KELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
RELIGION 
 IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 BY 
 
 GRAHAM TAYLOR 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 JANE ADDAMS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 1913 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BT 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 Published October, 1913 
 
I 
 
 Jf amtlp 
 
 EACH ONE CONTRIBUTING TO AND SHARING IN 
 LIFE'S WHOLE ENDEAVOUR 
 
 359390 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 BOTH the course of thought and the con- 
 clusions that follow are the outgrowth of 
 experience. They grew from the ground up. 
 They bear the earth-flavours of each field of 
 endeavour rural, pastoral and professorial, 
 civic. Wherein the conclusions differ from 
 whatever prompted the course of action 
 which led to them, the difference is due to 
 the trend of the times. Conservative ante- 
 cedents and training laid upon heart and con- 
 science the burden of the soul. The soul grew 
 into the whole self. The self took on what- 
 ever shaped it in the push from behind and 
 the thrust from about. Then, to apply the 
 simple Gospel to the saving of the soul was to 
 extend and apply the common faith to the 
 social conditions of the common life. This 
 was a reordination to ministry, a rededica- 
 tion of the Church. Evangelism became no 
 less personal for being more social. Condi- 
 
 vii 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 tions needed to be evangelised, so as to be- 
 come at least compatible with, and not de- 
 structive of, the Christian ideals and stand- 
 ards of life. Thus the community became 
 both field and force for the Church. The city 
 became the laboratory for the classroom. 
 Civics came to share with pastoral sociology, 
 and laymen and women with students for the 
 ministry, efforts to teach and train. Social 
 settlement residence seemed naturally the 
 next step to the furtherance of this purpose, 
 the best view-point and vantage whence to 
 fulfil it. 
 
 To fraternise the conditions of life and la- 
 bour, to Christianise the framework and 
 spirit of the community, and to humanise re- 
 ligion for the promotion of these ends, be- 
 came the Holy Grail. This quest of it was 
 first traced for The Survey. It is now 
 given more permanent form in the hope of 
 helping to realise the democracy of religion 
 and the religion of democracy. 
 
 CHICAGO COMMONS, 
 September. 1913. 
 
 viii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 FOREWORD . . . . . . vii 
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 I LIFE AND RELIGION .... 1 
 
 II THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW . . 19 
 
 III PERSONALITY A SOCIAL PRODUCT AND 
 
 FORCE 31 
 
 IV THE CALL AND EQUIPMENT FOR EF- 
 
 FECTIVE SERVICE . . . 58 
 
 V CHANGING CONDITIONS OF A WORK- 
 ING FAITH 80 
 
 VI THE RELIGION OF HUMAN RELATION- 
 SHIPS 105 
 
 VII THE FAMILY: FIELD, FUNCTION, AND 
 
 TRIBUTARY AGENCIES . . . 120 
 
 VIII SURVIVAL AND REVIVAL OF NEIGH- 
 BOURSHIP 140 
 
 IX INDUSTRY AND RELIGION : THEIR COM- 
 MON GROUND AND INTERDEPEND- 
 ENCE . 167 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 X ORGANISED INDUSTRY AND ORGANISED 
 
 RELIGION 191 
 
 XI CITY AND CHURCH RE-APPROACHING 
 
 EACH OTHER 211 
 
 XII CHURCH AND COMMUNITY THEIR 
 
 INTERRELATION AND COMMON AIM 228 
 
 EEFERENCES 259 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY JANE ADDAMS 
 
 THIS series of papers, now appearing in book 
 form, embodies an able and conscientious at- 
 tempt to state the actual relation existing 
 between organised religion and social ameli- 
 oration. 
 
 The author, Graham Taylor, has for many 
 years been both a clergyman teaching in a 
 theological school and a citizen actively iden- 
 tified with advanced movements making for 
 political and social reform. He sees the need 
 of more religion in all departments of life, 
 and he longs for the help of the churches 
 in the various efforts for social amelioration 
 which are now too often being carried on 
 without their leadership and sometimes with- 
 out their active participation. 
 
 In his careful analysis of our varied hu- 
 xi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 man relationships in the family, in the 
 neighbourhood, in industry, in the city and 
 of the changes they are undergoing through 
 the sheer pressure upon them of modern eco- 
 nomic conditions, Dr. Taylor draws from a 
 wide and varied experience in socialised ac- 
 tion. In the light of such daily living we 
 may perhaps claim for the ideas he sets forth 
 in this book that they are " true," in the 
 definition of Professor James, in that they 
 have been " assimilated, validated, corrob- 
 orated, and verified in experience. ' 9 
 
 Throughout these chapters it is as though 
 Dr.JTaylor saw t.frpt grid waaton of rnnrlorn 
 life being slowtyjiooded by an incoming tide 
 of religion which will in time irresistibly 
 bear away many impediments now blocking 
 the path of social progress. The reader 
 shares the consciousness that these beneficent 
 waters are rising in response to one of those 
 world forces which inevitably draw men's 
 wills into one effective current. 
 
 Dr. Taylor was among the first men to in- 
 xii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 troduce a systematic study of sociology into 
 a theologicalinstitution, at Chif.a^o Thpn- 
 logical Seminary. Therefore, from the stand- 
 point of a student of social history, fa- 
 miliar with the development of organised 
 religions, he knows that the religious syn- 
 thesis, or rather the competing religious syn- 
 theses, are constantly changing and differ- 
 entiating themselves in response to special 
 needs ; that such adaptations in organised re- 
 ligion are evolved not only because new needs 
 confront the Church from without, but also 
 because there is a vigorous minority within 
 the Church whom the existing forms of ex- 
 pression no longer satisfy. It is as a mem- 
 ber of this inner group that Dr. Taylor has 
 written the following pages in which he di- 
 rectly and fearlessly points out the adapta- 
 tion going on in the Church at the present 
 moment and the need for further changes. 
 
 Because the desire for just human rela- 
 tionships has seized upon the imaginations 
 of a multitude of our contemporaries, it is 
 xiii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 possible that a group within the Church is 
 now demanding that a new form of social 
 action shall express their yearning sense of 
 justice and compassion, quite as the school- 
 men once insisted that creeds and dogmas 
 should embody their philosophy, or the art- 
 ists that their absorbing desire for beauty 
 should be built into cathedrals and painted 
 upon the walls of shrines. This thirst for 
 beauty and order in human relationships may 
 seize upon the religious spirits of our time 
 as the desire for personal holiness and for 
 unbroken communion with God, in another 
 period of history, drove thousands of men 
 to spend their lives in hermitage or mon- 
 astery. 
 
 Certainly a distress of spirit for social 
 wrongs, " the burden of souls," as Dr. Tay- 
 lor calls it, expresses itself in many ways, as 
 the most casual observer may see. Many a 
 young person whose attention is fixed and 
 whose emotions are absorbed by the vast and 
 stupid atrocities of contemporary life its 
 xiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 aimless waste, its meaningless labour, its 
 needless suffering finds his only relief from 
 the abiding horror over the existence of such 
 things in the heated conviction that they are 
 not inevitable. He expresses himself in such 
 well-worn phrases as " there must be some 
 way out," " such a state of things was never 
 intended," " human nature can no longer 
 tolerate it." 
 
 To some of these young people the Church 
 with its chance of miracle, as it were, its 
 divine help, its faith so invincible and so in- 
 calculable, offers itself as a refuge against 
 unaided human effort and against the sci- 
 entific estimate of the slow pace of social 
 amelioration. It is said that human crea- 
 tures, almost as much as they require light 
 and bodily warmth, need the sense that others 
 are thinking and feeling like themselves. It 
 is obviously true that " the other poor little 
 brethren gathered with us under the Ma- 
 donna cloak keep us warm quite as much as 
 the great mantle itself." . Keligion has al- 
 
 xv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ways provided for deep-seated wants which 
 mortals themselves cannot satisfy, and has 
 ever comforted man for his own insuffi- 
 ciencies. Doubtless there has always been a 
 small number of persons who came into the 
 Church because they found that they could 
 not climb the steep and thorny road pointed 
 out by life's noblest teachers, because they 
 were discouraged with their own best con- 
 scious activities, quite as a multitude of those 
 affrighted by the wrongs and injustices 
 abroad in the world have throughout the ages 
 come into the Church for shelter. 
 
 Many of these young people, turning to 
 organised religion as it is found in their own 
 communities, hoping to find both simplifica- 
 tion of motives and an assurance of guidance, 
 are bitterly disappointed. The desire to re- 
 lieve, at one and the same time a personal 
 compunction and to utilise forms of social- 
 ised activity to which they have been trained 
 in college and elsewhere is seldom gratified. 
 The poignant sense of social wrong is all too 
 xvi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 seldom mentioned in the Church, often not 
 assuaged, and they receive no suggestions nor 
 directions for effective action. This is the 
 more remarkable in that, of the two leading 
 religions in America, Judaism has always up- 
 held the ideals of social justice, its great 
 prophets and great teachers from the begin- 
 ning having urged the redemption of the en- 
 tire nation and having considered individuals 
 pious or impious as they aided or retarded 
 this consummation: in the Christian Church 
 such religious expression in social action 
 would be the one thing able to unite the ex- 
 treme individualism taught by the evangelical 
 churches with that concerted action which is 
 only possible when a central authority is ac- 
 knowledged. Such expression would be a 
 veritable social growth, based upon the agree- 
 ments of experience and verified by the cur- 
 rent events in which all participate. Without 
 it, at this moment it is difficult to see how 
 religion can adequately perform its tradi- 
 tional function in the world. 
 
 xvii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A popular novel has recently asserted that 
 the Christian Church has no right to test the 
 \ fitness of men for its communion by their be- 
 lief or non-belief in a set of creeds which 
 were written and adopted by scholarly ec- 
 clesiastics who directed the Church during 
 the least spiritual period of her history. If, 
 as this widely read book contends, the leader- 
 ship of the Church depends upon her ability 
 , to guide and enlighten men in the complexi- 
 ties and contradictions of modern life, then 
 the test of the communicant should be his 
 willingness to bear a man's share in the self- 
 sacrificing labour involved in this period 
 of maladjustment in which we find our- 
 selves. 
 
 By this test no man has a better right to 
 speak for the Church than the author of this 
 book, although this is by no means his only 
 qualification. No one can be really useful in 
 the long and delicate task of social adapta- 
 tion unless in addition to the unresting desire 
 for universal justice he is informed on the 
 xviii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 economic situation and the changes being 
 urged by various bodies of people. 
 
 As a sympathetic student of social move- 
 ments, understanding the larger hopes of 
 men, in the early years at Chicago Commons 
 Dr. Taylor every week presided over a ' ' free- 
 floor " discussion where men of all social 
 faiths were made welcome. Chicago was at 
 that time characterised by a challenging dis- 
 cussion of the existing social order. Each 
 school of social philosophy preached not so 
 much its own remedies as the necessity of 
 clearing away much of the present industrial 
 organisation before any remedies could be ap- 
 plied, or rather before social reconstruction 
 could begin. Even among the socialists there 
 were many radicals of more zeal than learn- 
 ing, who felt that the end of the competitive 
 system was approaching and urged a moral- 
 ity such as could be applied only to a world 
 on the brink of destruction. These ardent 
 speakers, therefore, distrusted all tendencies 
 towards social improvements and denounced 
 xix 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 any compromise on the part of socialists with 
 the existing state. They looked askance at 
 any accommodating spirit evinced by a cap- 
 italistic society, and at the growing humani- 
 tarianism of an enfeebled bourgeoisie. Above 
 all they disliked the theory of the common 
 interest of labour and capital for which the 
 social settlement stood, as well as the gradual 
 interpenetration of the two classes. 
 
 In spite of these radical differences, Dr. 
 Taylor held the respect of these men of vari- 
 ous social beliefs, shall we say, because of his 
 religious faith in the unity and solidarity of 
 mankind. He judged them righteously and 
 generously, not as disturbers of the peace, 
 but as men who like himself were concerned 
 that the knowledge of economic forces should 
 be intelligently applied to the progress of 
 society. He did not despise half-baked the- 
 ories, because as a student of economic his- 
 tory, he was familiar with the fact that each 
 distinct historical epoch begins with striking 
 economic changes which society joyfully 
 xx 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 hails as indubitable signs of progress, but 
 that soon after the more sensitive men of 
 the epoch begin a long struggle to make the 
 social readjustments, and that at last the 
 epoch ends with more or less reorganisation. 
 
