a prosecutor now as I was then. I saw just two things then: the law and the indi- vidual criminal. I believe I broke the record for convictions in Dane County. I worked the sheriff half to death. . . . Since then I have come to have a little different point of view regarding crime. I see that the individual criminal is not always wholly to blame; that many crimes grow directly out of the sins and injustices of society." And what could be more impressive in this regard than the article by James Devin, medical officer in H. M. Prison, Glasgow, in the July (191 1) num- ber of the "Hibbert Journal," on "The Criminal, the Criminologist, and the Public," every word of which is an impassioned plea for a new criminology, based on the conception of crime as "a social question," and the criminal as "a member of 'Article in "The Survey," July, 191 1. 146 Function of the Church society"? "If the majority of prisoners," says this writer, "had half as good a position as those set out to instruct them, there is good ground for the beHef that they would as seldom offend against the law." Here are only a few of the abundant evidences of the new point of view upon this sub- ject which is appearing to-day in the most unex- pected quarters — evidences which could be a hundred times confirmed by extracts from the more scientific treatises in criminology which are now so numerous; and all pointing to the same conclusion, that we cannot begin to understand the problem of crime, to say nothing of solving it, until we have gone behind the individual offender and brought ourselves face to face with his " social background." (2) Juvenile Delinquency An even more impressive demonstration of this truth is found in the field of juvenile crime. Some time ago, at a social welfare exhibit in New York City, I saw a large map of the borough of Man- hattan, upon which was graphically depicted the geographical distribution of the twelve thousand cases of juvenile delinquency which come before the Juvenile Court of this borough on an average every year. Each case was indicated by a black- headed pin inserted upon the map at the point where the delinquent boy or girl lived at the time of the arrest. One fact immediately impressed Social Question in Religion 147 itself upon my mind as I examined this map — namely, that the pins were bunched in certain localities covering only a very small portion of the total area, while all the rest of the map was prac- tically free, only here and there an isolated pin rearing its lonely head. Now this fact could mean only one of two things — either the children of Manhattan were all herded together within these restricted areas, as Plato would have herded them in his Republic for purposes of state training, or else it is only the children who live in certain selec- ted localities who ever find their way into the Juvenile Court. It is obvious that this latter explanation is the only one that fits the facts of our municipal life. But this explanation itself raises the further interesting inquiry as to why the children in cer- tain restricted areas of the city should be so bad, and the children in all the rest of the community should be so good? Within a few months an answer has been given to this question which has explained the whole problem of the peculiar dis- tribution of juvenile delinquency in a great city like New York. In the latter part of 19 10, the New York City Commission on Congestion of Popiilation, desiring to discover if there was any connection between crime upon the one hand and crowded living conditions upon the other, ad- dressed a communication to Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, the Clerk of the Children's Court in Man- hattan and a recognised authority upon the subject 148 Function of the Church of juvenile delinquency, inquiring as to the reason why twelve thousand boys and girls are arraigned every year before the bar of this Court for more or less serious offences. Mr. Coulter's reply was interesting. He said nothing whatsoever as to the depravity of unspoiled and untrained human nature. He made no reference to the fact that boys will be boys — and presumably, girls will be girls! He laid little or no stress upon the foolish- ness or ignorance or cruelty or indifference of parents, or the failure of the churches and schools to provide adequate moral training. One expla- nation of juvenile delinquency alone seemed to hold his attention. The fundamental reason, he said, why all these thousands of boys and girls come into our Children's Court every year to be tried for crime is that they live in tenements! "Congestion is responsible for a vast number of cases that come into the Children's Courts of New York City ; environment counts nine-tenths in the whole proposition of juvenile delinquency." In- stantly, when this statement was made public, the story of the map and the pins became intelli- gible. The boys in one part of the city are much like the boys in every other part of the city — and the parents also living in the various sections of the community are of much the same clay as well. In great areas of the city, the children have fairly decent homes, go to good schools, play in open playgrounds — in a word, are under environmental conditions which are not wholly bad. And Social Question in Religion 149 although these children are impulsive and curious and lawless like all children, and are being reared under conditions which, compared with what might be and ought to be, are anything but ideal, yet few there are who ever find their way into the paths of sin and crime. If any evidence is needed of the basic goodness of human nature, study these child- ren of New York, living under conditions which, at the very best are artificial, repressive, and not seldom demoralising, and see how few of them really go astray! Here upon the other hand, however, are great myriads of children living in cer- tain other portions of the city, where the environ- ing conditions are as bad as human ignorance, indifference, and greed can make them. These children, if we may believe Mr. Coulter, are the same kind of children as these others of which we have been speaking. They are swayed by the same impulses, driven by the same passions, moved by the same sentiments of generosity and com- radeship. And yet thousands of them go astray every year! And who can wonder that they do? Is not the wonder that any of these innocents are ever preserved from moral ruin? Born into crowded homes which give no access to fresh air and sunlight, and which are filled with dirt, disease, and decay of every kind, and hence pale and sickly from the very first hour of birth — denied clean and nourishing and adequate food, and hence weak, underfed, and anaemic — neglected and per- haps abused by parents who are worn out by 150 Function of the Church exhausting and ill-paid toil — playing in dark tene- ment-halls or dirty gutters, and never in green pastiues or by still waters — put to work in sweat- shop or factory or store when freedom and delight should be the heritage of every child — living in small rooms crowded with boarders as well as with members of the family, where all personal privacy and separation of the sexes are impossible, and hence early acquainted with facts which should be unknown to the mind of any boy or girl — over- whelmed, in short, by all the conditions which grinding poverty in a great city makes inevitable to-day — living, to sum up the whole horror of the thing, in East Side tenements ! — what wonder that the children teeming in these hideous portions of the city find their way to the Juvenile Court at the rate of a thousand a month! The fact of the matter is, the problem of juvenile delinquency is scarcely a matter of the individual child at all. "Boys as such are never bad," says Mr. John Quincy Adams, Jr., of the Parental Republic in California. "I have learned," he continues, "that the boys who are called bad are simply the victims of circumstance and environment." ^ The problem is nine-tenths a matter of social conditions — of homes, of streets, of playgrounds, of child labour, 'Article in "The Survey," July, 191 1. See also James Whit- comb Riley's familiar stanza: " I believe all children 's good, If they 're only understood — Even bad ones, 'pears to me, 'S jes' as good as they can be." Social Question in Religion 151 of working mothers, of wages, of congestion, of rents, of systems of taxation, of corrupt politics, of industrial servitude, of poverty. Between the Children's Court and certain portions of the city there is "No Thoroughfare," for the reason that the problem of social conditions, as we know it to-day, does not intrude at all. But between this same Court and certain other portions of the city, the highway is broad and smooth, and many are the little feet that travel thereon, for the reason that the problem of social conditions constitutes the whole of life. I look at my own boy sometimes, as he plays in my home or lies at night asleep upon his bed, and I know that the chances are over- whelmingly in favour of his never being arraigned in the Juvenile Court. Not that the boy is different from any other curious and impulsive youngster, but because a case of juvenile delinquency in my neigh- bourhood is almost unheard of. And then I think of my brother in the slums, who looks at his boy as he plays in the gutter or tosses feverishly upon the floor of a tenement-room which has neither light nor air ; — and I know the constant fear in his heart lest the lad should some day go astray, as hundreds have already gone upon that accursed street. And then I think of how certain it is that, if the boys were exchanged, their moral destinies would be re- versed ! What wonder that the pins upon the map were bunched ! " Sin is misery," says Prof. Patten, "Misery is poverty; the antidote of poverty is income," And the Juvenile Court records are 152 Function of the Church the exhibit which prove this article of indictment ! (3) Prostitution Most impressive of all, however, because most pathetic and degrading of all moral offences, is the fact of prostitution. Here, as in nearly every other realm of htiman experience, the explanation in the past has been one purely individualistic. The prostitute is a "bad woman" — a creature totally depraved — a moral leper — and therefore of course an outcast ! She leads the hideous life of physical and moral self-abasement because she is vicious — and one need not look therefore beyond the con- fines of her own soul to uncover the cause of her sin. Now and again, to be sure, there has arisen a voice in lonely protest against this outlawTy of the "fallen woman." A prophet of moral vision, like Jesus of Nazareth, an historian of philosophical insight, like Mr. Lecky, have shown us at the very least that there is something more involved in the problem than the individuality of the prostitute herself. But from the most ancient days to the present time, there has been little change in the attitude of humanity toward this RvdvH phenome- non of social life ; and the prostitute has wandered in all ages and in all coimtries, as the most lonely and wretched of mortals. Within our own time, however, there seems to have come a new understanding of the "fallen woman," and a new sympathy for her condition. With the new conception of the individual as social, Social Question in Religion 153 and the resulting fixing of the attention of men upon the "background" as well as the foreground of life — that is to say, upon society as well as upon the individual — there has come to be the feeling that, with prostitution as with every other ill of body and of soul, there is a social or economic explanation which goes far deeper than the custom- ary explanation of individual depravity, which has little to hallow or sustain it, after all, but tradition. Our age, at any rate, is remarkable for nothing that is more striking than the deliberate reopening of the whole question of prostitution, and the ever-growing tendency to throw the responsibility for the situation back from the indi- vidual woman who has fallen, to the social organ- ism of which she is "a component and essential part." This of course is only what is being done, as we have seen, in every field of human experience to-day, and is thus only one more expression of the great social tendency of the hour; but it is extraordinary nevertheless as the farthest appli- cation of this new social interpretation of life. If the theory holds here it will certainly hold anywhere. Evidences of the new social interpretation of this problem of prostitution are abundant. Thus Miss Lavinia Dock, in her remarkable study of venereal diseases in her recent book entitled "Hygiene and Morality," declares that the breed- ing place of these hideous diseases is to be found in prostitution, and the prostitution she directly 154 Function of the Church attributes to the economic conditions of modem life. She flatly denies that the average prostitute is bad, and in the business because she likes it; and she seems to have adequate reason for her belief. Thus she reminds us that, at the great Brussels Conference for the Prophylaxis of Syphilis and the Venereal Diseases in 1899, the statement was made again and again that "the number of chronic or persevering prostitutes, if separated from the others, would be astonishingly small." She quotes U. S. District Attorney Sims, of Chicago, who made the famous investigation of the white slave traffic in his city, as saying that "about four-fifths of all prostitutes are im will- ingly such." The fact is, she says, the vast ma- jority of prostitutes are not "true prostitutes" at all, but unwilling victims of a stupid social order — sacri- fices — human loss and waste due to pure mismanage- ment. The underlying reason for their lapse is poverty or the unequal struggle against want. All medical and social experts who have studied this problem agree that prostitution is a disease of poverty. Testimony upon this point is so abundant that it is not necessary to prove the point here, but it may be recalled that the favourite ground for the argimients of those who uphold prostitution and licensed vice is the dictum that " there must always be prostitution because there must always be poverty." Another interesting piece of evidence upon this Social Question in Religion 155 point comes from Prof. Edwin R. A. Seligman, of Columbia University, one of the most learned, brilliant, and trusted students of social conditions in America to-day. In an address before the New York Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, reported in full in the Society's Quarterly, "Social Diseases," for January, 191 1, Dr. Seligman dis- cussed the whole problem of prostitution. His "conclusion of the whole matter" is impressive. "The problem now-a-days," he says, "is primarily a social and economic one. It is the problem not of the moral pervert but of the woman who has not enough to live on and who, therefore, takes to the practice as a means of livelihood." Again, let me refer for testimony upon this point, to the recent epoch-making report of the Chicago Vice Commission, which has made so profoimd an impression not only upon Chicago but also upon the country at large. It is doubtful if a more careful and searching investigation of the social evil has ever been made anywhere than by the members of this Commission. Composed of thirty leading citizens, representative of the occu- pations, nationalities, and religious interests of the city, including four lawyers, the chief justice of the Municipal Court, the judge of the Juvenile Court, the U. S. District Attorney, four physicians, — all specialists, — four business men, five university professors, seven clergymen, and numerous social workers — backed by an appropriation from the city of $10,000 — at work upon the problem without 156 Function of the Church interruption for over a year — this Commission presented a report which is ruthless in its presenta- tion of facts, and overwhelmingly convincing in its interpretation of these facts and in its recom- mendations for action. Seeking to explain the origin of prostitution, and discover the reasons why thousands of women enter and continue upon its practice, these investigators found themselves in the vast majority of cases led straight back from the individual prostitute to the social conditions prevalent in the city. Says Prof. Graham Taylor, analysing the Report of the Commission in the "Survey" for May 6, 191 1: The sources whence these 2420 women and girls under review were drawn into vice included bad or uncongenial homes; low wages, insufficient either to proper maintenance or to relieve the monotony of constant toil ; the pursuit of pleasure and the want of provision for recreation; procuring, through many agencies; involuntary entrance upon or continuance in "white slavery"; sub-normality, rendering the victim susceptible to temptation or to exploitation; lack of education in sex physiology and hygiene. Of course the individual factor in the case is never wholly eliminated here, as it is nowhere else. But while the mentally sub-normal or physically abnormal individual was occasionally encountered, and some girls explained their plight on the ground that they were "born bad," were "naturally bad," or were "always immoral," the Social Question in Religion i57 vast majority "were victims of conditions and circumstances for which they were less responsible than their families, their employers, or the com- munity." "In a large proportion of cases," says Prof. Taylor, "home conditions contributed to, if they did not cause, the downfall of daughters or wives. These conditions were sometimes of course the result of individual ignorance, brutality, or bestiality, but more often were the result cf general poverty and wretchedness." Economic conditions [continues Prof. Taylor], both on account of low wages and demoralising influences of employment, stand next as the most fruitful source of vice. ... In a group of twenty-five, the average wage before entering the life was five dollars a week. ... In other groups, averaging forty-five in num- ber, the wages ran from four dollars and eighty cents to six dollars a week, and for younger girls down to two dollars and a half. ... On an average the wage- earning capacity of these girls rose to twenty-five dollars a week after they abandoned themselves to a vicious life. And so Prof. Taylor goes on, paragraph after paragraph, in his analysis of the social causes of prostitution, as revealed by the thousands of in- dividual cases studied by the Chicago Vice Com- mission, including the significant statement, which seems always to appear in all discussions of this subject — "Poverty, leading to overcrowding in the houses and to work under too high pressure and too 158 Function of the Church long hours, also contributed its full quota." ^ One is inevitably reminded, by the conclusions of this Report, of the haunting statement contained in the Report of the Working Women's Society some years ago, " Woman's wages have no limit, since the path of shame is always open to her." The most impressive testimony which I have yet discovered, however, as to the essentially social or economic nature of prostitution, is that of Miss Maud E. Miner, who is perhaps the leading expert upon this subject in New York to-day as a result ' " The girl who has no home soon learns of ' city poverty,' all the more cruel to her because of the artificial contrasts. She quickly learns of the possibilities about her, of the joys of comfort, good food, entertainment, attractive clothes. Poverty becomes a menace and a snare. One who has not beheld the struggle or come in personal contact with the tempted soul of the underpaid girl can never realize what the poverty of the city means to her. One who has never seen her bravely fight- ing against such fearful odds will never understand. A day's sickness or a week out of work are tragedies in her life. They mean trips to the pawnbrokers, meagre dinners, a weakened will, often a plunge into the abyss from which she so often never escapes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls from country towns, and those born in the city but who have been thrown on their own resources, are compelled to live in cheap boarding or rooming houses on the average wage of six dollars. How do they exist on this sum ? It is impossible to figure it out on a mathematical basis. If the wage were eight dollars per week, and the girl paid two and a half dollars for her room, one dollar for laundry, and sixty cents for carfare, she would have less than fifty cents left at the end of the week. That is, provided she ate ten cent breakfasts, fifteen cent luncheons and twenty-five cent dinners. Is it any wonder that a tempted girl who receives only six dollars per week working with her hands sells her body for twenty-five dollars per week when she Social Question in Religion 159 of her years of personal experience, first as proba- tion officer in the Night Court for Women, and second as founder and secretary of the New York Probation Association, which maintains the famous Waverly House as "a home for women released from the courts on probation." Miss Miner, from intimate association with hundreds of the women of the streets, knows the inside of the problem, from the women's standpoint at least, as does nobody else; and what does she have to say as to the causes of prostitution or the reasons learns there is a demand for it and men are willing to pay the price? On the one hand, her employer demands honesty, faith- fulness and a 'clean and neat appearance,' and for all this he contributes from his profits an average of six dollars for every week. In the sad life of prostitution, on the other hand, we find here the employer, demanding the surrender of her virtue, pays her an average of twenty-five dollars per week. Which em- ployer wins the half-starved child to his side in this unequal battle? — What show has she in the competitive system that exists to-day? — Are flesh and blood so cheap, mental qualifications so common, and honesty of so little value, that the manager of one of our big department stores feels justified in paying a high- school girl who has served nearly one year as an inspector of sales, the beggarly wage of $4.00 per week? What is the natural result of such an industrial condition? Dishonesty and immoral- ity, not from choice, but necessity— in order to live."—" Report of Chicago Vice Commission, ' Introduction and Summary.' " The conclusion of the Report of the Minneapolis Vice Com- mission is equally emphatic. It recognizes that "one does not need to go far along this line of research to reach the conviction that one of the first factors in tracing the sources of supply, is the increasingly large influx of young girls into industry," and, after a summary of what this means, states, " The fault (in such cases) is not so much in the individual — it is rather the result of the industrial system." i6o Function of the Church why women practise this mode of earning a liveli- hood ? In her first annual report, Miss Miner says : Why have girls entered upon a life of immorality or prostitution? ... Of the 208 girls who answered this question, 45% claimed it was the influence of procurers, men who live on the proceeds of prostitu- tion, and of older prostitutes; 18% said that they had been deserted by men whom they loved or who had promised to marry them, and left home when they found that they were pregnant ; 16%, that it was the re- sult of work conditions, or the lack of money to pay for food and lodging; 8% claimed to have been drugged or forcibly assaulted; and 5% had entered upon an immoral life because of drink. Others attributed it to imhappiness and cruelty at home, fear of going home after staying out late at night, desire for good clothes and love of amusement, while with three at least it was natural inclination In this analysis strictly economic conditions seem to play a surprisingly subordinate part. Discus- sing this fact, Miss Miner states that economic conditions are more vital than they would seem upon the face of these percentages. "The lack of work," she says, "irregularity of work, character of work, and low wages, are oftentimes responsible. Though these were given as a first reason by only 16% of the group questioned, they have been the real reason for many (others) who had taken the first misstep, yielding to the offers of prostitutes and men who trafficked in vice." Social Question in Religion i6i In her second annual report, Miss Miner is much more definite upon this point, and draws sharp distinction between the individual and the social causes of the ill. "The larger number of these girls," she says, discussing the women whom she meets night after night in the Night Court, "are not guilty of moral obliquity because they are naturally bad, vicious, or depraved. In my work with girls in and out of prisons during the last five years, I can truthfully say that I have seen very few girls who could be so classed. In comparison with the total number, few have chosen the life deliberately." Miss Miner recognises perfectly that many have "drifted into a life of vice through weakness of will or through domina- tion by a stronger will." But she rightly points out that this personal weakness would never have been fatal had not the influence of society been all down instead of up. "With the larger number of girls there seems little room for reasonable doubt that their wrong-doing has been due to environ- mental causes — the conditions under which they live and work and play; and to the presence in society of the wretched men who exploit them for gain and who profit from prostitution." It is difficult enough, as Miss Miner constantly empha- sises, to isolate the immediate social causes and determine the exact degree of their several influ- ences. But one fact looms up with tremendous significance — that "nearly all the girls" who go wrong and find their way into the courts and i62 Function of the Church prisons as prostitutes "have at some time been employed, and that many of them have been working under conditions which were not favourable." Here now do we have overwhelmingly convin- cing evidence that the fundamental cause of this dreadful scourge of prostitution is located not in the soul of the individual but in the organisation of society. It is at bottom, like all the other ills which we have been studying, a social and not an individual problem. And it is this fact which is determining all the steps which are being taken in this day and generation for its repres- sion and ultimate annihilation. There are still those who hold with Dr. Richard C. Cabot — who strangely enough believes that the individual and not the social factor is the thing of supreme importance here — that "prostitution can be attacked only in the individual soul and by the individual soul overmastered by God"; but the great majority of social workers, in accordance with the social diagnosis, are seeking social reme- dies. Thus, Miss Lavinia Dock, while laying due stress upon the training of the will and the educa- ting of the young in matters of sex hygiene, sees hope of ultimate prevention only in radical social changes. "Child labour," she says, "must be abolished"; girls must be protected not only by "legislation, but by vigilant administration and unswerving enforcement of law " ; . . . "widowed mothers must not be compelled to act as fathers Social Question in Religion 163 and mothers both, by being driven to earn their children's bread outside the home. . . . The fundamental and crying need in the protection of older girls is a living-wage . . . and hours of work need to be shortened for all workers." Prof. Seligman, in the address above referred to, defining the problem "as primarily a social and economic one," immediately follows up this state- ment with the declaration that we can "affect the supply of women" for this business primarily by securing "the introduction of general economic and social measures which tend to raise the whole plane of the standard of life." The recommendations of the Chicago Vice Com- mission for the immediate repression and ultimate annihilation of this whole wretched business are along these same lines. It urges upon parents and teachers the importance of the physical, mental, and moral training of the individual; but it lays its chief stress upon the agencies of social change. Social and philanthropic agencies are recom- mended to make intensive studies of the working conditions and wages of girls and women in order to ascertain the living wage and standard of living requisite for a decent life; to give publicity to the moral dangers surrounding recreation, while working to eliminate them; to safeguard immigrant girls and working women by providing safe homes for their abode and keeping them out of the reach of procurers while seeking work. 1 64 Function of the Church Definite recommendations are made also to the Board of Health, the Park Commissioners, the police department, and other branches of the municipal government of Chicago, to the state government and even to the federal government — all pointing to the inevitably social character of the problem, which thus demands the action of social forces for its proper treat- ment. Most significant also is the work of Miss Miner with her girls at Waverly House. So far as can be judged by the activities of this institution, two methods are alone employed in the work of indi- vidual rehabilitation. "The first thing in this work," says Miss Miner," is to place the girl in the right surroundings," In other words, she is given the influence of a good home, which she has perhaps never known before. Then, in the second place, the girl is given an economic chance. "In the effort at rehabilitation," says Miss Miner, "employment is one of the most important fact- ors." Not any kind of employment of course! But employment under decent sanitary and moral conditions, with short hours, and with an adequate wage. These two things — a home and an economic opportunity — Miss Miner guar- antees to every fallen woman entering her in- stitution. And what wonder is it that she is accomplishing results in terms of personal char- acter which would have been unbelievable a few years ago! Social Question in Religion 165 Prostitution, therefore, like all other kinds of crime and sin, is primarily a consequence not of individual depravity but of social maladjustment. The individual is naturally good and true and pure — weak-willed perhaps, pleasure-loving, and care- less — but sound nevertheless ! — and her fall is thus to be attributed to the cruelty of a society which hinders and does not help, casts down instead of raising up. This is a painful, but at the same time it is a joyful, message. For the interpretation of this ill in terms of social instead of individual re- sponsibility means that prostitution, like every other ill, can be abolished. So long as it was be- lieved that this sin was rooted in a human nature essentially depraved, the situation seemed hope- less. But now that it is seen to be rooted in the conditions of organised society, it is at once seen to be, like tuberculosis and poverty, "preventable and curable." It is not surprising to find Miss Dock saying of prostitution, exactly what Miss Brandt has said of poverty, that it is "capable of being reduced to an easily controllable minimum." And it seems perfectly natural to find a physician like Dr. William J. Robinson, dreaming of a Utopia where, through the proper regulation of social conditions, prostitution with all its hideous train of diseases is utterly unknown, exactly as social workers on every hand are dreaming of similar Utopias where poverty is forgotten. Given a divinely-endowed and a divinely-empowered soul within, and an easily transformable social i66 Function of the Church organisation without, and the Kingdom of Heaven becomes something more than an idle dream! ^ ' I have used, in this discussion of prostitution as literally a social evil, only facts, figures, and expert opinions. We must often turn to fiction, however, for the most convincing presentation of the truth of a political or economic proposition, as for example the depiction of slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Thus do I venture to refer in this connection to two wonderfully vivid and impres- sive pictures of prostitution as the consequence of social malad- justment in recent fiction — first, O. Henry's short story entitled "An Unfinished Story"; and secondly, Reginald Wright Kauflf- man's "The House of Bondage." CHAPTER VI THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. HERE, in such examples as these of crime, juvenile delinquency, and prostitution, do we find, to my mind, a complete demonstration of the thesis that sin, like physical disease and material poverty, is social in its origin and is to be cured through social changes. Here is the proof of Prof. Patten's remarkable assertion that "sin, misery, and poverty become one problem, and their anti- dote is income. All three can be wiped out by changes in industrial conditions." The individual who is immoral, in other words, like the individual who is sick or the individual who is poor, presents a phenomenon not of psychology but of sociology ; and his cure is to be found not in the transforma- tion of the soul but in the reconstruction of society. The normal man is the good man, just as the normal man is also the well man ; and there is no explanation of his condition of depravity save that to be found in the conditions of his environment. (a) THEODORE PARKER And what does this extraordinary interpretation of the individual in terms of the social organism 167 1 68 Function of the Church not mean to the church ! Can there be any question that it means as great a revolution in the methods and aims of reHgion as in the methods and aims of medicine and organised charity? Theodore Par- ker, the great American preacher, more than fifty years ago, with his clear vision of this coming age of socialisation, described the change which must come over all the functions of the church in words that are still prophetic of a future which seems well-nigh as remote as ever. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which Parker antici- pated nearly all of this gospel of the social origin of sin, which has become so prominent in our time. Will a white lily [he said] grow in a common sewer; can you bleach linen in a tan pit? Yes — as soon as you can rear a virtuous population under such circumstances (as these). Go to any state prison in the land, and you shall find that seven- eighths of the convicts came from the perishing class, brought there by crimes over which they had no control, crimes which would have made you and me thieves and pirates. The characters of such men are made for them, far more than by them. There is no more vice, perhaps, born into that class; they have no more "inherited sin" than any other class in the land; all the difference between the morals and man- ners of the rich and the poor is the result of education and circumstances. All wrong-doers, he says, may be divided into two classes. First, "there are the foes of society Church and Social Question 169 — men who are criminals in soul, bom criminals who have a bad nature." This class, he points out, is always very small. Indeed, in the Massa- chusetts of his day he estimated that there were probably not as many as 250 men "who by nature are incapable of attaining the average morality of the race — not so many bom foes of society as are bom deaf and blind." In the second place, — and this number includes all wrong-doers not included in this very small first class, — "there are the victims of society" — men who go wrong "from circumstances which may be ascertained, guarded against, mitigated, and at last overcome and removed. The causes of crime lie outside of them more than in them. They are the victims and not the foes of society." And then he applies this principle to the people whom he addressed in the great Boston Music Hall from Sunday to Sunday. Take away your home, your property, your friends, the respect of respectable men; take away what you have received from education, intellectual, moral, and religious; and how much better would the best of you be than the men who will to-morrow be huddled off to jail, for crimes committed in a dramshop to-day? The circumstances which have kept you temperate, industrious, respectable, would have made nine-tenths of the men in jail as good men as 3^ou are. . . . The best among you would have become lost to virtue if abandoned, turned out in childhood, into the streets to herd with the wickedest of men. 170 Function of the Church Looking at the conditions in which most people are condemned to Hve, he cries out, with pardonable exaggeration: "I wonder at the fewness of crimes and not at their multitude; and I must say that if goodness and piety did not bear a greater pro- portion to the whole development of the poor than the rich, their crime would be tenfold." Here surely is a sociology which runs on all fours with that of Prof. Patten! And the remedy offered by Theodore Parker is likewise similar. "All reform and alleviation," he said, "must begin with mending men's circumstances, though of course it must not end there. Expect no improvement in men that are hungry, naked, and cold. What we want is the application of Christ- ianity to social life, nothing else will do the work." The church, therefore, according to Parker, if it would do the work which it was appointed to do, must grapple at first hand with the conditions of society. It has a duty which it owes to society quite as much as to the individual. It must con- cern itself with politics, industry, and trade — with all the social relations of our civilisation. It must be "the means," he said, in his great sermon on "The True Idea of a Christian Church," of reforming the world. ... It should bring the sentiments, ideas, actions of the times to be judged by the universal standard — should measure the sins of commerce, the sins of the state, by the everlasting ideas on which alone is based the welfare of the world. Church and Social Question 171 The Christian Church should lead the civilisation of the age. ... It should lead the way in all moral enterprises, in every work aimed at the welfare of men. ... Its sacraments should be great works of reform, institutions for the comfort and culture of men. Its one end should be the building of a state where there is work for every hand, bread for all mouths, clothing for every back, culture for every mind, and love and faith in every heart. There are those, said Parker, who tell us that the church should say nothing and do nothing (in the midst of social wrongs). If I thought so, I would never enter the church but once again, and then to bow my shoulders to their manliest work — to heave down its strong pillars, arch and dome and roof and wall, steeple and tower, though like Samson I buried myself under the ruins of that temple which profaned the worship of God most high. I would do this in the name of man; in the name of Christ I would do it ; yes, in the dear and blessed name of God. (b) social reform as the method of indi- vidual SALVATION Here in the light of a social philosophy well-nigh as clear as that of our ov/n day, is set forth the new function of the chiirch. The new religion, like the new medicine and the new charity, "has for its subject not the individual detached from the world, but the world itself in whose redemption the 172 Function of the Church individual has his share" ; not the salvation of any one member, but the salvation of all together through the salvation of the whole body of which they severally are parts. "The world," as Dean Freemantle put it in the famous title of his famous book, "is the subject of redemption." The task of the church, in other words, is no longer that of individual salvation, but that of social salvation. "The religion of individualism," says Prof. Pea- body, in his "Approach to the Social Question," "is but sharing the fate of the economics and the politics of individualism." Precisely as a new economics and a new politics, a new medicine and a new philanthropy, have issued from the new thought of the individual existing only as a mem- ber of the social whole, "so the circle of religious experience," says Prof. Peabody, "has widened from the problem of personal redemption to the problem of a world to be redeemed; and the indi- vidual, instead of being called to save his soul from a lost world, is called to set his soul to save the world." Just as the physician to-day finds the task of curing the individual invalid widening out into the problem of remaking the fabric of society, so that it will foster the health and strength which are normal to the natural man and not breed dis- ease — just as the charity worker discovers that his task of relieving poverty expands into the greater work of preventing poverty by abolishing the injustice of our social organisation — just as all modem thought and endeavour are carried Church and Social Question 173 straight back from the individual to the society which has made him, — so also with the church, in its great task of moral and spiritual salvation! Take, for example, the sins or crimes, which were analysed above from the standpoint of causes and remedies! How is the church to deal with the young criminal who is brought into the court of Judge O' Sullivan, or with one of the twelve thousand delinquents who are arraigned annually before the bar of the Juvenile Court in Manhattan? Can it hope any longer to accomplish anything by regarding these immoral individuals simply as individuals "detached from the world"? Can it look at them merely as souls which are inherently bad, and which must be changed by some process of personal conversion or confirmation? Forget- ting all about streets and slums, tenement^ and saloons, congestion of population, child labour, low wages, poverty, can it expect to save the souls of these individuals, as the phrase is, by taking them into Sunday-school, or introducing them to prayer-meetings, or preaching sermons to them, or even bringing them under the immediate influ- ence of strong and uplifting personalties? — Or, in the same way, take the problem of prostitution! Can the church continue longer to regard these unfortunates merely as bad women, wholly unaf- fected by disordered and poverty-stricken homes, organised vice, and economic slavery; and expect to save them by methods of individual appeal, wholly divorced from all attempts to surround 174 Function of the Church them with the influences of a good home and to open to them a legitimate economic opportunity? — Is not this suggestion preposterous upon the face of things? Is it not evident that the church must go behind the