 As he points out in his chapter on i ' Indus- 
 trial Relations," the abrupt changes in the 
 early years of the nineteenth century brought 
 about untold distress, overcrowding in towns 
 and mills, long working hours, child labour, 
 and all the rest of the dreary list with which 
 we are so familiar. In the first rush for 
 increased prosperity no one was concerned to 
 refit social conditions to the striking eco- 
 nomic changes. And yet the epoch thus in- 
 troduced must go through a long period of 
 slow readjustment before society can work 
 out a fitting reorganisation, the outlines of 
 which are now but vaguely apprehended. 
 
 In this middle period of readjustment in 
 which our generation finds itself, many peo- 
 ple, conscious of the social misery and con- 
 vinced that much of it is unnecessary, have 
 xxi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 been brought to a state of mind scarcely to 
 be endured. Although knowledge of social 
 development gave Dr. Taylor patience with 
 those driven to rebellion, yet his own tem- 
 perament and training place him in the list 
 of those of the social reformers who believe in 
 a gradual modification of society. Here, once 
 more, he presents " fruits for life," or to 
 use a more familiar phrase, he justifies his 
 faith by long and arduous works. 
 
 This may be illustrated from only a few of 
 the public and quasi-public commissions with 
 which he has been identified during these 
 later years, whose findings have changed 
 public opinion and have resulted in remedial 
 legislation. As a member of the well-known 
 Chicago Vice Commission, he became con- 
 versant with the breakdown of moral fibre 
 which so easily takes place where a large city 
 offers concealment for illicit relations, and 
 where many young people grow accustomed 
 to consider the pursuit of pleasure a legiti- 
 mate occupation. He vividly realised that im- 
 xxii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 plicit in city conditions is the grave danger 
 resulting from the withdrawal of social con- 
 trol at the very time the inner restraints of 
 religion are confessedly less compelling. The 
 Commission made a large number of pains- 
 taking recommendations for immediate ac- 
 tion, but always considered the final goal to 
 be the absolute abolition of commercialised 
 vice a drastic conclusion, founded not upon 
 vague ideals of human conduct but upon a 
 careful study of human nature as it reacted 
 to every possible temptation a great city 
 could provide. 
 
 He also served on the Illinois state com- 
 missions which secured effective legislation 
 to protect the workers from dangerous ma- 
 chinery and insanitary conditions, and to 
 safeguard life and property from loss in the 
 mines. These laws led the way to determine 
 the employer's liability for industrial acci- 
 dents and diseases, but the recommendation 
 to divide with the employer and the state the 
 burdens of these disasters, which were hith- 
 xxiii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 erto borne by the worker alone, could not have 
 been so willingly received by the very people 
 to whom it meant an increased expenditure 
 of money, unless the public mind had been 
 previously aroused to that renewed apprecia- 
 tion of the value and dignity of human life 
 which is said to characterise all moments of 
 spiritual awakening. 
 
 In the matter of municipal reform, Dr. 
 Taylor has been actively identified with the 
 Municipal Voters' League of Chicago, one of 
 the pioneer organisations in America, to 
 purify once corrupt city councils by arousing 
 public sentiment against evil practices which 
 had been unchallenged for so many years that 
 they had been accepted as inevitable. That 
 Chicago demands not only honest aldermen 
 but those devoted to the higher interests of 
 the city, is due to the fearless men who first 
 recognised and fostered a changing concep- 
 tion of public duty and insisted that the ideals 
 of Democracy are still operative in America. 
 
 Dr. Taylor has lived for twenty years at 
 xxiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Chicago Commons, the social settlement 
 which he himself founded in one of those 
 shifting city districts to which people of a 
 score of nationalities are drawn from all 
 parts of the world in response to industrial 
 opportunities in factories and shops that 
 too often exploit them but seldom unite them. 
 That political reforms were inaugurated in 
 his own ward, that the community was rallied 
 to strenuous endeavour, could have been ac- 
 complished only through an appeal to those 
 profounder spiritual experiences which, 
 transcending all differences of creed and 
 ritual, are at the foundations of every re- 
 ligious faith. 
 
 "Itrequires an unfaltering courage to act 
 year after year upon the belief that the hoary 
 abominations of society can only be done 
 away with through " the steady impinging 
 offact'oiffact, of interest on interest, and of 
 will on will." It requires skill as well as 
 loving kindness to be able to say this to an 
 ardent young person so that the statement, 
 
 XXV 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 even although it contains the implication that 
 these hideous conditions will at last be 
 changed, shall not come as a dash of cold 
 water to his ardent hopes. It requires tact 
 and training to make it clear that because 
 each one of us can do so little in the great 
 task~bi' regenerating society it is therefore 
 more necessary that each_shoul4_dedicate his 
 
 pmyera nnH ndH hiq inHiviHnnl will fn fy un- 
 dertaking. 
 
 For several years Dr. Taylor performed 
 this service for college women and others who 
 met with him at Chicago Commons for con- 
 ferences. It was as a logical outcome from 
 this and in response to a community need that 
 he founded the now well-known Chicago 
 School of Civics and Philanthropy. He saw 
 the necessity for trained workers in every 
 field of social endeavour. Where ameliora- 
 tion comes through legislation, informed and 
 trained people are needed not only to help 
 secure it but to interpret and enforce the new 
 laws. So long as the social needs, while 
 xxvi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 glaring and obvious, are still such as can be 
 supplied only by volunteer groups who must 
 experiment and make good before the state 
 can either realise the situation or attempt a 
 remedy, there is need of trained social work- 
 ers for philanthropy. For the teaching of 
 these two groups, and a third, of college men 
 and women trained in the methods of social 
 research, the School has gathered together a 
 faculty and staff of lecturers, many of them 
 distinguished in their own lines of work, who 
 are loyally devoted to the president and 
 founder of the School, and are convinced that 
 the School is rendering a patriotic service not 
 only to the city but to the nation as well. 
 
 Dr. Taylor has come to be regarded as an 
 " expert " adviser in the best sense of the 
 term. His long familiarity with the men who 
 are " down and out," both the vagrant and 
 the convict, has enabled him to give advice of 
 great practical value in their institutional 
 care, in the founding of a Municipal Lodging 
 House in Chicago, in the abolition of the 
 xxvii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 segregated district, in the establishment of 
 the Morals Court, and in many another 
 reform. 
 
 With other worried and harried social 
 workers who found themselves giving much 
 time to public speaking and to pamphleteer- 
 ing because they felt impelled to share their 
 knowledge with the community at large, real- 
 ising that the community alone could bring 
 about needed reforms, Dr. Taylor for years 
 has given much time to public speaking. He 
 constantly preached " the Christianising of 
 the social order " from orthodox pulpits, he 
 roused young men to a sense of social re- 
 sponsibility through series of lectures at lead- 
 ing universities and colleges, he spoke before 
 summer gatherings, before Y. M. C. A. audi- 
 ences, and wherever he was constantly sum- 
 moned by people eager for help in under- 
 standing the collective morality. 
 
 When the social workers, each with his 
 store of fermenting knowledge, met from year 
 to year in annual conference, they found that 
 xxviii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 they tended more and more to discuss the 
 economic conditions underlying the poverty, 
 disease, and overwork which they were seek- 
 ing to ameliorate. The discussion of the 
 sources of the low standards of living, of the 
 protection of the worker from the risks of 
 industry, grew in interest at each meeting of 
 the National Conference of Charities and Cor- 
 rection. That Dr. Taylor was elected presi- 
 dent of that imposing national body for this 
 year was a recognition both of his personal 
 achievements and of his sympathy with the 
 newer developments in philanthropy. 
 
 While many members of the Conference 
 were content with a mere general statement 
 of the relation between unregulated industry 
 and poverty, Dr. Taylor was closely identified 
 with a small group who felt that the time had 
 come for a more definite indictment. The 
 members of this group were convinced that 
 some of the worst conditions which de- 
 pressed whole communities of working people 
 and kept a promising generation of youth 
 xxix 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 from following its better impulses, were lo- 
 calised and definite, and although these spots 
 of glaring economic wrong might be excep- 
 tional, their very existence implied many 
 others only less sensationally wretched. In 
 their previous efforts to arouse an indifferent 
 public, the social workers had eagerly wel- 
 comed the help which had come from the so- 
 called " muck-raking " of certain magazines 
 and even of the exaggerated tales printed in 
 the daily press, the authoritative statements 
 of those economists who in increasing num- 
 bers felt the responsibility for public wrongs, 
 and the cumulative results of the govern- 
 mental investigations into industrial con- 
 ditions. For, while all of these were neces- 
 sarily national in scope, so that each com- 
 munity found it easy to shift responsibility 
 for that which was so widespread, there was, 
 however, gradually brought about a growing 
 conviction that industrial conditions could be 
 bettered. 
 In order to provide definite information in 
 
 XXX 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 the early days of the settlement, Dr. Taylor 
 had edited a small paper entitled " The Com- 
 mons, " in which he gathered data of 
 current efforts of social reform with sugges- 
 tions to those in industrial and civic strug- 
 gles, and in social and church work. Later 
 this publication was merged with " Chari- 
 ties, " a paper performing a similar service 
 in New York, and the two have since devel- 
 oped into The Survey, a journal which not 
 only reports constructive philanthropy and 
 industrial and civic undertakings, but points 
 out to its readers the gaps and failures in 
 the social structure. It was through The 
 Survey that it was first made clear that, / 
 with the help of a small number of persons/., 
 trained to careful economic investigation, the 
 thorough study of one community might fix 
 the responsibility where it could not be 
 avoided. The local investigation, isolating 
 the conditions from the rest of the country 
 in such wise as to make them appear ab- 
 normal, pointed out the wretched results of 
 * xxxi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 such conditions in the community itself. The 
 lack of protection against industrial accidents 
 in a huge steel plant had meant injuring so 
 many men among the employes during the 
 year; the insanitary housing in a given city 
 ward had caused an abnormally high death- 
 rate among the babies of that ward, and many 
 another conclusion from which it was difficult 
 to escape. When such investigation was ac- 
 companied by a picture of normal industrial 
 conditions, vividly portrayed as they existed 
 elsewhere, and was followed by an appeal to 
 civic patriotism, in many instances an en- 
 thusiasm for better things was evoked and 
 even a spiritual unrest. 
 
 But while the conviction of sin could thus 
 be made through an objective and economic 
 investigation, the regeneration which was 
 supposed to follow must of course depend 
 upon spiritual forces. The necessity of fol- 
 lowing each such presentation of special 
 civic needs by a revival of religion in that 
 particular city is to put it baldly, but some 
 xxxii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 such plan was finally evolved in the effort to 
 match the will power of the community to its 
 knowledge, " to marshal the moral forces 
 capable of breaking what must be broken and 
 of building what must be built. " It was at 
 once evident as soon as the results of an in- 
 vestigation and the methods of relief were 
 published in the daily papers, that even the 
 most obvious social reforms require practical 
 means for their realisation with the inevita- 
 ble committees. It seemed possible to accom- 
 plish both the spiritual awakening and the 
 organisation through The Men and Eeligion 
 Forward Movement. Its leaders were de- 
 termined to win the men of the country back 
 to religion by meeting the distinctively mas- 
 culine interests, and from the beginning it 
 was plain that it was the social obligations of 
 religion which rallied the audiences and 
 brought men under conviction of dereliction. 
 It was evident that the force to be applied 
 to social reforms was what Mazzini called 
 " religious sentiment, " that to which he so 
 xxxiii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 confidently appealed for the remaking of 
 Italy; " from it," he declared, " flow 
 strength and constancy in the struggle for 
 great principles, indifference to danger, noble 
 resignation in persecution. " Of course such 
 an attempt to connect religious enthusiasm 
 with civic and economic needs implied the 
 full co-operation of the clergy, and that there 
 was a generous response in so many cities 
 indicated perhaps how ready they were to 
 meet the challenge. 
 
 For the encouragement of these eager 
 young men one may be permitted perhaps 
 to quote from that great republican priest, 
 Lammenais: " There is no power on earth 
 that surpasses or equals that of the clergy 
 when they are imbued with the genius of a 
 nation and guide it faithfully in its natural 
 progress according to the laws that direct 
 the procession of its life. But if by error, 
 or from interest, they set themselves in op- 
 position to those eternal laws, if they attempt 
 to hold the people in a state which it knows 
 xxxiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 to be not good and so to block the road to the 
 future, their words excite mistrust and their 
 living force is spent. " 
 
 Dr. Taylor published in The Survey 
 the material for this book as his contribu- 
 tion to The Men and Religion Forward Move- 
 ment at the very time many cities them- 
 selves were beginning to ask for surveys of 
 their own conditions, willingly bearing the ex- 
 pense involved, as though they were insist- 
 ing upon a social expression for their reli- 
 gious sentiment and were asking to have the 
 road laid out. 
 
 This book will doubtless be of value to men 
 and women of all faiths who are eager that 
 the current of their religion should pour itself 
 into broader channels of social purpose. 
 
 HULL HOUSE, 
 
 September, 1913. 
 
 XXXV 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 LIFE AND BELIGION 
 
 LIFE and religion are alike. They were 
 meant and made to be one and the same. A 
 human life consists in largest part of its 
 relations with other lives. There is no * * self- 
 made man." If any of us could be put in 
 a chemist's retort, and by some strange al- 
 chemy everything were extracted from him 
 that mother and father, brother and sister, 
 playmate and schoolmate, teacher and work- 
 fellow, wife and child, pastor and partner, 
 author and speaker, the world's literature 
 and the life of his own day and generation 
 have put into him, who would dare to look 
 at himself in the glass? Could any one rec- 
 ognise himself? Every one of us would be 
 nothing less than a blasphemy of his former 
 self. For each and all the capacities and 
 1 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 powers which constitute selfhood and come 
 closest to being himself, the individual is de- 
 pendent upon and indebted to others. Every 
 
 " human life is a social product, produced by 
 the co-operation of many other lives. Every 
 one of us who is honest must put down on 
 the credit side of life's ledger all others who 
 have invested any part of their lives in him, 
 and, with Paul, write himself down, " I am 
 debtor. " 
 
 t \ Eeligion, like life, is relationship. No 
 other word is so interchangeable with it. It 
 is the ideal of what the relation of the one 
 man should be to the one God and to every 
 other man. 
 
 The religion both of Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity consists of their founders' ideal of 
 the relation of man to God as Father and 
 man to man as brother which is being 
 progressively experienced by the individ- 
 ual and gradually fulfilled in the life of 
 the community and the history of the 
 race. 
 
 2 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 The Bible is the story of the way in which 
 these relationships were realised, Godward 
 and manward, in the personal experiences 
 of typical individuals and in the history of 
 selected family, national, and racial groups. 
 It is the book of lives and therefore the Book 
 of Life. It gives life through lives. It is 
 biography and history, the life-story of God 
 and man. The book of Genesis is Abraham's 
 life put to press between the times of Ur of 
 the Chaldees and the eternity of the Lord 
 God Almighty, whose friend he was, with 
 whom he walked and talked. In Exodus we 
 see the patriarchal households becoming the 
 people of Israel, the " kingdom of priests," 
 as Moses' life emerges from the age of the 
 Pharaohs into Jehovah's leadership. In 
 great succession the books of the Old Testa- 
 ment and the New bear the sign manual, if 
 not the names, of the men and women 
 through whose lives they were produced. 
 They have the earth-flavors of every land 
 from which they sprung at the touch of life 
 
 3 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 from God's skies upon the soil of man's 
 earth. 
 
 Leaves of life God's life in man consti- 
 tute the sacred literature. Human lives are 
 the letters, the characters, the very types in 
 which the Word is written. Men, women, 
 and children ; families and tribes ; neighbour- 
 hoods and fellowships ; nations, peoples, and 
 races live, move, and have their being in this 
 Book of books, par excellence the Book of 
 Life. In form and substance the Scriptures 
 of both Testaments are biography and 
 genealogy, history and experience, folk lore 
 and personal epistles, songs and sighs of the 
 soul and of peoples. These are the warp and 
 woof in which the Spirit weaves the pattern 
 of the religious life upon the inspired word. 
 David and the psalmists of Israel, and the 
 singers of the Advent, wrought into music 
 the divine psychology of the human soul. 
 And in their songs they rise to the heights of 
 man's aspiration and sink to the depths of 
 his sin and despair. The seers are the inter- 
 
 4 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 preters of God to the people and of the peo- 
 ple to themselves. Their prophecy is the 
 interpretation of history. Their history is 
 the spirit of prophecy. Their religion was 
 statesmanship. And their statesmanship 
 was so true to their own times that it applies 
 to all times. 
 
 The Gospels are memoirs of evangelists, 
 memoranda of what they saw and heard of 
 Jesus, and of what they told others about 
 him. The first and greatest theologian of 
 the Church was its first and greatest mis- 
 sionary. It was in the heat and by the power 
 of his passion to win men's souls that Paul 
 wrought the facts of his own experience with 
 God and men into the formulated truth of 
 the epistles, for the teaching of those whom 
 he had evangelised. Thus faith is identified 
 with life throughout the Scriptures. But 
 none of its seers or singers emphasises this 
 fact more than St. John, whose name seals 
 the document with which the volume of the 
 sacred book is closed. He never reduces 
 
 5 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 truth to an abstract faith. Faith to him is 
 always believing, always the verb of action, 
 always the doing of the truth. He declares 
 " the life, the eternal life, . . . which we 
 have beheld, and our hands handled. " And 
 the final glimpse which this last survivor of 
 the apostles caught of Christianity trium- 
 phant was not in another world, but in this 
 one; not of a Church, but of a " Holy City "; 
 not of a mere multitude of saved souls, but 
 of the " nations of them which are saved," 
 organised into a saved human society, in 
 which " the tabernacle of God is with men 
 and he will dwell with them and they shall 
 be his people and God himself shall be with 
 them and be their God." 
 
 Far more than belief, the religious life in- 
 spired by the Old Testament and the New 
 has been always and everywhere the same. 
 The lives growing out of the doctrine, more 
 than the forms of the doctrine out of which 
 they grow, stand the historic test of catho- 
 licity, "semper ubique." Beliefs change, 
 
 6 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 vary, shift their emphasis. But the godly 
 life, like God himself, remains the same. It 
 is the Messianic life that links the Old Testa- 
 ment to the New. It is Christian living 
 which identifies contemporary experience 
 with primitive Christianity. The common 
 denominator of all the sects is the real 
 religious life being lived by their mem- 
 bers. 
 
 Dr. Austin Phelps, the great professor at 
 Andover Seminary, thus accounts for the 
 Bible: " Divine communications to the 
 world have always been made through the 
 medium of real life. Living men live a great 
 truth, and so truth comes to the birth. The 
 Bible is almost wholly history and biogra- 
 phy. Abstract knowledge is given in it only 
 as interwoven with the wants and experi- 
 ences of once living generations. God took 
 out of the circle of universal history a single 
 segment, and the result is a revelation. Men 
 live under special divine superintendence 
 and illumination, and the product is a 
 
 7 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Bible. So all the great truths which have 
 moved the world have been lived. They have 
 been struck out by collision of thought with 
 the living necessities of the world." 
 . The whole great field for human service 
 and religious work is a primary source of 
 information and inspiration. If the Scrip- 
 tures contain the spring whence the head- 
 waters flow, the field marks the channel 
 through which the river of life streams forth 
 into all the world. If the divine Word con- 
 tains the incentive and marching orders for 
 the work, the work with the Word is its con- 
 temporaneous expositor. We " know the 
 doctrine " only as we "do the truth." When 
 the believer or the Church has had no use for 
 the faith, it has been of no use to either 
 " without works dead." The marching or- 
 ders of the Church are like the sealed orders 
 to the navy which are to be opened, read, and 
 obeyed when at sea. 
 
 Nature is foundation for the supernatural. 
 The natural instincts of men are the ground- 
 
 8 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 work for the superstructure of faith. From 
 self-consciousness we rise to God-conscious- 
 ness. And the consciousness of God rounds 
 out and perfects our true self -consciousness, 
 in relation to the selfhood of God and fellow- 
 men. The instinct of reverence is the basis 
 upon which are built the spirit and forms of 
 worship. From the innate sense of account- 
 ability are developed the conviction of sin 
 and repentance toward God. Faith is 
 founded upon the universal experience of de- 
 pendence, from infancy to old age, from 
 birth to death. The yearning for fellowship, 
 in the loneliness of the human soul, leads up 
 directly to communion with the Father of 
 our spirits and to the " communion of 
 saints. " Even those who think, as Kingdon 
 Clifford thought, that " science has taken God 
 to the confines of the universe and bidden 
 him a respectful adieu, " seldom fail to feel 
 his " sense of utter loneliness at the loss of 
 one's cradle faith "in the thought that " the 
 Great Companion is dead." Black old " So- 
 
 9 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 journer Truth " reinspired the faith and 
 courage of Frederick Douglass in the strug- 
 gle for the freedom of the slave by rising in 
 the audience after he had struck a note of 
 despair and asking, " Frederick, is God 
 dead? " 
 
 Thus all human experience verifies the fact 
 to which St. Augustine gave currency in the 
 coin current of the realm, ' ' Thou hast made 
 us for thyself, and our souls are ever restless 
 until they rest in thee." So we must look 
 in human nature for the counterpart of the 
 divine ideal of man. For something of that 
 ideal is written on the hearts of men as truly 
 as upon the sacred page. In seeing that the 
 world's great heart, and every human life 
 that shares the pulsations of the race, are 
 as truly made for essential religion as re- 
 ligion is made to fit and form the life of 
 every human being, we discover the most 
 convincing evidence of religious faith. In 
 claiming that being religious is nothing less, 
 and yet can be nothing more, than making 
 10 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 the most of ourselves and doing the best by 
 others, and so becoming what we were meant 
 and made to be, by the best help from Father 
 God and brother men, we are laying the most 
 natural basis for the appeal of the "like com- 
 mon faith." 
 
 The whole world of man's life rolls 
 through the Scriptures. Having the range 
 of its area, one moves in a larger sphere than 
 his own life-contacts or any one age of 
 earth's history will open to him. The world 
 revealed there is larger than the earth can 
 be to any one at any time or place. One 
 meets there all kinds of men, types of char- 
 acter, and conditions of life with which he 
 comes in personal contact, and many more. 
 In its heavenward and earthward reach, the 
 Bible-visioned life " lives eternal life in 
 time," as Harnack says. 
 
 But even this does not compensate the re- 
 ligious worker for the lack of personal con- 
 tact with fellow men. To know men only as 
 seen in Bible characters and conditions is no 
 11 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 x substitute for knowing our own neighbours 
 and our own times. For the men and women 
 of the Bible are there as types and interpret- 
 ers of our contemporaries, not as substitutes 
 for them. They cannot render us the serv- 
 ice for which they have their being in the 
 letter unless we let them lead us out into life. 
 And yet the fact that so many of those who 
 have deprived themselves, or have been de- 
 prived, of these life-contacts have, in spite of 
 this fact, not because of it, been able to 
 understand and help their fellow men, so con- 
 spicuously as religious biography has shown 
 them to have done, proves the Scriptures to 
 be a very real source for the study of human 
 nature. Nothing else accounts for the suc- 
 cess of these secluded lives, lived within such 
 limited areas, and restricted to such remote 
 knowledge of practical affairs. But far 
 more effective would these merely Bible- 
 taught men and women have been if they had 
 known more of the world, and had been able 
 with dear old John Bunyan to say, in the 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 words of his prologue to the Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress: 
 
 " then come hither 
 And lay thy head, thy heart, my book together. " 
 
 Through all their history and biography 
 the Scriptures guide us to the very orig- 
 inators and founders of the ministries com- 
 mitted to ourselves. We stand at the birth- 
 place and hour of their life and power, within 
 the laboratory of their inmost souls where 
 their experiences crystallised into their mag- 
 nificent conceptions, by the forge and anvil 
 of their trials and toils where were wrought 
 the tools and implements of their achieve- 
 ments. Now watch for the coming of the 
 impulse they receive! To many of them its 
 coming is described by the phrase which 
 forms the preface to most of their deeds and 
 to some of their lives, " And the word of the 
 Lord came." This impulse to work " came " 
 to prompt Abraham's emigrant-faith and 
 pilgrimage to the fatherland (Gen. xii. 1; xv. 
 