individual who is a sinner, just as modern medicine goes behind the individual who is ill and modem charity behind the individual who is poor, and investigate the social background which is ultimately responsible for the abnormal individual, and in the change of this background achieve indirectly but none the less efficiently the change of this individual? The cure of the soul, in other words, is not different from the cure of the body; the problem of spiritual poverty is the same as the problem of material poverty. The church's task remains to-day what it has always been — the salvation of the individual! It is the business of the church to make men to be what they ought to be spiritu- ally, exactly as it is the business of the physician to make men to be what they ought to be physically. The mission of the church, in the last analysis, as we have said, begins and ends with the indi- vidual, and that mission can only be described, as Prof. Patten describes it, as the endeavoiir "to make men normal." But how can you expect men, living together in the close-knit fabric of modem society, to be what they ought to be, if beset on every hand by conditions of life and labour, which inevitably tend to reduce them to levels lower than those occupied by the beasts of Church and Social Question 175 the field? How can you expect men to be "nor- mal," who are denied fresh air and sunlight, robbed of rest and recreation, condemned to live under conditions which make decent privacy impossible and the ordinary affections of the heart a mock- ery? Why talk about normality of body and mind and soul under industrial and living conditions such as are the commonplace of our great modem centres of population? Is there not a wealth of prac- tical wisdom in the remark of the rough peasant in Charles Kingsley's "Alton Locke?" — "Oh, re- ligion 's all very well for them as has time for it. But I don't see how a man can hear sermons with an empty belly; and there 's so much to fret a man now, and he 's so cruel tired coming home o' nights, he can't nowise go to pray a lot, as gentlefolks does." It is true that the concern of religion, to-day as always, is with the individual. But it is not with any particular part of the individual, either heart or soul or spirit — whatever these sepa- rate terms may mean — but, as Mr. Baker has pointed out, in the case of bodily healing, it is "with the whole man"; and this means his mind and his body, and above all things else, his infi- nitely complicated social relationships. In other words, this individual whom the church desires to save — and this is the crucial point, as we have been seeing all along! — is a social creature, and there- fore must be reached, if he is to be reached at all, through the conditions of the social environment. Which means in this age at least, whatever may 176 Function of the Church be said of earlier and less complex periods of social history, that the function of the church must be primarily social and not individual. And it is just this thought which is now sweeping over the churches of all denominations and causing that "spiritual unrest" which is so conspicuous a characteristic of our time. Signs multiply [says Prof. Graham Taylor] that the churches are beginning to feel the inconsist- ency of longer remaining silent or inactive in facing industrial conditions which are incompatible with the ideals of religion. They seem to be increasingly aware that it does not fulfil the function of religion in the world for the churches to confine their atten- tion and effort to the individual soul, in the hope that individuals who are religiously brought up will make society what it ought to be. They are learning not only that good people make society better, but also that better social and industrial conditions help make men, women, and children good. So, in order to realise their ideals in individual lives, as well as in communities, nations, and in the world at large, the churches are taking very definite attitude and very overt action regarding social and industrial conditions confronting them. This is the whole aim and purpose of the church to-day — this shifting from the individual to society — from the members to the body, to use Paul's phrase. And it is this shifting, as I need not point out, which constitutes the revolutionary character Church and Social Question 177 of this new gospel of a social religion — revolu- tionary, it should be said, from at least two points of view! (i) The New Conception of the Function of the Church In the first place, it means a wholly new concep- tion of the distinctive function of the church. In the past, the church has been regarded as a more or less passive witness of salvation; in the future it will be regarded as an active agent of salvation. In the past, it has been the body of those who have been saved from the evils of the world ; in the future it will be the body of those who are saviours of the world from the evils which assail it. In the past, it has been a place of refuge, where men could flee for safety ; in the future it will be an armoury, where men may come to arm themselves against "the rulers of the darkness of the world." For centu- ries, the church has been a place where men have come for the help which they themselves might receive. They have sought strength in the hour of weakness, light in the hour of darkness, consola- tion in the hour of sorrow and disappointment. They have come to God's altars that they might escape "the tumult and the shouting" of the world, and find rest unto their souls. Now this service of bringing relief to the weary and heavy- laden the church will always offer, just as the battleship will always have its hospital ward; but 178 Function of the Church this function will always be subordinate to its new and greater function. I see already the coming of a day when men will come to the church not for what they can receive but for what they can give; not to be entertained or instructed or uplifted, but to be equipped in the whole armour of God, that they may again venture forth to die for the redemption of mankind ; not to flee from the world, but to prepare themselves to enter into the world to serve as good soldiers of the Lord. Not the company of the saints, not the assembly of the converted, not "the congregation of the right- eous," not a club of people who like to be together and worship together and pray together, but a great host of servants of the common good, of saviours of humanity, of fighters of the good fight for justice, righteousness, and peace — this is the new church of the new age! (2) The Indefinite Extension of the Field of Re- ligious Activity In the second place, the gospel of social salvation involves an indefinite extension of the field of religious activity. In the past, as we have seen, the church has concerned itself with certain par- ticular problems of the individual life, and beyond that it has not dared to trespass. Here, within a very circumscribed area, was the field of religion, and from every other field of human life, religion was ruthlessly excluded. Confronted, however, Church and Social Question 179 by the new task of redeeming the social order, religion must become of universal appUcation. It must enter into every field by virtue of the fact that its task is to save not the individual apart by himself, but the individual in all of his social rela- tionships as an organised part of the social whole. Every question becomes thus at bottom a religious question and all work for human betterment re- ligious work. Charged with the duty of saving the world — or, as Jesus put it, of bringing in the King- dom of God upon the earth — the church will fear- lessly grapple with the problem of poverty. It will accept the doctrine of the best social authorities of our time, that poverty is due not to individual depravity or inefficiency, but to social maladjust- ment; and upon the basis of this doctrine will so readjust social conditions, that poverty will be as impossible as wealth. The church will enter into the field of industry, and constrain the controlling forces of labour and capital to cease their warfare and unite upon a common platform of mutual co- operation. The church will enter into the realm of business, and insist upon its complete moralisa- tion. Since no man can serve two masters it will insist that God be served in the mart of trade as well as in the sanctuary, and God's will be done in every commercial transaction as well as in every ecclesiastical performance. It will enter into the field of politics and purify this Augean stable of its rottenness. It will insist that the city-hall and the state-capitol and the court-house be i8o Function of the Church as sacred a shrine as the cathedral, and the pubHc servants of the state as truly the minis- ters of religion as the priests praying before the altars. Moved by this new gospel of socialisa- tion, the church will care not so much for rites of baptism as for public baths and playgrounds; not so much for the service of Communion at the altar, as for that wider communion at every hearth- stone which shall give bread to all who hunger and drink to all who thirst; not so much for clerical robes and choir vestments, as for clothing for all who are naked; not so much for splendid churches and towering cathedrals, as for decent and com- fortable homes for all men, women, and children; not so much for an atmosphere of prayer and wor- ship in the church edifice, as for fresh air to breathe in the tenements and slums; not so much for teaching men to believe as for giving them means wherewith to live ; not so much for keeping Sunday inviolate from open theatres and concert-halls and sports, as for keeping every day inviolate from dishonest stock-transactions, piratical business deals, child labour, starvation wages, preventable diseases, selfish wealth and grinding poverty; not so much for saving the heathen over seas as for saving the Christians who are perishing at our very doors; not so much for emancipating men from what we call sin, as for emancipating them from the conditions of life and labour which make sin inevitable; not so much for saving souls, as for saving the society which moulds the soul for eter- Church and Social Question i8i nal good or ill. In pursuit of its work of social salvation, the church will enter thus into every field of human life, and will seek the extirpation of its misery, the elimination of its evil, and the righting of its wrongs. So long as the individual was regarded as a separate spiritual entity, apart from ail things else, it was entirely possible to assert that religion constituted a separate field of human activity, and that religious work had to do with very special areas of human experience. When the individual is seen correctly, however, as only a part of the social organism, then, in the very pursuit of its chosen work of salvation, re- ligion enters into every sphere of action and becomes coincident with life. From the standpoint of the new conception of social salvation, therefore, the church has a right to deal with all problems of industry, business, and politics. "The field is the world" in a truer sense than it has ever been understood before. "Every question between men is a religious question," says Henry D. Lloyd, "a question of moral economy before it is a question of political economy — and all political, industrial, and social activities functions of the church." There is not a question, therefore, which the minis- ter has not a right — nay, an obligation — to discuss in his pulpit in the name simply of religion. There is not a task of practical reform which the members of the church have not a right — nay, an obligation — to undertake in the name of religion. The church is concerned with saving the individual; 1 82 Function of the Church the individual exists only in his social relationships ; the individual can be saved only as his social relationships are saved. Therefore, in pursuit of its one true task, the church is vitally concerned with every social relationship of men. Theodore Parker had exactly this idea of social salvation in mind, when he said: "Religion is the natiu'al ruler in all the commonwealth of man. Therefore have I always taught the supremacy of religion and its commanding power in every relation of human life." (C)- JESUS AS THE PROPHET OF SOCIALISED RELIGION And this, as we should now point out without further delay, is nothing more nor less than the true realisation in this modem age of the life- purpose of Jesus of Nazareth. We have already seen that Jesus, in the last analysis, was the su- preme individualist of history, and that his one absolutely original contribution to the world's thought was that of the perfect sanctity of the soul. But the significance of this exaltation of the individual and its application to the actual problems of human life, in Jesus' day as in our own, has never been properly understood. In short it IS not too much to assert that the world, almost from the very day of Jesus' death, has cherished an utterly distorted idea of the distinc- tive character of his life. Church and Social Question 183 We think of Jesus at the present time, as all men have thought of him for ages past, as a man of infinite compassion and affection. We think of him as one whose heart was open to the sorrows of mankind and whose hand was ever ready to help and serve their needs. We think of him as one who journeyed from place to place — yea, from house to house — speaking words of consolation to hearts that were sore stricken with sorrow and disappointment — lifting, by the mere con- tagion of his marvellous personality, heavy bur- dens that were grievous to be borne — bringing companionship to those who were lonely and distressed — bringing strength to those who were weak against temptation — lifting up those who were fallen into sin, and with words of pardon and encouragement sending them forward upon their way — forgetting himself, and living from day to day for the sake ot others. Above all, we think of him as the great and inspiring teacher of religion, who revealed to the faltering gaze of men the reality of the living God, and pointed them to the promise of the eternal life. We think of him as the gentle, kindly, helpful friend of mankind— as "the joyous comrade," the "master of the art of living," the "first true gentleman," the "saviour," the "redeemer," the "good shepherd," to quote only a few of the classic phrases which have been applied to him in the ages past. He appears to us always, in his personal relations with the men and women who were about him, as a friend who 184 Function of the Church encouraged them with the gift of his abiding love, as a teacher who taught them how to Hve, as a prophet who aroused them to a sense of sin and inspired them to a yearning after virtue, as a seer who tore aside the veil which divides the visible from the invisible, and brought men face to face with God. Name Jesus, and we think of the man who spoke the Beatitudes, laid down the Golden Rule, defined the two great commandments of the law, and told the tale of the Good Samaritan. We think of the man who healed the sick, raised the dead, redeemed the sinful. We think of the man who helped the poor widow of Nain, was not unmindful of the appeal of the Roman centurion, lifted up the fallen Mary of Magdala, opened his arms in welcome to the little children, and was able so to love even his enemies that he could pray to God to forgive those who had betrayed him and nailed him to the cross. This is the universal idea of Jesus to-day, and it is in this conception of the Nazarene that the world finds strength and inspi- ration. He has taught us how to live, and shown us the path in which our feet should walk. He has taught us how to love and serve and help. Above all, he has lifted our eyes above the things of earth and shov/n us God, the Father; and con- vinced us, therefore, that we have nothing to fear, since God is with us. Now this idea of Jesus, I believe, is perfectly correct, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough! Jesus was all that has been described Church and Social Question 185 above, but he was something more than this besides. Here was a consummate personality, a marvellous teacher, an inspired prophet of God; and I for one am inclined to doubt if we have exhausted all the fulness of his divine perfection, when we have described him simply as a man who loved and served his fellow-men and revealed to their souls the reality of God. Is there not some- thing more in the career of this wonderful Nazarene than a mere example of individual living; did not this Hebrew youth do something more than merely reveal the spirit in which men and women are to live as individuals in a world of individuals; was not this great man, whose birth marks the division between ancient and modem times and whose death is rightly regarded as the crowning tragedy of human history, something more than a teacher of spiritual truth, something more than a revealer of God, something more even than "the way, the truth, and the life"? Have we described all that Jesus did, interpreted all that he said, and cxt plained all the influence which he has exerted upon humanity, when we picture him merely as a noble, self-sacrificing teacher, who went about doing good among his people, and revealing to them by word and by personal example the secret of the art of living? Must we not find something more here than we have yet discovered, if we would under- stand the whole truth of his career? These questions, I believe, must be answered most emphatically in the affirmative — and this, 1 86 Function of the Church for one reason if for no other ! How otherwise are we to explain the tragic end of the Nazarene's life — his arrest by the Jewish high priest, his trial by the Roman provincial governor, and his public crucifixion as a criminal upon the hill of Calvary? Did we ever stop to ask ourselves just why Jesus was thus violently put to death? Why, if Jesus was only a patient, gentle, loving man who was bent upon nothing else but helping other men to be as patient, gentle, and loving as himself, was the whole power of the Jewish church upon the one hand and the whole power of the Roman Empire upon the other united to crush and to destroy him? Why, if Jesus was only a simple moral teacher, trying to reform and regenerate the individual men and women whom he met on the highways and by the lakesides and in the villages of Palestine, was it necessary to the safety of the Jewish hierarchy and even to the security of the Roman authority in the East, that this inoffensive prophet of the soul should be put to death? Governments as mighty as that of Rome in the age of Tiberius, churches as great as that of Jerusalem in the priesthood of Caiaphas, do not seek out and destroy such men as Jesus is commonly represented to have been — not even when they describe themselves as Messiahs and prophesy the approaching end of all things! The whole weight of imperial and ecclesiastical dis- pleasure is never united upon a man who is merely preaching the Sermon upon the Mount and telling Church and Social Question 187 the parable of the Good Samaritan, healing disease and comforting sorrow, telling of God and his infinite compassion for mankind. When the Em- peror and the High Priest join hands to do a work of murder, we may be sure that the security of the throne and the altar are both at stake. Socrates was made to drink the hemlock, not because he was a teacher of logic and ethics, but because it was believed that he was systematically under- mining the foundations of the Athenian state. Savonarola was burned in the public square of Florence, not because he was an enemy of the vices of the people, but because he was an enemy of Pope Alexander VI. in the Vatican at Rome, and an enemy of the De' Medici in the palaces of the Italian metropolis. Latimer and Ridley were made to be flaming torches to illumine the darkness of reactionary England, not because they were faithful pastors of their flocks, but because they were hostile to the Catholic state and the Catholic church. Martyrdom is never won by men who accept the world as it is, bow obediently to the powers of king and bishop, and are content to teach their people to be pure and honest in their private lives, and patient, generous, and unselfish in their relations with one another. Martyrdom is never achieved by prophets who are content to speak of God only as a heavenly Father, and who implore their followers to obey the will of God as perfect wisdom and perfect love. Martyrdom is only won by the man who concerns himself not 1 88 Function of the Church alone with private but also with public matters, who is interested not merely to regenerate indi- viduals but to reform society, who is not satisfied to rebuke the weaknesses and sins of men, but must also condemn the unrighteousness, injustice, and oppression of the social organism. It is the man who criticises not men but institutions, who seeks to reform not merely the individual but the church in which the individual worships and the state which he supports, who seeks to establish the Kingdom of God not merely in the recesses of the human heart but also in the streets of the city and the highways of the state, in the temples of worship and in the halls of administration, — it is this man who is burned as a heretic or crucified as a criminal ! And when we see