 13 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 1, 4); Joshua's self-conquest for the con- 
 quering of Canaan (Josh. i. 1, 7-9) ; Sam- 
 uel's childlike soul to be the father of the 
 prophets (1 Sam. iii. 1-3, 21; iv. 1) ; Elijah's 
 lion-heart for every turn in his mighty career 
 (1 Kings xvii. 1-5, 9; xviii. 1, 31, 36; xix. 9; 
 xxi. 17, 28; 2 Kings ii. 2-6) ; Isaiah's humble 
 mind to " send" him to sing the oratorio of 
 the Messiah (Isaiah vi. 8) ; Jeremiah's fal- 
 tering faith to set him to " pluck up and to 
 break down and to destroy and to overthrow, 
 to build and to plant " (Jer. i. 2, 4, 19) ; the 
 courage of all the heroes of faith enshrined 
 in Hebrews, eleventh chapter, that Westmin- 
 ster Abbey of Scripture. 
 
 Thus also through the New Testament and 
 church history, Christian biography might 
 be scanned to see how the Word " came " to 
 the great world-workers. It came on the 
 wings of a mother's prayer to Augustine 
 calling him from the life of a renegade to 
 become the greatest of the Church Fathers. 
 It came to Francis of Assisi and made 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 him every one's hero-saint, to Xavier 
 and gave him the glow of heart and 
 tongue of flame which lit up so much of 
 the world. It " came " to the monk Mar- 
 tin before he became the world's Luther, 
 and to the Wesleys, prompting their evangel 
 of persuasive song and speech. It came to 
 a Coleridge and thus made the Bible divine 
 to him because it ' ' found ' ' him. At the knee 
 of his motherly nurse it came to a Shaftes- 
 bury and shaped him in the philanthropic 
 mould of Christian manhood and statesman- 
 ship, which the hardship of his early school- 
 ing and the subsequent influence of political 
 life could neither disfigure nor destroy. In- 
 spiration inspires or loses its claim to be in- 
 spired. 
 
 A commission and credential for human 
 service are issued both by the Old Testament 
 and the New, to each and all who meet the re- 
 quirements for work. The ideal of the one 
 is " a kingdom of priests, a holy nation " 
 (Exodus xix. 16), and of the other " a royal 
 15 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's 
 own possession " (1 Peter ii. 9, 10). The 
 ministering membership is the only recog- 
 nised constituency of the churches of both 
 Testaments. 
 
 There must be a whole world of work if 
 there is to be a whole kingdom of workers, 
 a whole people of priests commissioned to 
 do it. And there is. For the extent and 
 diversity of the field are as great as and even 
 greater than the number and aptitudes of 
 x the workers. Opportunities for service 
 always exceed the trained capacities to ren- 
 der it. To the call of God and the demands 
 of this world field, the Church itself and the 
 larger fellowship of human service are the 
 response. All that men need them to be, God 
 meant his churches to be. There are as 
 many kinds of work to be done as there 
 are kinds of people and diversities of human 
 nature to do them. "To each one his 
 work." One need not choose nor refuse an- 
 other's work. " Every man is a once spoken 
 16 
 
LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 word." There are few men and women 
 whom God cares to repeat. It required the "" 
 gospels of four evangelists to speak the Gos- 
 pel of that one great Christ-life. There are 
 diversities of gifts and workings, but the same 
 spirit. The ministering body " has not one 
 member but many," and the many members 
 of that one body are warned that " the eye 
 cannot say to the hand, I have no need of 
 thee; or again, the head to the feet, I have 
 no need of you. Nay, much rather those mem- 
 bers of the body which seem to be more 
 feeble, are necessary." So far from per- 
 mitting any fellow Christian to think that he 
 is ' l not of the body, ' ' St. Paul neither allows 
 that the working body can do without the 
 service of every one of its members nor ad- 
 mits that any member can really share the 
 life of the body if he does not do his own 
 work for and with it. " God tempered the 
 body together, giving more abundant honour 
 to that part which lacked; that there should 
 be no schism in the body; but that the mem- 
 17 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 bers should have the same care one for an- 
 other. " As each of the returned exiles was 
 expected to rebuild the walls of Zion ' ' over 
 against his own house/* so the apostolic com- 
 mission is " now, ye are the body of Christ 
 and members each in his part." 
 
 Life and religion are thus seen to be coun- 
 terparts of each other, according to the 
 account which the Bible gives us of both, and 
 according to our own experience of each. 
 Human lives, singly and together, and far 
 more together than singly, are thus shown 
 to be both the field and force for the work of 
 religion. 
 
 18 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 OLD John Bunyan describes each indi- 
 vidual life as " the citadel of man-soul." He 
 thus speaks as though each human being is 
 a field for the conquest of religion and a 
 force with which it is to win its way in all 
 the world. From the human point of view, 
 the religious spirit may best be seen on its 
 way into the citadel to save, and on its way 
 out to serve. Two simple stories drawn 
 from close human experience will point both 
 ways. 
 
 A baby lay dead. Over its little form hov-' 
 ered the grief-calmed mother and the sor- 
 row-distracted father. 
 
 " I told him," she said, " that he is too 
 good a man for his job." 
 
 " What is it? " was asked. 
 19 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 " Well, I am a gambler," the man replied. 
 11 But I hate the thing, the place, and those 
 who frequent it, and I wish I need never go 
 near it again." 
 
 " If you do," he was warned, " you go 
 
 from the light you now love into the 
 
 darkness you dread, with your eyes wide 
 
 open." 
 
 " I'll see," he said, and lapsed into silence. 
 
 Then followed the baby's funeral. A few 
 days after the father stood pitifully alone on 
 the threshold of his new life. So lonesome 
 was he that he carried in person a letter 
 which he had addressed and stamped to 
 mail. For he thought that if he came with 
 it, it might open to his empty heart some- 
 thing of human fellowship for which he hun- 
 gered. And it did, as such a letter could 
 hardly fail to reach the heart of anybody 
 who had one : 
 
 11 SIR AND FRIEND: 
 
 11 I have determined not to go back into the old 
 business, come what will. But you must know that 
 20 
 
THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 I have great anxiety for the future. I trust that 
 there will be an opening so that my wife and child 
 will not starve. I do not know that I am under 
 any special conviction of sin, but I do long to 
 associate with good and Christian men and women. 
 I am starved for that association. If I could have 
 it, I believe I could soon be willing to leave all to 
 God. You can hardly imagine the darkness, almost 
 despair, that at times I have been in. But for 
 years I had no one to talk with, as I now do with 
 you, and I have had to bear all, alone, without 
 human help. Words cannot tell you how I long 
 to be out from all low and wrong associations. 
 They none of them have any pleasure for me and 
 I do not believe that I shall be compelled to have 
 any more of them. 
 
 " With loving respect, 
 
 Here, then, was a man " starving " for 
 association with good men and women. 
 Back there under the shadow lay his evil 
 associations and his bad associates. Out 
 here he had come into the trailing light left 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 streaming into his tear-dimmed eyes by the 
 disappearing life of the little baby whom he 
 had passionately loved. If he was to stay 
 out and follow on he must find new associa- 
 tions, other places to be in, better things to 
 do, " good and Christian men and women " 
 to associate with. Religion meant to him 
 changed relationships. And the change of 
 associations was the condition, if not the 
 equivalent, of his conversion. To find the 
 good God, he was seeking better men and 
 women. Not only to him, but to those of us 
 who knew him, the one hope he had of the 
 divine companionship was in finding men 
 and women who were companionable with 
 his new-found life. The very existence of 
 his new ideals depended upon his finding 
 human conditions and relationships which 
 were at least compatible with them. 
 
 But scarcely had this former gambler 
 found his own place among the kinship of 
 his new spirit than " the way of life " led him 
 through the valley of the shadow of death. 
 
THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 ^tricken by an occupational disease in the 
 only employment which opened to him, his 
 manhood stood the supreme test of sacrific- 
 ing all for the highest and the best. When 
 asked whether he would rather be as he had 
 been, in the more prosperous ways he had 
 forsaken, than stand at the end of his new 
 life's hard struggle, he exclaimed, " Let me 
 be, I would have lost my crown. " 
 
 In this instance, at least, the new emphasis 
 upon the social conditions and relationships 
 of life was born out of the old " burden for 
 souls." It is short-sighted to ask whether s 
 you should work for the individual or for his 
 surroundings and relationships. You cannot 
 work for one without working for the other. 
 You are not shut up to such a dilemma. You 
 ought to work both ends of the line at 
 once if you expect to meet the real man 
 in the middle. For the approach to the 
 innermost self lies through some one or more 
 of the concentric areas in which each one of 
 us lives, moves, and has his being. " Eye- 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 gate, ear-gate, touch-gate " are the avenues 
 of sense which lead to the spirit. And just 
 behind these senses lies the thinking mind, 
 the whole area of the heart's emotions, the 
 moral judgments and sanctions of con- 
 science; still deeper, the religious feelings; 
 and, towering above all, the imperious will, 
 that citadel to which, as to imperial Eome 
 itself, all roads lead. All around and about 
 the body, mind, and spirit of every one of us 
 also lie the human relationships, the social 
 surroundings, the civic frame-work, the 
 hereditary and historical antecedents which 
 go far toward making us what we are. 
 Through all these areas everything that in- 
 fluences us must pass before it reaches our 
 outer gate and enters in to the citadel of our 
 selfhood. 
 
 So identified are we with our surround- 
 ings, which yet we strangely transcend, that 
 the modern man is less and less able to con- 
 sider himself apart from them, or to con- 
 sider religion real if it does not embrace 
 
THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 them. No man wants any one to tell Mm he~~ 
 loves his " soul " if he does not love him. If 
 you love my soul and do not love me, it 
 means nothing. I do not and cannot take it 
 to be love if you do not care about my life ; 
 or whether my wife can stay at home to take 
 care of the babies instead of going out to 
 work to help me eke out the living which I 
 have no fair chance to earn for my family; 
 or whether my children can have enough 
 schooling to get a good start in life; or 
 whether I have a hovel or a decent house to 
 live in; or whether the city is given over to 
 corruption, so that I cannot bring my chil- 
 dren up safely. What do I care if you care 
 for my soul and do not care for me and 
 mine! For what is my soul? Is it anything 
 less than myself! Is it not all I am or can 
 become! 
 
 And this is the way that same spirit, after 
 it has become the conquest of religion, goes 
 forth to serve its fellows. Listen to this 
 other man's quest for the Holy Grail: 
 25 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 " DEAR PASTOR: 
 
 " In the first place, when we try to help a fallen 
 brother, the odds against us are too great. Last 
 night I believe that man was in earnest. When he 
 said, ' I am tired of sin/ he meant it. He wanted 
 freedom, peace, happiness. What were the odds 
 against him and those new-born impulses? He 
 went out from God's house, away from those com- 
 missioned to do his work. Where could he go but 
 out into the cold, friendless streets of a great city? 
 Then what ? He had no home to go to, no friends 
 to cheer and wish him Godspeed, so he must walk 
 the streets. Were there no warm, lighted rooms 
 to welcome him ? Yes, but he was to shun the dram 
 shop. He did this. He passed by seven, with the 
 struggle which God only knows. The door of the 
 eighth stood open. It did look warm and com- 
 fortable within. So he finally went in, and going 
 apart from the motley crowd of hangers-on he 
 removed his hat, and took from it the little card 
 containing the time and place for meeting the new- 
 found friends the next day. Alas, there and thus 
 I left him. Perhaps I ought to have done some- 
 thing with him or for him. But what could I 
 do? Where could I have taken him? Cannot 
 26 
 
THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 something be done to lessen these odds, to even 
 things up, to give the Lord a fair show with a 
 man who wants to be saved? 
 