Jesus, after only eighteen months or so of public preaching, hanging upon the cross, with Roman soldiery dividing his garments between them and Jewish priests hooting at his agony, we may be sure that he had been doing something more in those few months of public ministry than speaking parables and teach- ing prayers, healing the sick and redeeming the fallen. He had been assailing, with the divine wrath of a hater of iniquity and a lover of righteousness, the social offences of his time, for which priests and governors were alike responsible, and his wrath had blazed with such fury and had so kin- dled the hearts of those who had listened to his flaming words, that state and church were alike threatened with destruction if he were not Church and Social Question 189 speedily silenced. Hence his arrest by Caiaphas the priest, and his crucifixion by Pilate the pro- vincial governor — church and state uniting as so many times before and so many times since, to crush the prophet who would blot out their trans- gressions and shatter their oppression, that a weak and suffering people might be redeemed. There must be something more, therefore, in our thought of Jesus than the world has yet dis- covered, if the overshadowing fact of his cruci- fixion at the hands of the Jewish church and the Roman Empire is to be adequately explained. And the experiences of human history in other ages and other places are calculated to convince us that this "something more" lies along the lines of social agitation, of a ministry to the outward institutions of society as well as to the inward souls of men. And if we turn now to the pages of the gospels, which contain all that we know of this great man, we suddenly discover that the evi- dences of this fact are here as clear before our eyes as the particles of gold which gleam in the sand- beds of an Alaskan mountain stream. Read the life of Jesus as it should be read, study the popular causes which he espoused and the social ideals which he sought to make real upon the earth, observe the powers of class and state and church whose oppressions he condemned and whose privi- leges he sought to destroy — and we are made to understand speedily enough that there was some- thing more here than a mere teacher of men — that 190 Function of the Church here was an heroic reformer of society! And we are made to see also that his path, as marked out in the beginning and as followed bravely to the bitter end, led as straight to the cross of Calvary as the footsteps of John Brown led to the gallows of Charlestown, Virginia. First of all, we are beginning to realise that Jesus proceeded from the common people, that he associated all his life with the common people — the fishers, artisans, farmers, and shepherds of his day — and that there is no indication that anything ever happened in his career "to neutralise the sense of class solidarity which grows up under such circumstances as these." Furthermore, the com- mon people of that day were also the poor people, and Jesus was poor along with all the rest. Says W. M. Thomson, as quoted by Prof. Walter Rau- schenbusch in his ** Christianity and the Social Crisis": "Jesus had no place to be bom in but another man's stable, no closet to pray in but the wilderness, no place to die but on the cross of an enemy, and no grave but one lent by a friend." "The birds of the air have nests," said Jesus, referring to his own condition, * ' and the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." Jesus was himself poor, he associated with the poor, he gave himself to the service of the poor and he sought the social liberation of the poor. How else are we to explain the extraordinary popu- larity of his preaching? "The multitudes heard him gladly," we are told; they followed him eagerly Church and Social Question 191 from place to place; they gathered about him in crowds wherever he sat down to teach; men left their toil, women abandoned their household cares, mothers came with their children in their arms or tugging at their skirts, that they might stand and Hsten to his words. And who can doubt that they heard him thus gladly because he spoke the things that were in their hearts, gave voice to their aspi- rations, confirmed their hopes, and promised them relief from their economic, political, and ecclesiasti- cal burdens? And how else also are we to explain his entry into Jerusalem, with the crowd surging about him and hailing him rapturously as the Messiah; or explain the secret arrest, the hasty trial, the anxious and careful efforts to prejudice the populace against him, if not on the supposition that he was the idol of the common people, and was their idol because he was leading a crusade for their emancipation from social slavery? They saw in this man, even if we do not, something more than a teacher of ethics or a preacher of the spirit- ual life — something more than a healer of disease, a comforter of personal sorrow, and a revealer of the presence of Almighty God. They saw in him a man who was indignant at the industrial oppres- sion, the poHtical tyranny, and the ecclesiastical hypocrisy of the age! They saw a man who was prepared to shatter the fetters by which his people were bound to misery and degradation. They saw a man who promised to all who had ears to hear the coming of a better time, when they should be 192 Function of the Church rescued from oppression, and be free to live, to labour, and to love ! They saw a man, in -short, who was eager to serve them and not plunder them, eager to lift them up and not cast them down, eager to set them free and not bind them with ever heavier chains of privilege and power. They saw a man who promised that the Kingdom of God was at hand! And we to-day, to hide our own perversity and blindness, declare that they mis- understood him, and interpreted in terms of the flesh what he intended should be interpreted in terms of the spirit ! But not only do we know that'Jesus was through- out his life one of the common people, and the repre- sentative and the leader of the common people because of his sympathy with their aspirations for deliverance, but there is also an abundance of evidence to prove that Jesus was no halfway reformer in his attitude toward the men and the in- stitutions of his day. Rightly does Prof. Rauschen- busch point out that ''there was a revolutionary consciousness in Jesus." Jesus understood per- fectly well, when he looked upon the suffer- ings of the common people and saw the political and industrial causes of this suffering, that he had come, as Rauschenbusch puts it, to kindle a fire upon the earth. Much as he was devoted to peace, and strongly and sincerely as he preached the idealistic doctrine of non-resistance, he knew that the actual result of his work would be "not peace but a sword." He saw, as Garrison saw when he Church and Social Question 193 began the anti-slavery fight in this coimtry, that he was destined to divide households and sever families, to separate brother from brother, and father from son. Hence the bold- ness of his declaration: '*He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me"! He proclaimed without hesitation that he pro- posed to turn society upside down — to make the first to be last and the last to be first. He asserted without qualification that he proposed a new dis- tribution of property — that the poor should be made rich and the rich should be made poor. He declared without apology that the things which were esteemed before men were an abomination before God, and that these things he was deter- mined to smite. Even in the Beatitudes, which seem to breathe the very essence of peace, there sounds the martial note of revolution. "The whole point of these Beatitudes," says Prof. Rauschen- busch, is that henceforth those were to be blessed whom the world had never blessed before, for the Kingdom of God would reverse their relative standing. Now the poor and the sad and the hungry were to be satisfied and comforted; the meek who had been shouldered aside by the ruthless, would get their chance to in- herit the earth ; and conflict and persecution would be inevitable in the process. All through his teaching, in short, there runs the prophecy of social change. "The Lord hath 13 194 Function of the Church anointed me," said Jesus, at the very outset of his work, "to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver- ance to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are bruised." And later, when he sent forth his disciples to do this very work which he had thus described, he told them that he knew that this work was so perilous that he knew he sent them forth "as sheep in the midst of wolves" — they should be hated of all men, but that they must endure even imto the end. If we would really understand the spirit which was in Jesus and appreciate the full extent of what Prof. Rauschenbusch calls his "revolutionary consciousness," we have only to see the attitude which he assumed toward those classes of the population of his day which he held responsible for the miseries of the people. These classes were three: first, the wealthy aristocracy; second, the ecclesiastical aristocracy; and third, the political aristocracy. Nothing is more amusing, and at the same time more disheartening than the attempts which have been made in all ages to gloss over and explain away the utterances of Jesus upon the subject of great wealth. If there is anything perfectly clear in the gospels, it is the Nazarene's unconditional, uncompromising, straight - from- the-shoulder denunciation of riches. Jesus did not hate the rich as individuals, nor did he denounce them as individuals — a mistake made by many an agitator both before and since his Church and Social Question 195 time. Nothing is more touching, for example, than the story of the rich young man, whom Jesus instructed to sell all his goods and give them to the poor as the sole condition of his entrance upon eternal life, wherein the gospel writer tells us that the Master looked upon the young man, whose wealth he thus declared must be destroyed, and looking upon him, loved him! It was wealth as a social condition, wealth as a goal to the ambitions of men, wealth as a source of power over the lives of other men, wealth as a source of pride and luxury and vice, wealth as a recognised social institution — it was this and this alone that he detested and denounced. No man ever saw clearer than did Jesus that wealth was inconsistent with true spiritual life, that God and Mammon could not be served together by any one man, that wealth can exist only upon the basis of poverty and pov- erty ended only by a more equitable distribution of wealth. The Kingdom of God, to his mind, was a fellowship of justice, equality, and love ; and no man ever saw more distinctly than he that it is almost impossible "to get riches with justice, to keep them with equality, or to spend them with love." Against wealth, therefore, as a condition, against wealth as the corrupter of the souls of those who have and the destroyer of the bodies of those who have not, against wealth as the basis of ine- quality and injustice, he ceaselessly inveighed, declaring that in his Kingdom there should be no wealth, just as there should be no poverty, and 196 Function of the Church that the first step of entrance into the Kingdom upon the part of the rich must be the complete renunciation of their great possessions. Remem- bering now what wealth has always meant to the minds of men — ^remembering the power it has always exerted in the world's history — remem- bering what wealth is to-day and what it has always been as a social institution — and what must we think of Christ! Similar also was Jesus' attitude toward the religious aristocracies of his time, an attitude which has well been described as one of "revolutionary boldness and thoroughness." Against the faithless priests of the temple he hurled such anathemas of wrath as have seldom passed the lips of any man. He called them hypocrites, blind leaders of the blind, serpents, generation of vipers, the children of hell. He accused them of being guilty of "all manner of extortion and excess" under the guise of religious service; "devouring widows' houses," he said, "and then for a pretence making long prayers." He exposed their punctilious solicitude for the non-essentials of religion, "the mint, the anise, and the cummin," and their utter neglect of "the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and faith." Outwardly righteous, he as- serted that within they were "full of hypocrisy and iniquity," and compared them to "whited sepul- chres," which "appear beautiful without, but within are full of dead men's bones and all imclean- ness." And as a climax to his denimciation of Church and Social Question 197 these priests and Pharisees, he pointed to the de- spised publicans who gathered the taxes from the people and the wretched hariots upon the public streets, and declared that these miserable outcasts had a truer piety than theirs. And then, at the end, standing before the temple upon Mt. Zion, he dared to proclaim that that temple should be destroyed so that one stone should not stand upon another — and this as one of the conditions of the coming of his Kingdom! Remembering now that the organised religion of that day was still the foundation of the Jewish state — remembering that the priests and scribes and Pharisees were the pillars of society — remembering that the temple was reverenced even by the common people as guarding the shrine of the Holy of Holies, — and again, what must we think of Christ! In the same revolutionary attitude do we find Jesus placed toward the political powers of his day. Speaking of Herod, the king, he referred to him as * ' that fox. ' ' Holding the coin of Ccesar in his hand, he instructed the people to render the wretched money unto Caesar, if Csesar wanted it, but for them to hold fast not imto the things of Csesar but unto the things of God. Pointing in scorn and derision at the political aristocracy of the time, he is reported to have said: "Ye know that they which are supposed to rule over the nations, lord it over them, and their great ones tyrannise over them. Thus shall it not be among you." And describing the last judgment of the world, he 198,' Function of the Church pictured the destruction of all the nations of the earth — Rome, of course, among the rest — and asserted that the Kingdom of God should be builded upon the wreckage of the kingdoms of men. Remembering now the power of the Caesars of that age — remembering the imiversal and appa- rently eternal dominion of imperial Rome — remembering the omnipotence of this state which plundered them with ruthless cruelty, — and again, what shall we think of Christ! What shall we think indeed? Is not the mission of his life now plain? It is true that Jesus was an individualist, in the sense that he recognised, as Emerson says, "for the first time in history the real greatness" of man, and thus had supreme interest in the integrity and welfare of this man. It is true that he was the gentle, kindly, sympa- thetic friend of his suffering and sinful fellows. It is true that he was deeply concerned by the trials and tribulations, the burdens and sorrows, of private life. It is true that he was the revealer to the minds of men of the heavenly Father, and the true prophet to their hearts of the immortal life. No man ever served the needs of other men as did he. No man ever shared their sorrows or lifted their biudens as did he. No man ever proved to be so great an inspiration to others, as they faced the problems and perplexities and tempta- tions of their individual lives, as did he. Jesus was all this, as we have seen ! But just because he was this, he was obliged also to be something more. Church and Social Question 199 With the clear insight of the great teacher, he saw instantly the inevitable relationship between the individual and the social organism, and the inevi- table dependence in greater or less degree of the former upon the latter. He saw how the men and women of his day were oppressed and persecuted and burdened. He saw how fully they were the victims of social disorder and injustice, and to what an extent therefore their weaknesses and sins were the result not of inward impulses to evil but of out- ward external conditions of degradation. And just because he loved and pitied and believed in the individual, and desired to emancipate and save him, he saw himself forced more and more, as time went on, to enter upon a crusade of social redemption. His very endeavour to help this man and to relieve this woman and to free this Httle child brought him into immediate conflict with the established institutions of church and state, and thus transformed him, almost in spite of himself I bcHeve, into the militant reformer and heroic martyr. I do not for a moment mean to imply that Jesus worked out in his own thought any such philosophy of the socialised individual as has been worked out in our day. But I most certainly do mean to imply that, in the course of his practical endeavour for the individual, he was carried on, like every other true servant of humanity in every age, beyond the individual to the environing so- ciety. And nothing so fully proves, to my mind, the essential soundness of this new social philosophy 200 Function of the Church of our time, as this repeated experience of every undaunted friend of human kind. Thus are we coming at last to a true understand- ing of the life and teaching of the great Nazarene ! Jesus was not only the friend of man, but he was also "the servant of a new himianity." He was not only a prophet of religious truth, but an instigator of social reform. In the words of Desmoulins, he was "the first sans-culotte " ; or, as Charles Kingsley has put it, "the first true demagogue"! In this sense, he was concerned not only with the sins of individuals, but also with the evils of insti- tutions. He was interested not only in making this man and that man a true son of God, but, in order that he might the more effectively do this very thing, he was also interested in making the society into which men were organised the King- dom of God. In other words, while his specific aim was undoubtedly individual, his method was as undoubtedly social. He was at bottom an agi- tator of revolution! He refused frankly and fear- lessly to accept the world as he found it — he refused to believe that society was as well organised as could be expected. "He refused to revere the men whom it called great, he refused to respect the institutions which it regarded as final," he refused to conform to the social usages and customs which it regarded as imalterable, he refused to cherish the moral and spiritual ideals which it regarded as sacred and upon which it had reared the whole edifice of its social fabric. He nourished Church and Social Question 201 in his soul the vision of a new society, "an ideal," says Prof. Rauschenbusch, "of a common life so radically different from the present, that it in- volved a reversal of values, a revolutionary displace- ment of existing relations." And to this work of destroying the old society, with all of its oppressive institutions, its corrupting customs, and its per- verted ideals, and of bringing in a new society which was to be something so beautiful and inspir- ing and hitherto imheard of that he could call it nothing less than the Kingdom of God come down upon the earth — it was to this work, as the very condition of that of helping individual men to live, that he dedicated his career. Jesus, therefore, as the saviour of men, was first and foremost the inaugurator of a new social and political order. He was not primarily the teacher of theology, nor the builder of a church, nor the guide to a way of life — he was more than all things else the champion of a great movement for a more righteous and just social order. Caiaphas and Pilate knew what they were doing when they put the Nazarene to death! Well does Prof. Rauschenbusch put the question, in his epoch-making book on "Christianity and the Social Crisis," "If we were forced to classify Jesus either with the great theologians who elabo- rated the fine distinctions of scholasticism, or with the mighty popes and princes of the church who built up their power in his name, or with the men who are giving their heart and life to the propa- ganda of a new social system, where should we 202 Function of the Church place him?" To this inquiry there can be but a single answer — and an answer, as I need not now point out, wholly in accord with the social mes- sage of our age!* ' In the writing of this entire section I am greatly indebted to the second chapter, "The Social Aims of Jesus," of Prof. Rauschenbusch's book. This is to my mind the most original and convincing interpretation of the Nazarene's career which has yet appeared. See also Bouck White's stirring volume, en- titled "The Call of the Carpenter," which appears as this is passing through the press. Nor must I fail to speak in this con- nection of Charles Rann Kennedy's wonderful allegorical drama, "The Servant in the House." Here is the traditional Christ- ianity of creeds and liturgies and narrow individualistic interests brought face to face with the spirit of the real Jesus of Nazareth, the rebuilder of the social order. In the deaf and blind Bishop do we see the extreme embodiment of the old religion which is passing, and in Manson the Servant the extreme embodiment of the new religion which is yet to come ! CHAPTER VII OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF THE SOCIALISED CHURCH THE new religion, therefore, like the new medi- cine and the new philanthropy, must be con- cerned primarily with society and not with the individual — or with the individual only as he is interpreted in social terms; and the new minister, like the new physician and the new charity worker, must be first and foremost a reformer of social conditions — a militant reconstructor of the social fabric. Signs of the coming change in this direc- tion in the religious world are all about us, as Prof. Graham Taylor has said ; but it is not to be expec- ted that the new religion of socialisation will make any such sure and rapid progress as the movement for socialisation in other fields of human endeavour. The church, in all ages and coimtries, has always been the most conservative of organisations; and Christianity in particular seems grievously handi- capped by ecclesiastical traditions and theological misconceptions which will make the entrance of the church upon this new field of social redemp- tion an exceedingly slow and painful process. In order to understand satisfactorily the question as to why the Christian church, in spite of the wonder- 203 204 Function of the Church ful social impulse behind it of Jesus of Nazareth and the long line of the earlier Jewish prophets from Amos to John the Baptist, has never been an active social force in the past, and is to-day destined in all probability to enter all too tardily upon the work of reforming social conditions, it would be necessary to survey the whole history of Christianity from the fourth century a.d. to the present moment. It would require such an elabo- rate study as Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch has given us in the fourth chapter of his "Christianity and the Social Crisis," which he entitles "Why has Christianity never Entered upon the Work of Social Reconstruction?" We should have to show how the early church was almost wholly diverted from the original social gospel of Jesus and the Jewish prophets by the expectation of the second coming and the approaching end of the world, by the extraordinary personal influence of Paul and his school, by the historical accidents attending the particular relationship existing between the government of the Roman Empire and the early church, by the alienations existing between the early Christian communities and the heathendom in which they found themselves involved, by the growing absorption of the church in matters of sacrament and dogma, by the obsession of the early Christian consciousness with a philosophy of the salvation of a lost individual in another world, and so on indefinitely! It must suffice, however, in this regard, simply to assert that, Obstacles to Socialised Church 205 within two centimes after the death of Jesus, the social significance of the Master's teaching and example had been almost wholly lost, and the church become what we have already described it — an instrument for saving the individual out of the world ; and pass on at once to the consideration of the present situation of the church, and the conditions now militating against its immediate and complete identification with the new social movements of the time. (a) the philosophy of individualism First and foremost, of course, is that theory of individualism which is the distinctive feature of traditional Christianity in all of its branches, and which has already been described at length in this book. The church has always looked upon the individual in the past as an isolated entity, having only a temporary, fortuitous, and wholly inconse- quential relation to the social environment; and this, as I need not point out again, is its prevailing philosophy to-day. And so long as this appre- hension of the nature of the individual life is dominant, it is almost hopeless to expect any very keen recognition upon the part of the church of its social responsibilities and obligations. Ftmda- mental to the adoption by organised Christianity of the new reHgion of socialisation is the whole transformation of its religious philosophy from the individualistic conceptions of yesterday to the 2o6 Function of the Church socialistic conceptions of to-day; and until this transformation takes place, there is little hope of the establishment of the new church described above. Other facts of very real significance, however, still further complicate the problem of this revo- lutionary transition. (b) denominationalism Of great influence, for example, is the evil of denominationalism, by which I mean the dividing of "the church universal" into sects or hostile parties by reason of differences of theological opinion. In the world of Christendom to-day, we see hundreds of differing sects, each concerned primarily not with the worship of God and the service of man, but with the establishment of its own private and patented and copyrighted inter- pretation of Christian doctrine. Church is arrayed against church, minister against minister, in no more serious differences than the translation of a Biblical text or the hair-splitting quibble of a theological distinction, neither of which has any conceivable relation to the living issues of the day. This di- vision of Christianity into an innumerable variety of denominations has had — and will continue to have — two most lamentable social consequences. In the first place, it has diverted the attention of the churches from the real evils of organised society to the unreal evils of theological error, and has Obstacles to Socialised Church 207 persuaded the churches that their sole duty is to propagate their own particular interpretation of Christian faith and, for this purpose, to strengthen their own sectarian organisation. That society should fall into the hands of Methodists or Bap- tists or Unitarians has aroused the churches to a veritable crusade of opposition; but that society should fall into the hands of poUtical grafters and money-mad capitaHsts and war-crazed statesmen has been contemplated by the churches with com- parative indifference. And even when the churches are not assailing one another, but are living together in more or less peace and harmony, as is to-day more and more coming to be the case, they are yet paralysed as social agencies by reason of their absorption in their own petty sectarian affairs. The Presbyterian churches are interested not so much in providing for the social welfare of the American people as in furthering the prosperity of their Presbyterian missionary organisations. The great boast of the Methodist church is not so much that it is redeeming American political and business life as that it is building a new Method- ist church every day. And the one great imited endeavour of the Unitarian churches, in spite of their pretensions to a gospel of appHed religion, is not the serving of society but the supporting of a missionary association which is devoted to "maintaining old Unitarian churches whose natu- ral lives are already spent, and building new Unitarian churches which cannot maintain them- 2o8 Function of the Church selves." Each sect, In a word, is so concerned in keeping its own denominational machinery going and in solving its own denominational problems, that it has little time or strength to give to the machinery of society and to the solution of the vexing problems of modem social life. And in the second place, this denominationalism alienates from the churches those who could do everything in the way of making them to be socially efficient. Says Prof. Francis G. Pea- body, in his ''Approach to the Social Question": "Organised charity has found the divisions of Christian creeds so obstructive to united effort that it has in large degree secularised itself, and even prohibits its agents from religious propagand- ism." Social workers as a class do not attend church services, and do not identify themselves with church organisations. And in all systematic social work, from the organised charity to the settlement house, religion is totally excluded, as it is from the public school, because of denomina- tional jealousies and fears. Thus are the churches, by their own folly, robbed of the co-operation of those who could best guide them to adequate social service, and the influence of religion ar- bitrarily banished from that field where it could do its best and noblest work. It is time that the absurdities of denomination- alism came to an end. It is time that Presbyterian churches and Methodist churches and Unitarian churches disappeared, and in their places there Obstacles to Socialised Church 209 came one universal church of God, dedicated exclusively not to the support of a hierarchy or the defence of a creed, but to the worship of God and the service of man. I venture to assert that the socialisation of the churches will never be reaUsed until all denominational barriers have been destroyed and all denominational titles wiped away. (C) OTHER-WORLDLINESS Another reason for the inevitable postponement of the hope of the socialised church is the so-called " other- world " conception of religion which has led the Christian church astray, in all of its mani- fold branches, for centuries. To-day, as for so many years in the past, the church is laying all the emphasis of its teaching upon the life beyond the grave, and is thus neglecting the life upon this side of the grave. The church presents itself to men as a means of salvation from the temptations and sins of this world, and therefore of safe en- trance into the promised joys of the future world. The church is busy urging men to turn their thoughts away from the problems of this purely transient Hfe and to give themselves to preparation for that eternal life which is be- yond the grave. This being the traditional at- titude of the church toward this present world, it is easy to understand why it does not greatly concern itself with the regeneration of exist- 210 Function of the Church ing society. Why. should it so waste its time, and squander its energies? Other organisations may concern themselves with cleaning the streets of our cities — the church can think only of the golden streets of the New Jerusalem! Other organisations may be interested in providing short hours and adequate wages and decent conditions of labour for the men and women who toil in our factories and shops — but the church must think only of the souls of these men and women in the next world, regardless of what happens to their bodies in this world! Other societies may devote themselves to the emancipation of little boys and little girls from exhausting labour in coal mines and glass-works and cotton factories, — but the church can be interested only in bringing these children to Christ! Thinking of nothing but this other world and the problems which they imagine this other world to present, the priests of the church have forgotten this world and the problems which they know that it presents. And not only has this absorption in the prospects of another world with its resulting neglect of this present world, alienated the church from society, but it has had the corresponding effect of alienating society from the church. Says Prof. Jacks, in a remarkable article in the "Hibbert Journal," entitled "The Church and the World": By pressing this distinction, the church forces the world into a position where effective reprisals are Obstacles to Socialised Church 211 not only possible but certain. So far from maintain- ing her moral supremacy, the church by this theory invited a contest in which her whole position is seri- ously imperilled. ... If it chooses to stand apart, society will leave it in its sublime isolation and go on its own business in its own way. . . . The alienation from church life of so much that is good in modern ctdture, and so much that is earnest in every class, is the natural sequel to the traditional attitude of the church to the world. The church in her theory has stood aloof from the world. And now the world takes deadly revenge by maintaining the position assigned her, and standing aloof from the church. If the churches are ever to be socialised, there must be a complete abandonment of this " other- world " conception of religion. They must realise that, whether there is a future world or not, their busi- ness for the present is with this world ; and that dreams of what may be yonder must yield to recognition of what actually is here. (d) dogma In the third place, and somewhat analogous to the above, there is what Prof. Rauschenbusch well calls "the deflecting interest of dogma." In the early church, practical interests rather than theo- retical were of supreme concern. Since the second century, however, and especially since the great doctrinal controversies of the fourth, dogma has been regarded everywhere as constituting the 212 Function of the Church essence of Christianity. Right belief has been described as the sole condition of salvation in the "other worid"; and the church, being exclusively concerned with the task of getting people into this "other world," has felt that it must do nothing but teach this right belief. Hence the doctrinal disputes, the creeds, the councils, the persecutions — all to the exclusion of any remotest interest in the conditions of society. If a man could be persuaded to believe, what mattered it under what conditions of degradation and misery he lived in this temporary earthly abode? If a man held the "catholic faith," what mattered it if he were destroyed by poverty, devoured by disease, and oppressed by injustice? Beside the great problem of faith, — "which faith ex- cept every one do keep whole and imdefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly," to quote the Athanasian creed, — what mat- tered such little problems as slavery, the degradation of woman, physical disease, poverty, political tyranny, and industrial oppression? This dogmatic interest was bad enough in the ages of Catholic domination ; but a bad matter was only made worse by the Protestant Reformation. Under the fertilising influence of the doctrine of the right of private judgment, a hundred antago- nistic sects, setting forth a hundred diverse statements of theological belief, each one of which was described by its adherents as the sine qua non of salvation, sprang rapidly into being; and the Obstacles to Socialised Church 213 history of Protestantism became primarily the history of theological controversy. It was creed against creed, theologian against theologian, school against school, until theology and religion became practically synonymous terms. With such an idea of the duty of the church, and of the nature of the religious life, the social gospel is of course utterly incompatible. Well does Prof. Rauschen- busch declare: "The polemic bitterness and intol- erance engendered by the dogmatism of the church have been anti-social forces of the first importance. . . The personality of Jesus, which is the unceasing source of revolutionary moral power in Christianity, has been almost complete- ly obscured by the dogmatic Christ of the Church. " (e) sacred vs. secular As a fourth reason for the indefinite postpone, ment of the hope of a completely socialised church, must be named that astonishing delusion which has persuaded the church in all ages to assert that religion properly speaking has nothing to do with political, industrial, or social questions of any kind. This idea has its roots in the fallacious distinction which has always been made by the theological mind between sacred and secular, and which has consigned to the care of the church the one, and absolutely removed from its control — or even interest — the other. The church, it is argued, has 214 Function of the Church to do with spiritual matters and not with worldly matters. It has its sacred book — all others are pro- fane ! It has its holy day — all others are common ! It has its one definite field of sacred work — all others are secular! Assiduously preserving the Sabbath from desecration by open libraries or mu- seums or theatres, the church is indifferent to the profanation of the other six days in the week by criminal political transactions, scandalous business deals, and inhuman conditions of labour. Tireless in lifting up its voice in denunciation of failure to attend divine services or indifference to the creeds and sacraments, it is silent about underpaid and overworked women, the working of children to death in factories and mines, the monopoly of the necessities of life, the abomination of a protec- tive tariff, the social iniquity of the private owner- ship of public resources and utilities. The church, in spite of highly gratifying evidences of a real awakening in many directions, is still too much to-day what Theodore Parker found the church of his day to be — apart from the real experiences of men, and absorbed in the artificial problems of its own narrowly prescribed ecclesiastical life. Look [he said] at the churches of this city ; do they lead the Christian movements of the city — the peace movement, the temperance movement, the movement for the freedom of man, for education — the movement to make society more just, more wise, more good — the great religious movements of the times? Not at Obstacles to Socialised Church 215 all ! . . . What clergymen tell of the sins of Boston — of intemperance, of licentiousness? who of the ignor- ance of the people? who tells of the causes of poverty and thousand-handed crimes? who aims to apply Christianity to business, legislation, to all the nation's life? who of them lays bare our public sins as Christ of old ? To-day we have come to the point of seeing that religion, properly speaking, enters into every relation of human life. We understand that any- thing which affects the life, liberty, and happiness of the individual constitutes a religious problem. We know that any social condition which ruins a human body, wrecks a human mind, or corrupts a human soul, calls for the very vital interest of the church of God. But priest and layman will not yet have it so, in all too many churches! The typical church and the typical minister are still as much scandalised at the attempts of the church to deal with the problems of public life at first hand as Lord Melbourne was scandalised a cen- tury ago, when he chanced to hear a minister speak strong words of condemnation about some of the prevalent sins in the private lives of the men of that day, and is reported to have said : "Well, it has certainly come to a pretty pass, when the church presumes to interfere with the private life of the individual!" We have really come to the point to-day when we all agree that the church is very nearly concerned with every simplest virtue or 2i6 Function of the Church vice of private life — that it has a right to rebuke the sins of which men may be guilty in their pri- vate relations; and it is now high time that we came to agree also that what is true of private life is equally true of public life. For human life, properly speaking, cannot be divided into sacred and secular. A man's character cannot be sepa- rated into water-tight compartments, the one la- belled private and the other public ; his character, in the very nature of things, must be all of a single piece. In the highest sense of the word, all things are sacred; and every human relation, whether public or private in its outward seeming, a religious problem. Theodore Parker was right, when he asserted more than half a century ago — "I am a minister of religion, therefore I have not only preached on the private individual virtues, but likewise on the public social vir- tues, that are indispensable to the general welfare. And this work has brought me into direct relations with the chief social evils of our day." And Woodrow Wilson is right in this age, when he similarly declares — "The church in its teaching must contribute to the solu- tion of our bewildered social conditions. It is the duty of the church to supply what society is most eagerly looking for — standards of revo- lution!" We shall have a socialised church just as soon as the present religious organisa- tions realise this great truth — and not one moment sooner! Obstacles to Socialised Church 217 (f) class consciousness More serious than anything that we have yet considered as an obstacle in the way of the social- ised church is the lamentable fact that the church to-day, in the Protestant worid, is an institution dominated very largely by that section of society which is responsible for the social injustice of the present age. The men who are the creators of the conditions which constitute our modem social problems, or at least the beneficiaries of these con- ditions, are often the men who sit in the pews of the churches and pay the salaries of the ministers. Looking upon his congregation, the typical Pro- testant clergyman surveys not a cross-section of society, but only one little segment thereof — and that segment more often than not the very one which is identified with those "new varieties of sin," to quote Prof. Ross's famous phrase, which are to be distinguished from the old varieties of sin by the fact that they are public and not private in their nature. The minister to-day finds no difficulty in swinging his church into the fight against the liquor traffic, for the reason that the saloon keeper and the beer brewer do not usually