 Thus on the field, in personal work, the 
 individual emphasis and the social emphasis 
 are seen to be two sides of the same thing. 
 When men rise up in response to the re- 
 ligious appeal and say, " If you knew how I 
 live and have to live, and where I work and 
 have to work, and how I earn my livelihood, 
 you would not be quite so sure that I could 
 accept this doctrine of the pure heart quite 
 so readily," they may not be believed, but at 
 least we can look to see whether the living 
 and working conditions are such that the 
 way of making a livelihood is the " way of 
 life," or the way to death; whether the ways 
 in which young people seek their pleasure 
 lead them up or down; whether our munici- 
 pal conditions and city government make it 
 easier to do right and harder to do wrong, or 
 easier to do wrong and harder to do right. 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 You cannot have a saved life survive 
 always in unsaved surroundings. You can- 
 not have a saved soul in a lost body. You 
 cannot be half saved, inside and not outside. 
 You must save a larger and larger part of 
 the world's and man's human relationships, 
 and make his surroundings at least compat- 
 ible with the ideals of life which you are 
 holding out to him, if he is ever to realise 
 those ideals. The undoing of " evangel- 
 ised " souls by unevangelised surroundings 
 and relationships is the tragedy of modern 
 religious experience. It is often due, not 
 to the lack of the desire to be religious, but 
 to the lack of that atmospheric pressure to 
 protect and promote right living which every 
 community should and can assure every one 
 who enters upon the religious life. Law has 
 been finely defined as the " steady pressure 
 of divine love. ' ' Every one of us needs that 
 pressure and the steadiness of it. Remove 
 it from those of us who have never known 
 what it is to be without it, and who of us 
 
THE HUMAN POINT OF VIEW 
 
 knows what would happen to him? A foot- 
 soldier in the Civil War said that the car- 
 nage of the battle, the crushing of the bones 
 of the wounded under the cannon wheels, the 
 agony of the dying, were not so appalling as 
 the collapse of character, when men were 
 taken away from the atmospheric pressure 
 of the restraints and impulses to which they 
 had been accustomed at home. 
 
 In his Consular Sketches, Hawthorne de- 
 scribes the appearance of an American cler- 
 gyman who came to the consulate to request 
 him to keep his mail until called for. After 
 the captain of the vessel on which he was 
 to return home had been compelled to sail 
 without this passenger of his, the man re- 
 turned to the consulate so changed in appear- 
 ance that he was scarcely recognisable. He 
 reintroduced himself and asked for his mail. 
 Then Hawthorne, taking the part of a faith- 
 ful friend, held him up to himself so that 
 he could not fail to see that he had not known 
 how weak a man he was until he had found 
 29 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 himself alone, away from home, and lost in 
 the crowd of a great strange city; and that 
 he could not trust himself away from the 
 restraints and supports of his home sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 From the human point of view, the social 
 emphasis, therefore, is just as personal as 
 religion is, and that is about the most per- 
 sonal thing there is. And, on the other hand, 
 the individual emphasis is just as social as is 
 the life of a mortal man. 
 
 30 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 PERSONALITY A SOCIAL PRODUCT AND FORCE 
 
 PERSONS have always been God's first chosen 
 means for fulfilling his purposes. Upon them 
 the selection, use, and efficacy of all other 
 instrumentalities depend. This primacy of 
 personality is everywhere asserted in the Old 
 Testament and the New. In the persons of 
 law-givers and prophets Jehovah revealed 
 himself as clearly, if not more closely, to 
 men, as by the words they wrote or spoke. 
 
 In the New Testament the incarnation is 
 God's own emphasis upon personality as a 
 prime social force. His love for the world, 
 wise enough to choose from all possible 
 choices and great enough to make the last 
 sacrifice, could suggest no higher instru- 
 mentality for his loving service. So, first of 
 all, God gave all that he is for us, all that 
 31 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 lie could be to us, in the person of his Son. 
 And nothing that he does for us or gives us, 
 apart from himself, can be compared with 
 what Jesus is to us. No pardon of sin, no 
 salvation of the soul, no heaven hereafter 
 that can be conceived of apart from him who 
 is our Brother, Saviour, and Life can measure 
 the Christian's " unspeakable gift." Every 
 other gift " without the giver is bare." 
 
 For Christianity was born with him in his 
 manger, it appeared among men when he 
 " became flesh and dwelt among us," it died 
 with him on his cross, it was buried with him 
 in his sealed sepulchre, it was resurrected 
 when he arose from the dead, it has been 
 going into all the world since he has been 
 with us always, it has been achieving its 
 ascendency ever since he ascended on high. 
 Christianity is Christ. And the old Christ- 
 life is still lived as personally as ever before, 
 if not more so. After twenty centuries each 
 one of us has the opportunity of knowing 
 Christ better than any generation which has 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 preceded our own. For through all these 
 ages he has been drawing nearer, out of his- 
 tory into experience, out of the letter into 
 life, out of creeds into deeds, out of criticism 
 into reality, even out of the Bible and the 
 Church into the daily walks and work of the 
 world its customs and laws, its government 
 and administration, its justice and charities, 
 its institutions and agencies, its commerce 
 and labor, its literature and art, and all the 
 relationships and movements of our lives. 
 
 If the Church is still his shrine, the whole 
 world is his sphere. The Good Shepherd 
 still says, " I know mine own, and mine own 
 know me." But he also reminds those who 
 claim him for themselves alone, "other sheep 
 I have, which are not of this fold ; them also 
 I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; 
 and they shall become one flock, one shep- 
 herd." So the life of the Lord is lived out 
 in the open, where it belongs, with the stars 
 and the green earth, with the trees and the 
 common soil, with every other living thing 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 which God has made; so that every one who 
 seeks may find him, and in him live, and 
 move, and have his being. 
 
 He who was thus given and gave himself 
 to us, from all possible choices of agencies 
 for the fulfilment of his mission, chose men 
 and women as his first means. His first pub- 
 lic act was to call men to be with him and to 
 help him. Following the determination of 
 the rulers to reject him when he felt the 
 greatest need of help to finish his work, i l He 
 called his disciples ; and he chose from them 
 twelve, whom also he named apostles, . . . 
 that he might send them forth to preach, and 
 to have authority." 
 
 Persons, then, are God's first and chief 
 means. He chose them before, and has used 
 them beyond, organization, ritual, code, or 
 book. He has made the efficiency of all those 
 other means depend upon his chosen persons, 
 however much he made them depend upon 
 these other means. 
 
 What is it in the human personality that is 
 34 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 thus first chosen and most used in religious 
 and social work? Was it any one thing, or 
 any certain characteristics, that he chose in 
 them to the exclusion of all else that per- 
 tained to them? Was it only John's heart, 
 and Peter's zeal, and Andrew's brotherli- 
 ness, and Paul's intellect and learning that 
 he chose for his service! Is there anything 
 to be discovered in these men that he did not 
 choose for his use? He had need for all they 
 were or could become. The whole manhood 
 of each man was required for every service 
 he was called upon to render. All that each 
 of them was appears in everything they did 
 or said or wrote. Our personality, there- 
 fore, as chosen and used for service, consists 
 of all that we are or can be. He whose own 
 self we need has use for nothing less than our 
 whole selves. The whole man is his choice. 
 He chooses also for highest and greatest 
 use what there is in each one of us that is 
 common to all. As it is his own capacity 
 " to be touched in all points like as we are " 
 35 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 that enables him to touch us all, so we touch 
 men the best with his power who can be 
 touched the most by human need. The num- 
 ber of points which we have in common with 
 men and at which we touch our fellows meas- 
 ures our practical and efficient service in 
 most lines of Christian usefulness. 
 
 We are apt to forget this law of selection 
 and service in our not altogether unselfish 
 ambition to be distinct from and to be dis- 
 tinguished above others. Although there are 
 undoubtedly place and use for the character- 
 istics which do distinguish one from another 
 an Elijah from an Elisha, an Amos from 
 an Isaiah, a John from a Matthew, a Paul 
 from a Peter, a Chrysostom from an Augus- 
 tine, a St. Francis from a St. Dominic, an 
 Erasmus from a Luther, a Wyclif from a 
 Wesley, a Spurgeon from a Shaftesbury, a 
 Moody from a Phillips Brooks yet, how- 
 ever much a man seems to be used because 
 he differs, his larger usefulness is to be seen 
 in the fact that he has more in common with 
 36 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 men. That really distinguishes men the 
 truly great from the actually small. A 
 greater proportion of our common human 
 nature makes a greater man for the divine 
 spirit to dwell in and work through. Per- 
 sonality is a larger instrumentality than pe- 
 culiarity. The Son of Man was distinct 
 from men in having everything in common 
 with them, except sin. That which distin- 
 guished him from them allied him to them. 
 He set himself apart to God by " taking 
 part " with men (Heb. ii. 11-18). His sanc- 
 tification was consecration to service : l ' For 
 their sakes I sanctify myself " (John xvii. 
 19). 
 
 Such is the distinction we should seek if we 
 would be used by him. Having in us the 
 most that is common to others distinguishes 
 us the best in Christ's work for men. In the 
 light of the incarnation, the most human is 
 the most divine. In Christian experience, 
 the more the divine possesses us for use the 
 more our humanity develops in service. In 
 37 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 doing anything witih us the Spirit makes 
 more of us. The use God makes of a man 
 enlarges his manhood for further service. 
 Manhood, womanhood, and childhood are, 
 then, the means of ministry, to which God 
 prefers none other, than which he uses none 
 more. 
 
 There is something like a reincarnation in 
 a godly life. The Word becomes flesh again 
 in every one whose human nature has become 
 a partaker of the divine, and dwells on earth 
 among men in every such life. Christian 
 character is another and better Holy Land. 
 Paul, the toiler and the sufferer, seemed to 
 himself to be the scene for the re-enactment 
 of his Lord's life and work before the eyes 
 of men. He is ' ' made a spectacle ' 3 a 
 place for seeing, the stage of a theater 
 " unto the world and to angels and to men " 
 (1 Cor. iv. 9). What is best shown forth in 
 the world is, therefore, most wrought into 
 some one's experience. This thought may 
 well comfort us all, but especially those whose 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 mission seems to consist only in bearing and 
 being. They, too, are doers. Bearing is let- 
 ting God act upon you and in your stead. To 
 be wrought upon by him may be the greatest 
 work for him. When laid aside and seem- 
 ingly doing nothing, one possibly may be do- 
 ing the most. What he tells us in darkness 
 may be spoken in light, what is heard in the 
 ear may be proclaimed upon the house-tops. 
 The " shut-in " may " show forth. " As we 
 need what others may be to us more than 
 anything they can do for us or give to us, so 
 others need what we can be to them more 
 than anything we possess that we can part 
 with. What the parent is to the child does 
 more for it than anything he can give to it. 
 The child more surely becomes what the par- 
 ent is than anything he says or does to make 
 the little one what he desires him to be. The 
 poor, the neglected, or self-neglectful, the 
 sinning or unfortunate all need what we are 
 more than what we have. " Not alms but a 
 friend," is the motto of modern philan- 
 39 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 thropy. Spiritual friendship is rarer, yet 
 more needed, than alms or even preaching. 
 It costs more to be something to others than 
 to give almost anything we have to them. 
 But being measures doing. Character is the 
 fulcrum for accomplishment. We can really 
 do for others no more spiritually than we 
 are willing to be to them. 
 
 This thought, that the Lord Jesus finds in 
 our lives a place in which to live his own life 
 again before men and angels, is most sug- 
 gestively and beautifully wrought out in 
 Denis Wortman's Reliques of the Christ, a 
 poem which has in it much of the realistic 
 mysticism of the mediaeval hymn-writers. 
 
 " But my soul, as I thy good 
 
 And evil ways explore, 
 I seem to see the Christ in thee, 
 
 His earthly life live o'er, 
 Thou art another Holy Land 
 (Ah, holy mightst thou be!) 
 The olden joys and griefs of Christ 
 Repeat themselves in thee. 
 40 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 " No longing for His coming, 
 
 No greeting Him with scorn, 
 No mountain for His praying, 
 
 No sea by tempest torn; 
 No cheer of friend, no wrath of foe, 
 
 From manger to the tree, 
 But finds its faithful counterpart, 
 
 Mysterious heart, in thee." 
 
 Scarcely more definite and explicit are the 
 terms which describe his own incarnation 
 and life upon earth than those in which he 
 declares our union with him, and in which 
 the apostles recognised his union with us. 
 " Ye in me, and I in you," is the mystical 
 message of his consciousness and ours (John 
 xiv. 19-23). " It is no longer I that live, but 
 Christ liveth in me," is Paul's response (Gal. 
 ii. 20). And John, who leaned upon his 
 bosom, whispers, " We abide in him and he 
 in us " (John iv. 4, 12-17) . The counterparts 
 to his life in our experience are wonder- 
 fully close and real, as they are suggested 
 to us by those who live closest to him. 
 41 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 He is said to be " formed " in us at our re- 
 generation as at his birth; we " suffer " and 
 are " crucified " with him, " die " and are 
 " buried " with him; we are " risen " and 
 "glorified" with him. It reads like the 
 repetition of the gospels of the letter in the 
 book of his people's life. In Christian ex- 
 perience there is a continuous reproduction 
 of the life of Christ. It is a perpetual incar- 
 nation. The Word becomes flesh as faith 
 becomes life, as creed becomes deed. Christ 
 is recognised as dwelling among men in no 
 way so soon or so surely as in the Christian's 
 life. 
 
 The continuation of - his work in and 
 through ours is also implied. The preface 
 to the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 
 (Acts i. 1) implies that its real title should 
 be the Book of His Acts. It was Peter who 
 took the lame man by the right hand at the 
 beautiful gate and raised him up. But when 
 he and John went to their own company they 
 prayed " while thou stretchest forth thy hand 
 42 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 to heal " (Acts iv. 30). " According to the 
 working of his power, " Paul declares him- 
 self to have been made a minister (Eph. iii. 
 7), and describes himself as " striving" to 
 accomplish the ends of his ministry ' l accord- 
 ing to his working, which worketh in me 
 mightily " (Col. i. 29). " I laboured," said 
 he, " yet not I, but the grace of God which 
 was with me " (1 Cor. xv. 10). Our own sal- 
 vation as that of others we " work out," 
 " for it is God who worketh in you both to 
 will and to work " (Phil. ii. 12, 13). 
 
 ' ' This wonderful change in Africa, bringing 
 light out of darkness, removing superstition and 
 cruelty, unyoking the woman from the plough, tak- 
 ing the witch from the stake, loosening the chains 
 of the slave, and changing the slave-catcher into 
 a brother who did it? Who did it? There are 
 two different names given to him. Sometimes he 
 is named God, sometimes he is named David Liv- 
 ingstone; God is in him, sending him; and if 
 Livingstone with God in him is there, then God 
 is working in this marvellous and mighty 
 
 change." 
 
 43 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 But the apostles' thought goes further than 
 identifying Christ with the individual Chris- 
 tian only. They suggest that God effects 
 greater results through us unitedly than any 
 one of us, apart from others, can accomplish, 
 however wholly consecrated one may be, or 
 however much in common with men and God 
 one may have. Paul declares that " we all 
 attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the 
 knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full- 
 grown man." In thus emphasizing " we 
 all," instead of each one of us, he gives the 
 suggestion of all coming together into one; 
 of the putting together of all that we are into 
 a common life all our hearts into one 
 greater heart, all our little lives into one 
 larger life. Moreover, he speaks of us as 
 " fitly framed and knit together." Each is 
 dependent for the supply of what is neces- 
 sary to all upon being " joined " to every 
 other. "All the body "to which he 
 likened us when we thus grow together in- 
 creases and is built up in its common life and 
 44 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 love, " according to the working in due meas- 
 ure of each several part." What " we all " 
 are, when thus merged and blended together 
 into " a fullgrown man," is a great common 
 life made up of many lives, a corporate per- 
 sonality consisting of many personalities. It 
 is like the body of one great person. Paul 
 calls it " His body." Addressing the Co- 
 rinthian Christians, he reminds them and us 
 of what they and we really are, i * Now ye are 
 the body of Christ, and members each in his 
 part " (Compare Eph. iv. 12-16 and 1 Cor. 
 xii. 12-27). 
 
 This then is the grandest definition of the 
 ideal and function of the Church and also the 
 most practical conception of its mission 
 among men. It is all of us growing together 
 into " a fullgrown man "; becoming " his 
 body," " the fulness of him that filleth all in 
 all "; living, loving, and laboring among 
 men, " unto the measure of the stature of 
 the fulness of Christ." His personality and 
 ours in one ; his spirit in our lives, his mind 
 45 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 in our thought, his heart beating in our 
 hearts, his eyes looking through ours, our 
 hands in his pierced hands lifting like one 
 hand, our feet going about as his, doing 
 good; this is " the Church which is his 
 body," something like a divine-human per- 
 sonality again on earth, dwelling and work- 
 ing in every community. 
 
 This definition in the letter is not larger 
 than that which we may read in life's need 
 of the Church's ministry. What men needed 
 it to be, that its founder meant it to be. They 
 need it to be among the sinning, suffering, 
 struggling, sorrowing, aspiring, despairing 
 people of to-day what he was among such 
 when he " dwelt among us " in the body. 
 We need the Church to be his visible repre- 
 sentative among us, the manifestation of his 
 presence in our midst, the medium of his 
 ministry to us ; to be what he was and is to 
 us all, to express what he feels and thinks 
 for us all, to do what he did and would do for 
 us all. The personal, organized, and unified 
 46 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 ministry which the world needs of the 
 Church, and the Church was meant to fulfil in 
 the world, is all included in this definition 
 " His body." 
 
 This Scriptural idea of each individual life 
 in its personal relation to Christ and fellow 
 men is remarkably substantiated, illustrated, 
 and applied in many particulars by the mod- 
 ern view of the social nature of personality. 
 Modern psychology traces our very selfhood 
 to what others have contributed to us or 
 done for us. 
 
 Self-consciousness is our most personal 
 possession. It comes nearer being our very 
 self than anything else we possess. It has 
 been taken for granted to be something for 
 which we are indebted to God and our own 
 natures and not to others. But those who 
 are gaining new and deeper insight into child 
 psychology assure us that even our self- 
 consciousness is due in such part to others 
 that it cannot be accounted for apart from 
 47 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 them. Thus Professor Koyce, of Harvard 
 University, writing of the development of 
 self-consciousness in the infant child, informs 
 us: 
 
 " As early as the second month it distinguishes 
 its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. This 
 is the child's very first step toward a sense of the 
 qualities which distinguish persons . . . the ego 
 (that is, the I) and the alter (that is, the other) 
 are thus born together . . . are thus essentially 
 social. My sense of myself grows by imitation of 
 you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of 
 my sense of myself." 
 
 Prof. J. Mark Baldwin, of Johns Hopkins 
 University, after quoting these and other 
 opinions of Professor Eoyce, sums up and 
 adopts them in these words : 
 
 " The essence of the theory is that the child 
 gets his material for the personality sense from 
 persons around him by imitation. So that his 
 growing sense of self is constantly behind his 
 growing sense of others." 
 48 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 Tennyson long anticipated these scientific 
 conclusions of the psychologists in his seer- 
 like insight into the developing self so beau- 
 tifully described in these well-known lines 
 from In Memoriam: 
 
 " The baby new to earth and sky 
 
 What time his tender palm is prest 
 Against the circle of the breast, 
 Has never thought that ' this is I.' 
 
 " But as he grows he gathers much, 
 
 And learns the use of ' I ' and ' me/ 
 And finds ' I am not what I see, 
 And other than the things I touch.' 
 
 " So rounds he to a separate mind 
 
 From whence clear memory may begin, 
 As through the frame that binds him in 
 His isolation grows defined. 
 
 * This use may lie in blood and breath, 
 Which else were fruitless of their due, 
 Had man to learn himself anew 
 Beyond the second birth of death." 
 
 For our use of the very faculties upon 
 which our self -development depends we are 
 
 49 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 as dependent upon others as we are for our 
 birth and self-consciousness. We could not 
 teach ourselves to talk unless we heard 
 the speech of others. The only reason 
 why those born deaf are mute is that 
 they have not heard others speak, and 
 so do not put their own vocal organs to 
 use. 
 
 Schools and all other educational means 
 and agencies are made possible only by the 
 co-operation of many. To educate each 
 child, the state or Church or private agencies 
 invest personal and financial resources, and 
 teachers and pupils co-operate. The univer- 
 sity is the universal life helping the indi- 
 vidual to share the experience and achieve- 
 ment of the race. 
 
 Dr. William T. Harris, one of our greatest 
 national commissioners of education, has 
 given us our best definition of education in 
 these memorable words : 
 
 " Social life is the realisation of ideal man in a 
 far higher sense than the life of the mere individual 
 50 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 realises it. Thinking, reason, a rational moral will, 
 a religious culture in the soul are not of the par- 
 ticular man, but they are the ideal of the species 
 and denote the ascent of the individual into the 
 species. This is not a loss of the individuality, 
 but a deepening of individuality into personality, 
 which is the unique phenomenon found in social 
 science. " 
 
 In effect he defines culture to be the rise of 
 the individual into the life of the species. 
 That is, we are educated only as we let an- 
 other individual, age, or race into our lives. 
 For the uneducated person is the one who is 
 shut up to his own little experience and ob- 
 servation, who starts all over again by him- 
 self alone, just as though no one had lived 
 before him and no one were living about him. 
 But as we let the experience and observation, 
 the successes and failures, the knowledge and 
 aspiration of others into ourselves, back 
 goes our sky-line, out goes our horizon, 
 greater grows the world in which we live, and 
 larger is our own life. 
 51 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Professor Baldwin's conclusions are there- 
 fore sound: 
 
 " Man is not a person who stands up in his iso- 
 lated majesty, meanness, passion, or humility, and 
 sees, hits, worships, fights, or overcomes another 
 man, who does the opposite things to him ... so 
 that he can be considered a unit. On the contrary, 
 a man is a social outcome rather than a social unit. 
 He is always, in his greatest part, also some one 
 else. Social acts of his that is, acts which may 
 not prove anti-social are his because they are 
 society 's first ; otherwise he would not have learned 
 them nor have any tendency to do them. Every- 
 thing that he learns is copied, reproduced, assim- 
 ilated from his fellows. When he acts quite pri- 
 vately, it is always with a boomerang in his hand ; 
 and every use he 'makes of his weapon leaves its 
 indelible impression both upon the other and upon 
 him." 
 
 If all this be true, then education is a debt, 
 culture an obligation, which can only be hon- 
 estly discharged by turning back into the 
 common life the best results of what others 
 52 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 have made it possible for us to acquire. He 
 or she who appropriates the self -development 
 acquired through education solely to himself 
 or herself, who thus takes as much out of 
 others and gives as little back as possible, dis- 
 honestly misappropriates what was given for 
 another purpose. 
 
 When with his family the writer was about 
 to enter upon settlement residence at Chicago 
 Commons, he was thus challenged by a 
 Eussian- Jewish workingman: " I suppose 
 you know that you owe it to us to share what 
 you are and have with us. Well, you do, for 
 while you are learning, we are labouring ; and 
 if we, who may have as much capacity for 
 learning as you, cease to labour, you would 
 have no leisure to learn. " On leaving that 
 same settlement household for his university 
 course, a resident was followed to Harvard 
 by a letter from his friend, also a Jewish 
 workingman, to this fine effect : ' ' Do not for- 
 get that your education cost more than you or 
 your father can ever pay for. Therefore make 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 return in glorious light for all the oil that is 
 being poured into the lamp of your life." 
 