go to chiu"ch ; but it is a different problem when he attempts to tell what he thinks about the employer of child labour, and sees that employer sitting right before him and listening to his words. Any minister can safely criticise the trades unions and denounce their violence, since the labouring man 2i8 Function of the Church is not very often a contributing member of the church ; but he finds himself confronted by a very different proposition when he desires to state his honest opinion of the Manufacturers' Association, which has devoted itself to the noble task of redu- cing the labouring men of America to serfdom, and finds that members of that Association are perhaps the heaviest contributors to his society. Say what we will, the church to-day, in all too many cases, is a class institution ; and the men and women who are responsible for the industrial evils which are besetting our country at this time, and are profit- ing by these evils, are more often than not the very ones who compose that class which is inside and not outside the organisation. Theodore Parker, who saw these issues more clearly than any man who ever stood in an American pulpit, saw this fact with absolute distinctness. "This class," he said, in his great sermon on the "Mer- cantile Class," controls the churches; hence, as a general rule, the clergy are on the side of power. They are uncon- sciously bought up — their speech paid for, or their silence. As a class did they ever denounce a public sin or a popular evil? ... I know that there are exceptions, and I will go far to do them honour, but I am speaking of the mass of the clergy. Christ said the priests of his time had made a den of thieves out of the house of God. Now they conform to the pub- lic sins and apologise for popular crime. The clergy answer the end they were bred for, paid for. Obstacles to Socialised Church 219 They have "a gospel for a class, not Christ's gos- pel for human kind. It is sad to say these things ! Would God they were not true! Look around you, and, if you can, come tell me they are false." Nor have the churches changed as much as they should have changed in the sixty years or more since Parker spoke these terrible words! Look around to-day, and see if they are not still all too true ! Said Mr. Lincoln Steffens, in a recent address before the Universalist ministers of Boston, ''You do not have to look for the sinners of our day, for they are in your pews every Sunday." Mr. Ray Stan- nard Baker, in that astonishing book of his entitled ''The Spiritual Unrest," which is a marvellous revelation of the church as a class institution, bears witness to the same facts. He tells us in specific detail that what Parker called the Mercantile Class in his day still dominates the Protestant churches; and therefore, he says, "They have no vision of social justice; they have no message for the common people." Said Dr. Woodrow Wilson: ' ' The besetting temptation of the church is always not to be democratic in its organisation, its sym- pathies, and its judgments. It ought to keep to that standard in which there is no difference between man and man! But we do not arrange our pews or our worship upon this basis. There- fore we lose the masses of the people." And again he said, in an utterance before the Princeton Alumni of Pittsburgh: "The Protestant churches are serving the classes and not the masses of the 220 Function of the Church people." And what minister has not blushed with shame at the sickening revelations given by Judge Ben Lindsey, in his recent book, "The Beast," as to the attitude of the churches of Colorado toward the social problems of that great state? No more holy battle for social justice was ever fought than that fought by Judge Lindsey against the "Beast" in the Colorado "Jungle"; and he bears testimony that the churches of God lent him practically no aid — in spite of certain splendid exceptions — because these churches were bound hand and foot to the business and political interests of the special social class which they represented and served. If anybody wants to know the full meaning of what is being said here about the modem church as a class institution, let him read this wonderful story of American civic life. Instance after in- stance is there given of churches and ministers lining up on the side of corrupt politics and inhu- man business, and joining the worst forces of the community to destroy the "children's judge." — The ministers [says Lindsey] are allowed to do what they can — and they do much — to palliate the hard- ships of poverty and rescue the victims of economic wrongs; but as soon as they attempt to attack the causes of some of the greatest hardships of poverty and attempt to alleviate the injustices of corporate greed, our masters speak. As long as the ministers are content to dip the water out of the tub into which the faucet is still running, they are encouraged. But as soon as they attempt to turn off the faucet — to Obstacles to Socialised Church 221 cure the cause instead of relieving the result — the strong hand of the system is laid upon them. How- can the churches have any vision of social justice and any message for the common people when the rulers of their congregations exist upon active social injus- tice to the common people? We must be free of the Beast in our congregations before our ministers can be free ! When the slaveholder sat in the pew, there was no abolitionist in the pulpit. Where the Beast is deacon, the minister is dumb! When our churches are truly democratic and not aristocratic — when they represent society and not the dominating business interests of one par- ticular class of society — when they are composed of people and not of "our best citizens" — when they emulate Jesus in having a gospel for human kind and not for one social class — when they have driven the Beast out of the sanctuary as Christ drove the money-changers out of the Temple — then and not before shall we have our socialised church ! CHAPTER VIII THE NEW CHURCH THESE are some of the reasons why the church, of which we have been speaking, will prob- ably remain for many years a dream rather than a reality. And yet, if anything is certain in this world, it is certain that this new church will some day come. The new theology which, as we have seen, is everywhere making effective inroads upon the old orthodoxy, is rapidly disintegrating those traditions of " other- worldliness " and "sacred vs, secular," which are to-day diverting the attention of the church from the real business of religion. The accumulating common- sense of humanity, to say nothing of the inevitable tendencies of our age away from competition and toward co-opera- tion, is revealing the folly of sectarian strife and rivalry, and making the question of church unity one of the livest issues of the hour. The permanent capture of the Christian church, with all of its unforgettable traditions of human brotherhood and equality, by any one social class, is simply inconceivable, and therefore the return of the alien- ated classes a certainty in the not distant future. And, most important of all, of course, is the utter 222 The New Church 223 passing of the philosophy of individualism in fav- our of the philosophy of social change, which makes the church's practical doctrine of salvation as obsolete and effete as the Ptolemaic theory of the universe. The transformation, for which we are looking, is bound to come ; or, if not — if the forces of reaction, ecclesiastical, theological, social, con- trary to all expectation and precedent, remain permanently triumphant — the church itself will disappear, and a new church, like unto that which we have described, will straightway rise up to take its place. There is no reason after all, in the nature of things, why a new religion, with a new church as its organised expression, should not appear, to embody the thought and realise the dream of advancing humanity. A stagnant Judaism was followed by Christianity — and, within Christian- ity itself, a reactionary Catholicism made inevi- table the advent of Protestantism. And why should not history repeat itself, if necessary? Why is a new Reformation impossible? Why is a third great branch of Christianity improbable? The religion of socialisation is to-day the realest thing in all the world; and if this reHgion cannot do its work within the existing church, we may be sure that it will do this work outside! For the work must and shall be done! And it is this work, and not at all the name by which it is known, which is the important thing. Well does Mr. Henry D, Lloyd, in his "Man, The Social Creator," pro- claim the coming of this new religion which, as 224 Function of the Church the agent of social change, is something more and better than the traditional Christianity of the past. "In the sense," he says, "in which Christ- ianity, though only a variation in an unceasing evolution, was a new religion, may that also be said to be a new religion on which man is now brooding. The new era is ushering itself in by a new religion, and that religion is not merely Christ- ianity but an expansion of it." And Mr. Lloyd describes what this new religion will do and mean in terms of its outward organised expression — the church. The new church, he says, will be a church of the deed as well as of the creed — a church that wiU not only preach Christ but do Christ — a church which will recognise no vested right of property in man except the right to love and be loved — a church which will declare that the difference in the death-rate between the classes and the masses is evidence of murder done for money — a church which will look upon idleness by the side of industry, wealth by the side of poverty, luxury by the side of want, health by the side of disease, as impious and profane in the highest degree, the real sins against the Holy Ghost — a church which will stop the manufacture of poor- houses because it will stop the manufacture of pov- erty — a church which will not let any man offer charity to those to whom he refuses justice — a church which will offer not even to the lowliest member of the com- munion of mankind crumbs from the table, but a seat at the table and a full meal three times a day every day — a, church which will persecute the heretics who The New Church . 225 give the highest bidder the best pews in the churches and the best chance in the courts — a church which will teach that the Ufe eternal is the Hfe we are living now — a church which will not let the poor give up all of this world on the unsecured promise of the rich to divide the next world — a church which will judge civilisation not by the six-million-dollar cathedral on Murray Hill but by the children in the back-alleys — a church which says that those who are to be brothers hereafter must be brothers here — a church which recognises nothing as love which does not bear justice as its fruit — a church which declares the sacred right to work to mean that he who works a full day shall live a full day, and that employment is a right not a charity — a church which will make every social wrong a moral wrong, and every moral wrong a legal wrong — ■ a church which will abolish the merchant prince and the factory corporation sooner than let them abolish the childhood of children — a church which will abolish charity and philanthropy, for these cannot be between brothers, and need not be where justice is — a church which will take the weak and despised out of the earthly Inferno of dirt and want and ignorance, to which they have been condemned by the oppressor — a church which will worship God through all of his sons made in his image, through a mediator. Mankind, which having suffered all and sinned all, can sympa- thise with all, and will carry all the weak and weary ones safe in its bosom — a church which will realise the vision of Carlyle of a Human Catholic Church. Here, and nothing less, is the new church, cap« tured and directed by the new social ideal ! It will 15 226 Function of the Church seek first to act and not to believe — to work and not to worship — to abolish social injustice and oppression, and not individual shortcoming. And lo! it will discover that, in acting, it is believing — in doing the will, it is knowing the doctrine; that in working, it is worshipping ; and that in redeem- ing society, it is most immediately and most ef- ficiently redeeming the individual. CHAPTER IX OBJECTIONS TO this social gospel of the new religion — that sin, like disease and poverty, must be over- come fundamentally through the transformation of the external conditions of the social environ- ment — there are certain objections which, to many minds, are unanswerable and therefore conclusive. These objections are endowed with all the sanctity of long tradition and supported by all the authority of centuries of unquestioned acceptance, and there- fore exert an altogether disproportionate influence in the world of human thought. One never enters upon the discussion of the social question in all of its many phases to-day without encountering these objections at the very start; and always are they introduced with all that air of finality which accompanies every reference to Newton's law of gravitation or Euclid's axioms of geometry. And yet, Uke many another hoary and venerable con- ception, these objections are at bottom nothing but superstitions; and, like most superstitions, they still survive in the average mind only because the average mind, by a wholly unconscious pro- cess, has taken them for granted and thus has 227_ 228 Function of the Church never gone to the trouble of thinking them through. It needs only a moment's serious thought, however, in the light of past experience and present know- ledge, to expose the fallacies of these classic doc- trines, and thus remove them once for all as real objections to our program of social change (a) human nature cannot be changed by law The objections to which I refer are two in number. In the first place, there is the familiar dogma, which, as expressed in the popular ver- nacular, reads — You cannot change human nature by law! You cannot transform character by fiat! You can introduce any arbitrary social system you please — you may bring in the Kingdom of God by legislation until the crack o' doom — but human nature is still human nature, and therefore your elaborate schemes of social reconstruction must go for nought, so far as actual results are concerned. Men under the system of yesterday are the same men under the system of to-morrow — and therefore the actual status of individual character and the actual measure of social progress remain about the same. Every Utopia ever established in the his- tory of mankind has inevitably failed because of this one fundamental truth. Ideal conditions have been established — perfect justice has been ordained — special privilege has been given to none and equal opportunity to all — and still the world has remained the same old world because the all- Objections 229 important factor of human nature has remained constant. The only way to achieve permanent progress is to deal with the human heart direct. The only way to make over the individual man — changing his selfishness into unselfishness, his greed into generosity, his love into hate — is by the old and well-tested process of mental, moral, and religious education. To begin the other way around, and to attempt to change the individual cell by changing the structure of the organism, is an utterly futile process. As one of the most brilliant exponents of philosophical individualism has put it — "The effort to reconstruct the charac- ter of men by a change of environment is contra- dicted by the history of the race. No jelly-fish was ever made vertebrate by putting on it a set of stays." The fallacy of this objection to our plan for the reconstruction of society as the first and essential step toward the reconstruction of the individual is so patent that it is almost unbelievable that people should go on repeating it as though it were an a priori condition of thought. The very refer- ence to the jelly-fish and the vertebrate embodies its own complete and perfect refutation. It is true, of course, that "no jelly-fish was ever made verte- brate by putting on it a set of stays," but it is also true that, in the due course of biological evolution, the jelly-fish did become a vertebrate, and achieved this distinction, not by any impulse of its own inner spirit, and not by any course of training from with- 230 Function of the Church out such as enables an elephant to stand on his head, but only by that unconscious process of adaptation to the changing environment which Darwin and his successors, as we have seen, have taught us is the sole condition of survival! And what is true here of the jelly-fish is equally true also of the human being. So far from the history of the race contradicting "the effort to reconstruct the character of men by a change of environment," does it not affirm this very thing? "The most superficial knowledge of history," says Mr. Edmond Kelley, in his "Twentieth Century Socialism," "will suffice to demonstrate the untruth of the maxim that human nature cannot be changed by law. Human nature has already been profoimdly changed by law — by the insti- tution of marriage, by public education, by pro- perty." Who can tell, indeed, what changes have been wrought in the character of men's minds and hearts and souls through the operation of those changes which have first been wrought in insti- tutions by peaceful legal enactment or by violent revolutionary convulsion? Who can estimate what it has meant to human nature to abolish chattel slavery, to emancipate womankind from social and industrial dependence, to guarantee the right of private property and private contract, to protect the family and the home, to displace monarchy with democracy, and ecclesiastical authority with religious liberty ; and who can simi- larly estimate what it would mean to human nature Objections 231 to destroy the liquor traffic, to socialise capital, to abolish industrial slavery, and to establish international peace? Why indeed should human- ity ever waste its time and strength, to say nothing of its blood and treasure, in trying to accomplish any such reforms as these, if human nature remains absolutely unchanged in the process? What dif- ference does it make if we have chattel slavery or not, if masters and slaves are the same kind of individuals under conditions of freedom as under conditions of bondage? Why should we care whether a woman is a plaything in a Turkish harem or an honoured wife and mother in an Anglo-Saxon home, if her soul is the same in the one place as in the other? Why should millions of men have died upon the battle-field and in the dungeon and on the gibbet for the cause of political liberty — why should we have Puritan Revolutions and French Revolutions and American Revolutions, — why should we regard Hamptons and Pyms, Mirabeaus and Dantons, Washingtons and Jeffersons, as anything more than fools and simpletons — if human character is absolutely unaffected by the transformation from oppression to freedom? Why should Robert Owen have agonised over the con- dition of English working-men, and the Earl of Shaftesbury have laboured early and late for the passage of his Factory Acts, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning have raised "the bitter cry of the children," if the great masses of England's working population were in the same condition morally 232 Function of the Church and spiritually before the reforms as after? Why- should we be striving to-day for the conquest of the liquor traffic, the abolition of Mormon poly- gamy, the democratising of conditions of labour, the banishment of war, if these things mean nothing to the individual soul? Why have any social question? Why bother about external reforms of any kind? Why not accept the insti- tutions of Mohammedanism as well as those of Christianity, the government of Russia as well as that of America, the conditions of living of the tenth century as well as those of the twentieth century? These questions answer themselves, do they not? We all agree that the one important thing in human life is the welfare and integrity of the individual soul. And men have laboured in all ages to reconstruct the institutions of society, which constitute the external environment of the soul, because they have known, whether they have confessed it or not, that there is the closest possible relation between the two. It is true that the passing of a law or the rebuilding of an insti- tution leaves the individuals concerned absolutely unchanged in essence. The pig is still a pig, after the sty has been cleansed; and the man is still a man after the tenement in which he lives has been remodelled in accordance with the new law. But who ever said that he would be anything else than a man? Who ever prophesied that he would become transformed into an angel of heaven? He is still a man, of course — but he has now the possi- Objections 233 bility of being a better man, a stronger man, a happier man, a more efficient man; and what is this but the very ''reconstruction of character" that we are after — the transformation of the jelly- fish into the vertebrate?