 Every school-trained boy and girl, man and 
 woman, should as plainly be made aware that 
 neither the family nor the Church, neither 
 the state nor private endowments provide 
 educational advantages for exclusively per- 
 sonal use. The service of others or of the 
 public is expected of every one whom others 
 y ^educate. And there is no self-educated per- 
 son, as there is no " self-made " man. Those 
 who think they have made themselves gen- 
 erally worship their maker. 
 
 Selfhood rounds itself out by service. It 
 culminates in offering the highest expression 
 of our best selves to others. Self-sacrifice 
 in service is really, therefore, self-develop- 
 ment. Phillips Brooks has given us the fin- 
 est balance between these two apparently 
 opposite, but actually supplemental elements 
 of a normal life : 
 
 * ' And so these two, self-culture and self-sacrifice, 
 both present themselves as true and pressing duties 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 of a human existence. No man has any right to 
 contemplate the life before him, no man has any 
 right to be living at any moment of his life, unless 
 he knows himself to be doing all that he can to 
 develop his soul and make it shine with its peculiar 
 lustre in the firmament of existence. And no man 
 has a right to be living at any moment unless he 
 is also casting himself away and entering into the 
 complete and devoted service of his fellow men. 
 In order to cultivate himself more completely, the 
 man is to sacrifice himself more completely. In 
 order to sacrifice himself more completely, he is 
 to cultivate himself more completely. These two 
 great principles of existence will only come into 
 harmony with one another in mutually adminis- 
 tering to one another, as they pour themselves out 
 together and mingle with one another, and find 
 themselves a part of the great plan of God. Self- 
 culture and self-sacrifice these two have been the 
 great inspiring forces of existence in all ages, in 
 every land." 
 
 If he who reads shrinks back from this as 
 from self -extinction, he should listen to what 
 55 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the apostle Paul said to those who were long 
 ago overheard murmuring, " This is to die." 
 " Yes," replied the apostle, " ye are dead, 
 and your life is hid with Christ in God. 
 When Christ who is our life shall appear, 
 then shall ye also appear with him in glory." 
 Thus all the great servants of God and men 
 have disappeared in the hidden life; Moses 
 to deliver Israel from Egypt, Elijah to save 
 Israel from Ahab, Paul himself to turn to 
 the Gentiles, David Livingstone to heal ' ' the 
 open sore of the world " in the dark conti- 
 nent of Africa, Florence Nightingale to as- 
 suage the horrors of war as the angel of the 
 battlefield, John Howard to deliver the cap- 
 tives from the dungeons of Europe, Lord 
 Shaftesbury to do justice to England's work- 
 ing men, women, and children in the factory 
 acts, Lincoln to save the union which could 
 not exist " half free and half slave." But 
 these all reappear in the glory of our saved 
 country, of England's industrial democracy, 
 of furled battle-flags, and in the rising of 
 56 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 " the sun of righteousness with healing in his 
 wings " over all lands and peoples. Time 
 enough, then, for us to reappear from our 
 hidden life when Christ appears in the glory 
 of what we are working with him to achieve. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CALX. AND EQUIPMENT FOB EFFECTIVE 
 SERVICE 
 
 Two great needs are found to be in a dead- 
 lock everywhere. Not only more workers 
 but more kinds of workers are everywhere 
 imperatively needed. And in nearly every 
 community there are undeveloped capacities 
 and untrained aptitudes, not only unutilised 
 but actually perishing because unused or mis- 
 directed. These personal resources are ade- 
 quate and diversified enough to meet the need 
 of almost every community. Much of the 
 energy and ability of our youth, aroused and 
 spending itself with glorious abandon, is mis- 
 directed and " spent. " How shall we apply 
 this precious power? Talents of the first or- 
 der lie folded in the napkin of manly reserve 
 and womanly delicacy. People's willingness 
 58 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 to work is gradually overcome by their fear 
 that they cannot do anything, or by their cer- 
 tainty that they cannot do it well. They thus 
 become unwilling to attempt that for which 
 they come to believe they have no ability nor 
 aptitude. How shall we put them to work? 
 Our leaders are trying to do the work of a 
 thousand people, instead of putting a thou- 
 sand people to work. Is there any way of 
 doing so except by making each one con- 
 scious of what he or she really is, how he or 
 she is actually equipped by nature and ac- 
 quirement to serve, and of the opportunities 
 available to train himself or herself for 
 service? 
 
 We have already gleaned Scriptural and 
 scientific reasons for thinking that our per- 
 sonality, which consists in what we share 
 with others, measures our capacity to 
 serve them by the number of points at which 
 we come in contact and are identified 
 with them ; that our individuality is as neces- 
 sary and useful in sharpening up our apti- 
 59 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 tndes to meet those points of contact. Both 
 personality and individuality are required to 
 make any one serviceable. 
 
 Phillips Brooks' greatest description of 
 preaching and preparation for it as prac- 
 tically describes the pith and point of all 
 other social work : 
 
 " Truth through personality is our description 
 of real preaching. It has in it two essential ele- 
 ments, truth and personality. Neither of those can 
 it spare and still be preaching. The truth must 
 come really through the person, not merely over 
 his lips, not merely into his understanding and 
 out through his pen. It must come through his 
 character, his affections, his whole intellectual and 
 moral being. It must come genuinely through 
 him. 
 
 ' ' In balancing the use to be made of personality 
 and of individuality, the principle of personality 
 once admitted involves the individuality of every 
 preacher. Every preacher should utter the truth 
 in his own way and according to his own nature. 
 It must come not only through man but through 
 men. If you monotonise men you lose their human 
 60 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 power to a large degree. If you could make all 
 men think alike, it would be very much as if no 
 man thought at all as, when the whole earth moves 
 together with all that is upon it, everything seems 
 still." 
 
 His conclusion is as true of all ministering 
 as it is of " the ministry, " that the prepara- 
 tion for all human service 
 
 " must be nothing less than the making of a man. 
 It cannot be the mere training to certain tricks. 
 It cannot be even the furnishing of abundant 
 knowledge. It must be nothing less than the 
 kneading and tempering of a man's whole nature 
 till it becomes of such a consistency and quality 
 as to be capable of transmission." 
 
 Such work is done only by men and women 
 ministering, and the ministering is always 
 and everywhere measured by the manhood 
 and womanhood of those who minister. 
 
 Light is greatly needed upon the call to 
 usefulness. The conception of what a 1 1 call >: 
 61 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 is, not only keeps many young men out 
 of the ministry, but prevents the great 
 majority of church-members, and others who 
 have the religious spirit, from recognising 
 and responding to their varied callings. The 
 general warrant for every one doing some- 
 thing may be acknowledged ; the need for all 
 that can be done may not be denied ; the de- 
 sire and impulse to do more may be admitted 
 in a conscience-stricken way; the accessible 
 sources of knowledge concerning the work 
 and its message may be well known ; and yet, 
 if the consciousness of the special call or 
 personal duty be lacking, there may not be 
 sufficient momentum given by all these gen- 
 eral considerations to carry even a devout 
 soul over specific obstacles. 
 
 The study of the call to discipleship (John 
 i. 35-51) and the call to apostleship (Mark 
 iii. 13-15) discloses the way by which the 
 worker is drawn to the work. Here, and 
 throughout Scripture history, it is a process 
 of selection by which work and workers are 
 62 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 brought together. Far too much emphasis 
 has been laid upon the invariable necessity 
 of a direct, supernaturally expressed " call," 
 such as some of the prophets and the apos- 
 tles are supposed to have actually heard from 
 heaven. How far, even in these few most 
 exceptional cases, the call may have been 
 heard only within, and how far what was 
 ' ' said ' * found its utterance to them through 
 such circumstances and experiences as are 
 common to the religious life, is a fruitful 
 theme of study. Even some of the most 
 direct calls made upon the workers of Bible 
 days came to them out of plainly dis- 
 cernible processes of experience, by which 
 they had been gradually prepared to be 
 called, and without which they could 
 hardly have been capable of hearing or 
 obeying. 
 
 Excepting these few extraordinary cases, 
 
 the " call " by which the person was led into 
 
 discipleship and service was a process. In 
 
 John's Chapter of Eurekas, those whom the 
 
 63 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 seeker " finds " exultingly cry, " We have 
 found him! " They whom he thus silently 
 sought had been silently seeking, until at last 
 they needed Jesus only to approach, and John 
 only to look upon them and speak, in order 
 to recognise their call to follow and serve 
 him. Thus drawn, they run after him. 
 Seeking, they are found. Beneath the con- 
 sciousness of their response, and accounting 
 for it, is to be discerned the operation of a 
 great law of spiritual selection. 
 
 There, on the Jordan's banks, as every- 
 where else since, there have been " diversi- 
 ties of workings, but the same God." As 
 John the Baptist introduced Andrew to 
 Jesus, and Andrew ' ' findeth first his own 
 brother Simon, and brought him unto Jesus, ' ' 
 so personal influence continues to be the me- 
 dium of communication between the will and 
 its duty. Prayer, too, has its preeminent 
 place given in this great scene of the choice 
 of the Twelve. Nowhere is its solemn im- 
 portance and practical efficacy more impress- 
 es 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 ively set forth than in Luke's preface to the 
 Master's call of the cabinet of his Kingdom: 
 " He went out into the mountain to pray; 
 and he continued all night in prayer to God. 
 And when it was day, he called his disciples ; 
 and he chose from them twelve, whom also 
 he named apostles." 
 
 To the type of this first call to discipleship 
 and service modern experience conforms. In 
 very much the same way in which every other 
 decision of life is or ought to be reached, this 
 call to religious and social work is being and 
 must be decided. Out of the providential 
 combination of circumstances, through the 
 convergence of influences from above, about, 
 and within, " by the pull of numerous 
 forces," the divine call is to be expected. 
 The whole trend of life may generally be 
 seen to lead up to it. In his impressive 
 treatment of the call to the ministry, Dr. 
 Nathaniel J. Burton thus impresses upon us 
 the comfort and significance of a growing 
 call to minister: 
 
 65 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 " Calls may begin feeble (they often do), but 
 as the years go on and our work goes on, the call 
 ought to go on too, from strength to strength, being 
 more and more articulate, affirmative, and inspir- 
 ing. There is a band of music moving about the 
 streets of the city and it is curious to notice in 
 what alternating swells and falls it comes to you. 
 Now you hear it and now you hear it not. A 
 waft of wind has caught it. A line of buildings 
 intervenes, or possibly the musicians themselves 
 have ceased from their strong blasts, and are mov- 
 ing through their gentler and half inaudible pas- 
 sages. So it is with this other and more heavenly 
 music, the music of God's voice inviting us to be 
 co-workers with him in the gospel of his son. That 
 great authentic voice comes to us through this and 
 that medium, even as the air at large is made to 
 deliver itself melodiously through the several in- 
 struments of the band; but for various reasons, 
 some innocent and some not, that one dearest music 
 of our life, as chosen men of God, finds its way 
 to our ears inconstantly. Various unpardonable 
 winds sweep in. Various infirmities whereunto we 
 were born and from which we cannot wholly escape 
 interpose their confusion. Possibly an occasional 
 66 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 miserable gust from the outlying hells of the uni- 
 verse points this way to hinder our hearing. All 
 this is incidental to a life on earth. But no real 
 minister will consent, or will be called upon to 
 consent, to a lifelong loss of a supernatural com- 
 mission. By and by the old music will come back. 
 In some watch of the night, in some moment of 
 prayer and mourning, in some studious hour, in 
 some praying assembly of God's people, by some 
 bed where a saint lies dying, in the uplifted de- 
 livery of some sermon, somewhere and before long, 
 he will catch again that voice of voices, that call 
 of his Heavenly Father, and straightway his work 
 will be transfigured before him again and he will 
 bear the strength of ten." 
 