^ And it is just this consideration which gives us the real answer to this objection that character cannot be changed by the transformation of the environment. Who wants to change human na- ture, after all? Have we not already seen that human nature is essentially divine, and therefore needs not a change but a chance? The whole idea that human nature needs to be changed from what it now is into something that it is not but ought to be, is a part of that whole traditional conception of a depraved and lost human nature which the world has long since cast aside. Human nature is all right as it is ! It is normally sound and clean and strong — capable in its original and unaltered state of infinite possibilities of development. The trouble is not with the soul but with the environ- ment of the soul. The trouble is that this soul is "cribbed, cabined, and confined" — degraded and oppressed and persecuted — used, abused, and exploited — denied that freedom of opportunity without which physical, mental, and moral ab- normality are the inevitable result. What we need therefore is not to transform human nature but to transplant it. When the botanist sees that the » See the convincing treatment of this objection in Norman Angell's recent book, "The Great Illusion." 234 Function of the Church rose-bush in his damp, dark cellar is scraggly and drooping and withered, he may think that the trouble is with the plant itself, and that it is neces- sary to change it in some miraculous way which is unknown to the ways of science. But the real botanist will understand clearly enough that the trouble is not with the plant but with the cellar; and therefore he will seek to revive it by changing its environment. He takes it out into the open air — he puts its roots deep down into the warm, fresh soil — he exposes it freely to the sunshine and the rain. And, lo! before a week has passed, the bush has become strong and tall and beautiful! The plant is the same plant that it has always been. No change has been accomplished what- soever in any slightest fibre of its being. But it has been given a fair chance to fulfil all of its original latent possibilities by being placed in an environment which was a help and not a hindrance. And exactly the same thing is true of human nature ! When we attempt to pass progressive legis- lation for the reform of social conditions, and we are met with the challenge that we cannot change human nature by law, we need only to reply that the challenge is quite beside the point. Human nature needs no change, and nobody is trying to change it. It needs only a chance — a chance to grow and thrive and blossom — a chance to be the thing that God intended it to be — and it is just this outward chance, and not at all the supposi- titious inward change, which we are seeking in our Objections 235 legislation. If men are to be men, they must be freed from slavery of every kind — they must be rescued from conditions of life and labour which are intolerable because inhuman — they must be protected from conditions which make ill-health, ignorance, poverty, and immorality simply inevi- table — they must be given an environment, in a word, which will strengthen and not break the body, expand and not repress the mind, uphold and not ruin the soul. They must be given the chance that the flower has, when it is given rain and sun- shine and fresh air. And we can do this only by changing laws and institutions ! We cannot legis- late morality, but we can legislate conditions that foster morality. We cannot enact virtue by pass- ing laws, but we can enact conditions which make virtue an infinitely easier and more natural thing than vice. We cannot prevent men from yielding to temptation by legislative action, but we can by legislative action remove all temptation from them. We cannot by any law or code or sign, any legislative measure or executive proclamation or judicial decision, redeem a lost soul, but we can by one or all of these methods prevent that soul from becoming lost in the beginning. It is true that human nature can be changed in the sense that it can be degraded, perverted, wrecked, de- stroyed by unfavourable environment. And it is to prevent this calamity, and to keep human nature just what it is in its normal and imspoiled condi- tion, that we must seek its protection and emanci- 236 Function of the Church pation through social reconstruction. Men are as good as society permits them to be. Men are as bad as society forces them to be. Here is the final and perfect answer to this objection! (b) how change society except through the influence of good men The second objection to our gospel of social change is as familiar and venerable as the first. I refer to the doctrine that society cannot be reformed except through the influence of good men, and these good men can be produced only by the long-tested process of moral and religious edu- cation. It may be true, as Dean Freemantle puts it, that "the world is the subject of redemption"; but it is also true that this task of redemption can be accomplished only by individual men who see the necessity of social change and are unselfish enough to give "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour" to its fulfilment. How are you going to get the work of social reconstruction done, it is asked, if not by individual men who have the social vision; and how are you going to get these men in the first place, if they are not provided by the church through the old method of salvation or character-building? The only possible way to proceed, in other words, is to redeem this individual and then that individual and then the other individual, and then look to these redeemed individuals to remake the organisation of society. Objections 237 To begin the other way around — to undertake to transform society first, and then, through the influence of the changed environment, to expect the transformation of the individual, — is simply to put the cart before the horse. However true it may be that the individual is essentially a social creature and that his ultimate salvation must be found in the redemption of the social organism, it is equally true that man is unique among all crea- tures, as we have seen, in his abihty to change his environment of his own initiative and according to his own desires, and therefore must be regarded as a social agent as well as a social victim. Society must be changed, no doubt ; and this change will im- questionably do much to react upon the condition and character of the individual. But it is this same individual, all the same, who must serve as the agent of the change desired; and not one step can be taken in the carr>-ing out of the program of social reconstruction, tmtil that agent has been provided. Applied to the church, this conception means that any such identification of rehgion and the social question as that for which we have been arguing all along is irrational and dangerous. The church as an institution should have no connection whatsoever with any movements of social reform, and should not attempt of itself to influence the trend of social development. Its business begins and ends with the individual men and women who compose its congregations and make up its stand- 238 Function of the Church ing membership. It must take these men and women and purge their souls of all vanity and self- seeking, banish from their minds all worldly desires and ambitions, fill their hearts with sympathy and compassion and abiding good-will — plant within each one of them those ideals of truth and right- eousness and love, which make up the being of God in so far as we understand that being, and energise the spirit of each into the service of these ideals. It must take each individual, in a word, and persuade him to live, in association with men, the life of God. Then, having thus animated these individuals with the divine spirit of con- secration, it can send them out into the world and safely trust them to do as individuals whatever is necessary for the redemption of the world. It is the business of the church, in other words, to train good men. These provided, the good society will follow at once as the work of their hands. The churches, that is, cannot them- selves act as organised agencies of social reform. They must be content with awakening the social conscience in the men and women who comprise their membership, and then send them forth as individuals to co-operate with similarly inspired individuals for the redemption of the world. "The mission of the church," says Prof. Rauschenbusch, interpreting this attitude, with which of course he most heartily disagrees, "Is to im.plant the divine life in the souls of men, and from these regenerated individuals the forces of righteousness will silently Objections 239 radiate, and evil customs and institutions will melt away without any propaganda." Now it must be recognised at once that this objection, if sound, is absolutely fatal to the social interpretation of religion which has been set forth in this book. In describing the individual as the ultimate influence in the development of humanity, it brings us straight back to the traditional indi- vidualism which has characterised Christianity almost from the very beginning, and thus contro- verts everything for which we have been contend- ing. But it must also be recognised at once that this objection can have no standing whatsoever except upon the basis of the old hypothesis of a depraved and lost humanity. To say that society can be redeemed only through the agency of the redeemed individual is to assume that men are naturally bad, and that they must be individually converted or educated before they can be trusted to serve the cause of human betterment with unself- ish consecration. It is to assume, in other words, that there is no goodness in the world for the doing of the work of social reconstruction, except what can be manufactured by the schools and churches. It is here that the familiar figure of the church as a "power-house" is so often used. According to this idea, there is no moral energy in the world for the doing of any social task; and therefore we set up the church, as the electric engineer sets up his dynamo, to generate the energy which we must have for the accomplishment of our work. 240 Function of the Church This idea, however, that humanity is essentially bad, and that there is no natural store of moral energy in the human heart which can be applied to the task of social salvation, is a supposition, as we have seen, which is utterly discredited. The normal man, it should never be forgotten, is good and not bad; and ready therefore at any time, if only he be given the opportunity and shown the way, to serve the highest interests of hiimanity. There is no need of manufacturing individuals, if I may use the phrase, to serve as agents for the accomplishment of the social changes which we desire. These individuals, — brave, strong, patient, long-suffering, self-sacrificing by right of birth — are already here, and all they need is to be sum- moned and directed. The amoimt of moral energy latent in the unspoiled human heart is beyond all human calculation. Else why the world-shaking movements which have arisen spontaneously without the leadership of church or state — nay, more often than not, in open defiance of these insti- tutions — and swept away in one mad surge of revolution the mightiest obstacles in the path of progress? Why the deeds of heroism and conse- cration which are the commonest events of daily life? Why the visions and dreams of myriad human souls, in every age and nation, who have been confined within the limits of no church, been obedient to the laws of no state, and been guided by the authority of no leader? In the face of such facts as these, why talk about the necessity of Objections 241 making over individual men and women to serve as the agents of social change? Why declare that it is the church's business to make the individual religious, and then trust that individual to recon- struct the social fabric? The task of the church, says Prof. Patten, in a striking passage, ''is not to make men religious, but to make men normal." They are already religious just as they are, in their natural, imspoiled state; and if religion seems to have disappeared from, or never to have appeared at all in, their souls, it is only because the oppres- sions of society have made them abnormal to just that extent. From the standpoint of this interpretation of human nature, this objection to our description of the church as itself the agent of social recon- struction, wholly fails. We do not need to redeem the individual to serve as the church's agent — this individual is already here ready to be used! We do not need to regard the church as a "power- house" generating moral energy — this energy is already here, waiting to be directed into the chan- nels of social service. What we must ask of the church is not that it shall redeem the individual, but that it shall take the individual just as he is and organise him with his fellows for efficient work — not that it shall generate moral power, but that it shall direct this moral power already gene- rated. And it is just this business of using the individual as contrasted with redeeming him — of directing moral energy as contrasted with generat- id 242 Function of the Church ing it — that the church has done in those two or three notable instances when it has not been led al- together astray upon strange and unfamiliar paths, but has been really serviceable to humanity. How is it possible for any sane man, in the light of certain remarkable episodes in Christian history, to con- tend that the church has never itself acted as an organised agency of social reform? The supreme task of the church, as we have seen, has always been the task of redeeming or educating the indi- vidual soul, quite apart from any social relations or entanglements ; and this so well-nigh exclusively that Prof. Rauschenbusch can seriously ask the question, "Why has the church never entered upon the task of social reconstruction?" But on two or three occasions, through some inevitable and per- haps imconscious extension of the work of indi- vidual salvation to that of social salvation, the church has aroused itself, and shown its possi- bilities of achievement in the field of social action. What was the movement of monasticism, for example, but a social movement? — not an attempt to redeem the world, to be sure, but certainly an attempt to create ab initio a new world for the rescue of humanity. What was the movement of the crusades but a great social endeavour to con- quer the world for Christ? — and when the church preached the crusades what was it doing but becoming itself an agent of social reconstruction? What is the great movement of foreign missions, especially in its more recent developments, but a Objections 243 direct movement for the reconstruction of foreign civilisations after the pattern of Christian society? At bottom, of course, there was present here the ever-present motive of individual redemption, but the social motive was not and never could be absent from such imdertakings. In such instances as these, we see the church not only generating spiritual energy in the individual heart, but actu- ally directing the line of action of this energy. And it is this work of directing which I have in mind, as I need not now point out, when I speak of the church as an active organised agent of social reform. What the church has unconsciously been doing in such tremendous movements as these of monasticism, the crusades, and foreign missions, it should now do consciously and deliberately along the lines of direct social reconstruction. Let the church attempt to build up a perfect social order in the world, instead of outside the world, as in the case of monasticism! Let the church preach a great world-wide crusade against industrial feud- alism, special privilege, poverty, — in a word, eco- nomic infidelity, as it preached centuries ago a dozen or more crusades against Mohammedan infidelity! Let the church undertake to banish child-labour, sweat-shops, tuberculosis tenements, the wage system, machine politics, the tariff, in our own land, as it undertakes to banish cannibalism, polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, subjection of women, by foreign missions in lands across the seas! Indeed, not to ask too much, let the church 244 Function of the Church as an active organisation grapple with every social ill, as it has already learned to grapple with those few social ills wherein the consequences to the individual are peculiarly conspicuous. The church, for example, has never declined within recent years to enter the fight against the liquor traffic on the ground that work of this kind must be left to the individual whom the church has instructed and inspired. On the contrary, in this stupendous combat against one of the most insidi- ous of all the social evils of modem times, the church has of late been ''foremost in the fight," whatever its shortcomings in other directions. It has always inspired its members to wage this warfare outside the church as individuals; but it has realised also that the church must act as a church — and right nobly has it done so ! The same thing is true of the gambling iniquity. Here also the church has never been afraid to act as itself an agent of reform, and has steadfastly refused to leave the fight to such earnest and con- secrated individuals as might care to enter the lists. The last great battle against this social abomination was fought in New York State, imder the leadership of Governor Charles E. Hughes; and the Governor himself bore public testimony to the fact that he could not have won his fight had not the church upheld his arms. And by this he meant the church in its organised capacity, and not at all the individual members of the church. This is what is meant by the social function of Objections 245 the church — that the church shall enter into every political, industrial, and social problem as it entered into these few, and not fall back upon the miser- able subterfuge of relying upon the individual. Except for such isolated instances as these which I have named, the church as a church has confined its activities almost exclusively to works of charity or relief, and never extended them to the more fundamental works of justice or prevention. It will give money as an organisation to philanthropic agencies for the amelioration of the individual consequences of poverty, but it will not throw down the gage of battle to the industrial system which makes poverty as inevitable as the apple blossoms in the springtime. It will send little children out of the hot slums to the fresh-air farms, or give them the use of its buildings for vacation schools, but it will not assail the unjust system of municipal taxation and private owner- ship of land and transportation facilities which create the slum conditions of congested popula- tions. It will give food to the hungry and cloth- ing to the naked, but it will not abolish the monopolies and special privileges, the protective tariffs and capitalistic industries, the unemploy- ment, the industrial accidents, the long hours and intolerable conditions of labour which create more hunger and nakedness in a day than can be sat- isfied in a year. The church has no difficulty in acting as an organised agency of social reform, so long as the reform is superficial and therefore 246 Function of the Church means only charity. It is only when the reform is fundamental and therefore means justice, that it withdraws and talks about inspiring its individual members to go out and work! It is noticeable also that such social ills as are really assailed by the church in its organised capacity — the liquor traffic, gambling, the social evil, etc. — are always those ills which affect the financial interests and the moral standing of some other class of the population than that represented in the actual membership of the church. The church can pitch into the brewers and the saloon- keepers, as we have already pointed out, since these men seldom rent pews or sit in them on Sun- day morning — and when they did do so, more than they do now, the chiu-ch was very frequently a reluctant antagonist of the evil!'' The church can assail the race-track "toots" and the gambling fraternity with an easy conscience, as these gentry never sit upon boards of trustees or help pay off deficits. But when we come to certain other great and much more fundamental reforms, then it is straightway a different proposition! vSuppose we call upon the church to take up the fight for a read- justment of municipal taxation upon a basis of land values and the unearned increment! That is of course impossible — for is not Mr. Many-Acres one of "our most prominent men," and one of the most liberal contributors to the minister's salary! ' See the famous John Pierpont episode in the history of Boston Unitarianism. Objections 247 Or suppose we summon the church to put itself in dead earnest behind the battle for the abolition of child-labour! Here again, impossible — for Mr. Child- Killer, who owns the great glass factory in New Jersey, is one of "our trustees," and Mrs. Stocks, the president of "our ladies' society," has all her money invested in southern cotton mills! Or suppose that we declare to-day that the protec- tive tariff is a moral issue, and that the church should fight it as "the abomination of desolation." What then would happen to those churches whose supporters are the beneficiaries of a customs tax on the necessities of life? Mr. Worldly- Wiseman, who is the "Richard Yea-and-Nay" of many churches, is inclined to draw the line rather tight in these days; and when there comes up the ques- tion of any fundamental reform, which strikes straight to the heart of a crying social injustice and inevitably threatens to disturb some vested inter- ests, lower some stock values and diminish some swollen and tainted fortunes, the church as a church is "called off," and we get some pretty prattle about the individual members of chiirches and their duty to society ! The fact of the matter is, the more we study the history of organised Christianity and see the atti- tude which the church has consistently assumed toward the monstrous social iniquities of all eras, from the feudalism of the Middle Ages to the American chattel slavery of the nineteenth cen- tury and the world-wide industrial slavery of the 248 Function of the Church twentieth, the more we are forced to recognise the essential truth of Prof. Rauschenbusch's sig- nificant statement that this theory, that social change must proceed from the radiation of "good- ness from our regenerate souls," "was devised to put the best face on an uncomfortable fact. It is a fact that there has been a startling absence of any thorough and far-going determination or effort to transform and Christianise the social life of humanity. But that lack has not been due to the wise self-restraint of the church, which knew a better way." The moral energy necessary for the accomplishment of these reforms has always been ready and waiting in the hearts of men for the sum- mons and direction of the church. But ordinarily, as we have seen, the church has been interested in other things ; and whenever it has been aroused to the task of social salvation and has attempted to direct the latent energies of men to this end, it has been careful, from motives far from worthy, to direct these energies into "safe and sane" chan- nels. And itself ashamed of its betrayal of the Master, it has devised this attractive but not altogether plausible theory of the responsibility of the individual. What is fitting work for the Christian individual is fitting work for Christian individuals organised — which means the church! Nor can the church much longer escape this inevi- table corollary from its own proposition. Both these familiar and venerable objections to the socialisation of the church must be put aside Objections 249 as wholly fallacious. Both have their origin in the theory of a depraved and fallen humanity, and both therefore disappear before the doctrine of the essential divinity of the soul. If man is nor- mally good, then it follows that "sin has no exist- ence apart from the misery that bad conditions create," as Prof. Patten asserts; and this being the case, the church must make it its supreme busi- ness to banish these conditions as the first step toward the banishment of sin itself. This con- clusion is inevitable — and no theory that human nature cannot be changed by law, or that the indi- vidual must himself be the agent of reform, can stand for an instant in the way of its ultimate acceptance. CHAPTER X CONCLUSION (a) summary of the argument THE course of our argument must by now be clear. It is taken for granted at the outset that the distinctive work of the church is the sal- vation of the individual, to use the familiar theo- logical phrase — the making of the individual man or woman to be perfect after the likeness of Al- mighty God. Interpreting the individual as an iso- lated personal entity, having no essential relations with the social organism, the church has always undertaken to achieve its end by exerting its redemptive influence directly upon the individual soul, without any regard whatsoever for its physi- cal and social environment ; and thus have resulted the Catholic doctrine of confession, the Protestant doctrine of conversion, and the Liberal doctrine of moral education. To-day, however, there has come a new interpretation of the individual which has achieved a revolution in our thought and must eventually of course achieve a revolution in all of our methods and ideals of practical endeavour. Partly because of the teachings of the evolutionary 250 Conclusion 251 science and philosophy of our time, and partly because of the increasing complexity of the fabric of our modem civiHsation, we have come to recog- nise clearly to-day, what had been only dimly seen before by a comparatively few minds, that the individual at bottom is a social creature and must be understood and influenced only from the social point of view. The members live only as the body itself lives. The parts mean nothing save as they are parts of a whole. Which means, in other words, that the individual realises his individuality only as he lives in organised association with his fellows, and is thus dependent upon what we know as society. This revelation of the essentially social character of the individual has meant, of course, a revolution in all of our practical activities affecting the lives of men and women. It has given us a new medi- cine, a new philanthropy, a new education, a new criminology — the one common feature of them all being the recognition of the ultimate social cause of most individual abnormality, whether it be disease, poverty, ignorance, or crime; and of the necessity of finding the cure of this abnormality not in the transformation of the individual but in the reconstruction of society. It is this sudden change in viewpoint, from the individual to society, which has raised the social question; and it is the wide-spread realisation of the significance of this change, which has made our age, as Prof. Peabody has pointed out, "the age of the social question." 252 Function of the Church Now what is true of every other field of human endeavour, is true also, of course, of religion. With our new understanding of the social nature of the individual life, we find that sin, like disease and poverty, can no longer be explained upon the basis of individual abnormality, which has found its traditional and characteristic expression in the doctrine of the depravity of human nature. On the contrary, we know that human nature is essen- tially good and not bad ; and that the basic causes of its sins are to be found not in the soul but in the social environment of the soul. If the individual is to be saved, therefore, it is with this environment — that is, social conditions — that religion must directly deal ; and this means that the church, like the hospital and the charity society, — the minister, like the physician and the philanthropist, — must be first and foremost active agents of social reform. This of course means a church almost wholly different from anything that Christendom has ever seen, but not a church wholly different from that conceived by the mind of Christ. If anything is evident in the life of Jesus, it is that, from his very desire to emancipate humanity, he found it necessary to become a reformer of society, and is thus understood only as he is seen in his distinctive role as a social revolutionist; and if anything is evident in the history of Christianity, it is that the church was diverted from this original spirit of the Master by theological preconceptions and historic influences which were utterly foreign to Conclusion 253 the movement. In entering upon the work of social reform, therefore, as the essential step in the performance of its distinctive work of saving the individual to the normal standards of existence, the church, so far from betraying its mission, is in reality only feeling once again that initial social impulse, by which it was dominated for a few years in the beginning, and thus only yielding once again to the perfect mastery of Christ. (b) the final outcome— the banishment of sin —A PERFECTED HUMANITY— THE KINGDOM OF GOD And what shall we say as to "the conclusion of the whole matter?" The natural conclusion would seem to be that, with the transformation of social conditions from the prevailing injustice of the present to the ideal justice of the future, sin will practically disappear. Nor would I avoid this sweeping and perhaps startling generaHsation. "Sin," says Dr. Lyman Abbott, "is a disease." Now physical disease, we are being told by our medical experts to-day, can be annihilated through the transformation of the environment. And I have already pointed out that the physicians are proving this wonderful affirmation in the case of such frightful scourges as cholera, yellow-fever, typhoid-fever, and lastly tuberculosis. In other words— let us have the kind of world that we ought to have, and disease will forthwith disappear! And if this be true of 254 Function of the Church physical disease, it ought also to be true of all other kinds of disease. It is because poverty has suddenly come to be recognised as in its essential nature fundamentally a disease, that we know to-day that its further continuance is inexcusable. "Poverty," says Dr. Devine, to quote his familiar statement once again, "like tuberculosis, is pre- ventable and curable." And it is because sin must also be regarded now as such a disease, that the similar possibility of its annihilation is disclosed. A perfect social environment, that is, should pro- duce — or rather permit — a normal manhood; and a normal manhood should mean health and not disease, virtue and not vice! That this hope is not wholly chimerical is shown by the sober reflec- tion of such a man as Prof. Patten. He does not shrink for an instant from the logical conclusion which must be drawn from this thesis, "Sin is misery, misery is poverty, and the antidote of poverty is income" — a thesis based upon the hypothesis, as we have seen, that "man is good and nature perfect." Conceiving of the coming of a new and better society to replace the present one, which shall be "dominantly normal in its attributes," he states his belief that the result will be the production of a normal man who will be good by an almost instinctive process. Certain at least it is, according to his mind, that character, — virtue, — "the good life," — "the new birth," — will not have "to be worked for," as under the old order of thought, but will "come of itself." "To Conclusion 255 make men normal," he says, " is to start a train that leads to religious awakening. . . . We can plough the land, but the fruit comes in its own way." Nor is this supposition altogether new. For it is now more than two decades ago that Herbert Spencer announced it as his belief that the time would come when the voice of conscience would no longer be heard within the human heart, since the performance of duty would become as instinc- tive as breathing, and virtue as a consequence automatic ! The logical conclusion of our thesis, therefore, is the automatic redemption of the individual soul through the deliberate reconstruction of the social organism. And yet it is doubtful if logic is any sounder here than elsewhere in actual human living. For when all things have been said and done, we must never forget, what has been duly emphasised above, that, in addition to the factor of the social environment, there enter into the problem of all human destiny, the two ever-con- stant factors of heredity and the will. Heredity can be dismissed from further consideration, as only the factor of environment passed along to later generations. But the factor of the will remains as something wholly distinct. So long as a man is a man and not merely a jelly-fish, he will always be able to refuse to give obedience to those laws of cleanliness and temperance and self- restraint, which can alone insure the banishment of all disease from a perfect natural environment. 256 Function of the Church So long as a man is a man, he will always be able to refuse to practise those virtues of industry, thrift, sobriety, perseverance, which can alone insure the absolute disappearance of poverty, even from an ideally just social order. And in the same way, so long as a man is a man, he will always be able to yield to the temptations which so easily beset him and thus make sin an ever-present reality even in the Kingdom of God itself. Even the most sanguine of modem physicians does not dare to hope for the elimination of more than 90% of all existing disease. Even the most radical of modern social workers still reserves a measure of poverty as the result of individual frailty. And in the same way, we must conceive of sin as still existent to some extent, whatever the outward conditions of the social organism. ^ In other words, just as the problem of the free negro remained after the prob- lem of the enslaved negro had been solved, so will the problem of the emancipated soul still remain after social justice has everywhere been established. To assert anything else would be to interpret man not at all as a son of God, endowed with all the divine powers of the free will, but a mere piece of automatic mechanism. But if the absolute banishment of sin cannot be conceived of as the practical result of systematic social reconstruction, the banishment of sin as a ' " Until the hearts of men are changed, we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the social evil." — "Report of Chicago Vice Commission," p. 27. Conclusion 257 problem can and must be so conceived. In a well-ordered society, says Dr. Robinson, the 10% of unavoidable disease consequent upon individ- ual weakness and excess would not be even noticeable; and, as a problem of human life, would wholly disappear. In a similarly well- ordered society, says Miss Brandt, poverty would be reduced to a minimum so small as to become a negligible factor in the problem of the race. And exactly the same thing is true of sin! Granted that a justly organised social system would pro- duce the normal man, and that the impulses of the normal man are naturally good and not bad, — and the amount of actual sin remaining as the result of the action of the perverse and obstinate and distorted will would not be a subject of any serious concern. We can never conceive of a time perhaps when the physician will not have to heal disease, the charity-worker relieve poverty, and the minister train the will, in certain isolated individual cases; but we can conceive of a time when these cases would be so comparatively few, and the task under normal social conditions there- fore so comparatively light, that the problem in each case as a problem would rightly be said to have vanished altogether. "The conclusion of the whole matter," there- fore, is that the social factor is the essential factor in the problem of individual redemption. With this unsolved, nothing else will for a single moment avail. With this conquered, everything else is 17 258 Function of the Church easy. This is the strategic point to be assailed to-day, if we hope ever to win the fight for God. This is the "nearest duty," as Carlyle put it, if we hope ever to achieve our end. For in general terms we may safely assert, that, with the estab- lishment of the Kingdom of God upon the earth, the problem of the individual soul will once for all be solved — or at least be possible of solution ! And is not this what Jesus, with his "revolutionary consciousness," may have had in mind, when he said to his disciples and followers, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all things else will be added unto you." APPENDIX (a selected list of books on the general subject OF the church and the social question) "The modem emphasis upon the social aspects of religion may be said to be first clearly expressed in Prof, Seeley's 'Ecce Homo/ 1867. The same note was struck in the Bampton Lectures of Canon Free- mantle, 'The World as the Subject of Redemption,* 1885, an historical survey of much originality and power. Less academic, but rich in spiritual insight, were the Bohlen Lectures of Phillips Brooks, 'The Influence of Jesus,' 1879, Chapter IL, 'The Influence of Jesus in the Social Life of Man.* To these evi- dences of Christian teaching applied to social life may be added, out of many titles : Abbott, ' Christianity and Social Problems,' 1897; Fairbairn, 'Religion in History and Modem Life,' 1894; Gladden, 'Applied Christian- ity,' 1886; Ely, 'Social Aspects of Christianity,' 1889; Gore, 'The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount,' 'Econ. Rev.,' April, 1892; Bosanquet, 'The Civilisation of Christendom,' 1893; Hodges, 'Faith and Social Service,' 1896." — Francis G. Peabody, in "A Guide to Reading in Social Ethics and Allied Subjects," published by Harvard University, 1910, page 216. To this list of early utterances upon the subject should be added many of the sermons and addresses 259 26o Appendix of Theodore Parker, who stands as the chief of all American preachers to understand the significance of socialised religion. See especially the two volumes in the Centenary Edition of Parker's Works, published by the American Unitarian Association, 1910, entitled "Social Classes in a Republic" and "Sins and Safe- guards of Society." Among the more important of the great flood of books upon the subject are the following : Abbott, Lyman — " Social Questions and Jesus." "The Spirit of Democracy." Baker, Ray Stannard — "The Spiritual Unrest." Balmforth, Ramsden — "The New Reformation." Brown, Charles Reynolds — "The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit" Bruce, William R. — "The Social Aspects of Chris- tian MoraHty." Cairns, D. S. — "Christianity and the Modem World." Campbell, Reginald J.—" The New Theology." "Christianity and the Social Order." Chadwick, William E.— "The Social Teaching of St. Paul." "Social Relationships in the Light of Christianity." Coleman, James M. — "Social Ethics." Commons, John R. — "Social Reform and the Church." Cone, Orello — "Rich and Poor in the New Testa- ment." Crafts, Wilbur F. — " Practical Christian Sociology." Appendix 261 Crapsey, Algernon S. — " Politics and Religion." Crawford, William H.— "The Church and the Slums." Cunningham, W. — "Christianity and Social Ques- tions." Davidson, Morrison — "That Great Lying Church." Earp, Edwin L. — "Social Aspects of Religious Institutions." Gladden, Washington— " The New Idolatry." "Social Salvation." "Tools and the Man." "Christianity and Social- ism." "The Church and Modem Life." Haggard, Rider — "Regeneration." Hall, Thomas C. — "Social Meaning of Modem Religious Movements in England." Harnack, Adolf— "What is Christianity?" "The Social Gospel." Haw, George (Editor) — "Christianity and the Working.Classes." Heath, Richard— " The Captive City of God." Heermance, Edgar L. — "Democracy in the Church." Henderson, Charles R. — " Chalmers's Christian and Civic Economy." "Social Duties from the Christian Point of View." Herron, George D. — "The Christian Society." Hocking, Silas — " Democratic Christianity." 262 Appendix Hodges and Reichert — "The Administration of an Institutional Church." Holland, Robert A. — "The Church of the World." Hughes, Hugh Price — "Social Christianity." Hyde, William De Witte—" Outlines of Social Theology." Jenks, Jeremiah — "Political and Social Significance of the Life and Teaching of Jesus." Judson, Edward — "The Institutional Church." Kaufmann, Moritz — "Christian Socialism." Kennedy, Charles Rann — "The Servant in the House." (A Drama.) King, H. C. — "Theology and the Social Conscious- ness." Leighton, Joseph A. — "Jesus Christ and the Civi- lisation of To-day," Loomis, S. L. — "Modern Cities and their Religious Problems." Macfarland, Charles S. — "The Christian Ministry and the Social Order." McGinley, Anna A.—" The Profit of Love." Mathews, Shailer — "The Social Teaching of Jesus." "The Social Gospel." "The Gospel and the Modem Man." "The Church and the Changing Order." Mead, G. W. — "Modem Methods in Church Work." Ming, John J. — "The Characteristics of the Re- ligion of Modern Socialism." Appendix 263 Nash, H. S. — "The Genesis of the Social Con- science." Paradise, Frank I. — "The Church and the Indi- vidual." Patten, Simon N. — "The Social Basis of Religion." Peabody, Francis G. — "Jesus Christ and the Social Question." "The Approach to the Social Question." Peile, James H. F.— "The Reproach of the Gospel." Plantz, Samuel — "The Church and the Social Problem." Rainsford, William S. — "The Church's Opportunity in the City To-day." Rauschenbusch, Walter — "Christianity and the Social Crisis." "For God and the People." Reid, Andrew — "Vox Clamantium." Richmond, Wilfred — "Christian Economics." Ross, Edward A. — " Sin and Society." " Latter-Day Sinners and Saints." Schmidt, Karl — "The Social Results of Early Chris- tianity." "Socialised Church, The" — (A book composed of eleven papers read at the First National Conference of Social Workers of Metho- dism.) Stelzle, Charles — "Christianity's Storm Centre." "The Social Application of Re- ligion." 264 Appendix Strong, Josiah— " The New Era." "The Next Great Awakening." "My Religion in Every-Day Life." "The Gospel of the Kingdom." (A course of study.) Tippy, Worth M.— " The Socialised Church." Thompson, C. Bertrand — "The Churches and the Wage-Earners." Thompson, Herbert M. — "The Purse and the Con- science." Ward, H. F.— "Social Ministry." Westcott, Brooks Foss — "Social Aspects of Chris- tianity." "Christian Social Union Addresses." White, Bouck— "The Call of the Carpenter." Wood worth, Arthur V. — "Christian Socialism in England." Zueblin, Charles — "The Religion of a Democrat." Date Due '■^ -^ 13 '4^ t J'J ■■■: u Ar f- . •' '46 ■«>"= •50 Je i i> < S? jtiiittttffli k SSKgi !P^ ^^^^Sr- ^