 The sense of personal unfitness for service, 
 which often counteracts the consciousness of 
 the divine call to render it, suggests the study 
 of the character-training by which prophets, 
 apostles, and the " chosen people " were fit- 
 ted for their work. It is selected, equipped, 
 and trained personalities that are the chosen 
 means for ministry. The purpose and man- 
 67 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ner of this training are both emphasised by 
 the fact that " he calleth unto him whom he 
 himself would; and they came unto him. 
 And he appointed twelve that they should be 
 with him, and that he might send them forth 
 to preach, and to have authority " (Mark iii. 
 13-15). To "be with him " we are called 
 first of all. And being with him is both an 
 end in itself and a means to a further pur- 
 pose. Character is religion's greatest 
 achievement and the instrumentality of all 
 its accomplishments. Our sending forth de- 
 pends upon our being with him. The forth- 
 going upon service is measured by our in- 
 coming to fellowship with God and fellow 
 men. 
 
 Nowhere is the relation between prepara- 
 tion and service more impressively stated 
 than by Jesus' own life. How dispropor- 
 tionately long seem those thirty years of 
 silent preparation to the three brief years of 
 his public ministry! Yet in what contrast 
 with any three years of any other life or 
 68 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 with all the years of the longest and greatest 
 of lives stand those three years of his toil! 
 The fact that he was but three years in doing 
 all that he did is not without its connection 
 with the other fact that he was all of thirty 
 years in becoming what he was and in pre- 
 paring to do what he did. 
 
 The place in the plan of Christ 's life given 
 to the training of the Twelve is also most em- 
 phatic testimony to the divine sense of the 
 necessity of preparation for service. More 
 than by anything else his life-plan is to be 
 discerned in the requirements of and pro- 
 vision for the training of the disciples. This 
 was the purpose that lay nearest to his heart. 
 Every act and word, miracle and discourse, 
 took its bearings from and had its bearing 
 upon the development of their characters. 
 The study of our Lord's life as the school for 
 the training of his disciples reveals new plan 
 and purpose in his whole earthly career. 
 
 Two distinct aims are apparent in this 
 training, to the accomplishment of which two 
 69 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 different periods of their discipleship and his 
 life were devoted. The first effort of their 
 great teacher was negative to liberate them 
 from the limitations of their natures and sur- 
 roundings. Fundamental qualities and ca- 
 pacities are discoverable in the first six of 
 the disciples which became the basis for at- 
 tainment of character that qualified them for 
 their service. The brotherliness of Andrew 
 and Philip (John i. 41, 45), reappears in 
 larger mould in John xii. 20-22. Through 
 the Simon of John i. 42, Jesus saw the Rock- 
 Man, Peter, of Matthew xvi. 16-19. John's 
 coming to Christ, to see and abide, stands for 
 that love and loyalty to which all the prom- 
 ises are made (John i. 39). Nathaniel's 
 guilelessness is the lowermost layer of the 
 foundation of Christian character. (John i. 
 47, compared with Matt. vi. 22-24.) 
 
 Yet these very fundamental elements of 
 
 character were fettered and bound down by 
 
 the limitations of their own natures, the force 
 
 of fixed habits, the restrictions of false teach- 
 
 70 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 ing and custom, and the iron-earth and brass- 
 heavens of their hard age. 
 
 To the rescue of their imprisoned spirits 
 and their suppressed hearts the great Lib- 
 erator came proclaiming release, the recov- 
 ering of sight, the binding together of their 
 fragmentary lives, the opening of the prison, 
 and the liberty of life. Through all the early 
 part of their discipleship he did little else 
 than ring in their ears this proclamation of 
 their emancipation. Most of his words were 
 blows to strike off their shackles of self and 
 sin. Most of their trials of heart and faith 
 were the forges in which habit and custom 
 were melted off. Most of the wonder-works 
 they saw him do were done to let the op- 
 pressed go free and to display the glorious 
 liberty of the children of God. 
 
 Such, too, must be the initial experience of 
 our spiritual apprenticeship. It lies in the 
 deeds that must be undone, in the thoughts 
 that must be unlearned, in honest dissent 
 from hitherto careless assent, in squaring 
 71 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 11 hearsay " theories with facts, in surren- 
 dering self and the very consciousness of it. 
 But this conquest is the price of our liberty 
 to live, to labor, and to love. Dispossession 
 is the condition of being possessed with the 
 divine purpose. 
 
 With the opening of the last year of their 
 training a great change is noticeable in the 
 form and purpose of Christ's teaching and 
 discipline. In the main, the manner of his 
 speech becomes more direct and plain, more 
 unreserved and confidential. He talks with 
 them no longer as servants but as friends. 
 He turns from what they should not be and 
 what they should not do to tell them what 
 they are to be and do. Affirmatives replace 
 negatives in doctrine as well as in morals. 
 Gradually he teaches the hard and high 
 things as they are ready to bear them. Such 
 is the positive training in character for which 
 negative discipline is only and always pre- 
 paratory. 
 
 Thus, the first disciples shared his pur- 
 72 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 pose not to be ministered unto but to minis- 
 ter; they saw that greatness is measured by 
 service and service by sacrifice. 
 
 We have already seen that there is more 
 use for the whole man than for any of his 
 parts. We are bidden by St. Paul not only 
 to " present yourselves unto God as alive 
 from the dead ' ' but also ' ' your members as 
 instruments of righteousness unto God." 
 Our personality is thus represented as a 
 whole armory of weapons for service. We 
 should learn the serviceableness of each in- 
 tellect, conscience, imagination, memory, will, 
 and heart; and by exercise and discipline we 
 should cultivate their capacity and develop 
 their power. 
 
 " The body is for the Lord; and the Lord 
 for the body " (1 Cor. vi. 13). All its mem- 
 bers, also, are instruments of righteousness 
 unto God. The whole man is sometimes de- 
 scribed as a " voice." The eye is the outlet 
 and inlet of the soul. " Beautiful upon the 
 mountains are the feet of him that bringeth 
 73 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 good tidings, . . . that publisheth salva- 
 tion." Awful is the desecration of the body 
 which is "a temple of the Holy Spirit." 
 Terrible is the destruction of that temple 
 when it is defiled. Nothing in the education 
 and religious training of the young is more 
 needed than developing and informing " a 
 physical conscience " for the protection and 
 spiritual culture of the body. 
 
 Besides the implements for service with 
 which we are equipped by nature there are 
 those which, in the language of religion, are 
 called " gifts of grace." Repentance, faith, 
 hope, and love generally stand connected in 
 Scripture with the words " in," "by," or 
 " through." This means that they are the 
 instruments in, by, or through which some- 
 thing is done. Almost always what is said 
 to be done by means of these instrumentali- 
 ties is what is done through them for and 
 upon the individual who possesses them. 
 But there is warrant enough both in Scrip- 
 ture and in experience to study these gift- 
 74. 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 growths of the religious life as implements 
 in, by, and through which we may work for 
 others. 
 
 Experience with our repented sins gives 
 us capacity to be touched with the feeling of 
 others' infirmities and to share in David's 
 and Peter's power to " turn the disobedient 
 to the wisdom of the just." Kindled by 
 love, the faith and hope by which our own 
 souls are saved are the means of believing 
 and helping others into the better life who 
 have no faith nor hope in themselves. 
 
 " God sends us a soul-friend once in a life- 
 time," writes Harriet Beecher Stowe, " who 
 loves us not for what we are or have been, 
 but for what by God's great grace we may 
 become." And she likens this soul-friend to 
 the mother of Augustine, who dreamed that 
 she saw him clad in the white robes of a 
 Christian priest, ministering at the altar, 
 when he was a prodigal in the far country, 
 until he became the saint his mother's 
 prayer-dream hoped he would be. Lord 
 75 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Byron, on the other hand, is said to have 
 lamented, " Men thought me to be so much 
 worse than I was that I became as bad as 
 they thought me to be." 
 
 These natural endowments and gifts of the 
 religious spirit, which we have been consid- 
 ering as " instruments of righteousness unto 
 God," must not be considered apart from 
 ourselves. They are the living organs of our 
 new life. They do not belong to any part of 
 us. They are the organs of the whole man, 
 through which the entire person acts. Man 
 is a unit. We live one life. Mind is a man 
 thinking. Will is a man willing. Faith is a 
 man believing. Partition is the paralysis of 
 the parted member and the crippling or death 
 of the dismembered body. " Soul " and 
 "spirit" have almost perished from our 
 consciousness by being regarded, and so con- 
 stantly referred to as something a man has. 
 Soul is the self, all I am or can become. 
 And the body is also so much a part of what 
 we now are that it is difficult if not impos- 
 76 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 sible to conceive of ourselves as disembodied. 
 Browning enjoins us : 
 
 " Let us not always say 
 'Spite of this flesh to-day 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the 
 
 whole. 
 
 As the bird wings and sings, 
 Let us cry, * All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than 
 
 flesh helps soul.' " 
 
 The great commission of Judaism to invite 
 tbe world to come into the Covenant, and 
 of Christianity, " Go ye into all the world, " 
 commits every disciple of both faiths to ful- 
 fil tbis mission of tbe wbole congregation 
 and cburcb. Although general enough to 
 include tbe work of all, each one must read in 
 it bis own part in the common cause. It pro- 
 claims from tbe bouse-tops all tbat is spoken 
 in tbe ear and within tbe inner chamber of 
 eacb one's beart. Whatsoever bas been said 
 in the darkness to eacb solitary worker is here 
 77 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 heard in the light. Its great common ele- 
 ments enter into every one's summons. 
 "All nations " indicates the catholicity in 
 our ideals and efforts which are requisite to 
 obedience and success, the all-comprehensive 
 purpose of each one's mission. No one can 
 do more. Nothing less will do. Debtorship 
 to all prompts the best impulse and efficiency 
 for striving to serve each. 
 
 But to be good is not enough. We must 
 be better than good, if we would do good. 
 We must know how to do it, we must be effi- 
 cient. " The goodness fallacy " is well said 
 by William H. Allen to be fatal to both re- 
 ligious and social work. No education should 
 be considered " liberal " which does not fit 
 for public service of some kind. No public 
 school fulfils its function that does not fit 
 for citizenship. No religious character or 
 culture should satisfy any church or church- 
 member that does not inspire and equip for 
 serving others. To schools of civics and 
 philanthropy leading students should be 
 78 
 
EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 
 sent from colleges and seminaries, Sunday 
 schools and training institutes, for graduate 
 study and practice to learn to do efficient 
 social work. 
 
 For, all the qualifications to meet the re- 
 quirements of the world-field are identified 
 with the duty and privilege of service in that 
 imperative mandate in each one's great com- 
 mission, " Go ye." 
 
 79 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 CHANGING CONDITIONS OF A WORKING FAITH 
 
 IT is well to pause and poise one's thought 
 in turning from the experience of religion as 
 a personal possession toward the necessity to 
 apply it to the relationships and conditions 
 of human life. For there is danger of part- 
 ing asunder what God has put together, of 
 making antagonistic to each other and mu- 
 tually exclusive the elements which consti- 
 tute the same life and which are inextricably 
 identified in every human being. 
 
 If life and religion are alike in being made 
 up of our relationships to God and fellow 
 men; if the human factors involved in the 
 problem of applying the divine ideals and 
 forces of religion to every life must be reck- 
 oned with; if personality itself must be rec- 
 ognised as a social product, as well as a social 
 80 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 force ; then a religion of right-relationship f o 
 fellow men and Father God is the only re- 
 ligion we can live by or work with. In this 
 very way God constituted both human life 
 and religion itself, according to the Scrip- 
 tures. 
 
 If this is true, then it follows that the 
 emphasis upon the human elements inherent 
 both in life and religion is no less religious, 
 spiritual, and divine. For God himself has 
 not only constituted human life in that way, 
 but Christ himself declares " on these two 
 commandments hang all the law and the 
 prophets." The first of course is first 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all 
 thy mind, and with all thy strength." But 
 it implies a second, and " the second is this, 
 Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." 
 On these two together, not on either one of 
 them apart, all religion hangs. 
 
 And yet there are poor souls, perhaps the 
 most of us, who are trying to be religious on 
 81 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 one of these lines alone, trying to be religions 
 individually while collective!^ we are pagan; 
 trying to live an individual Christian life, 
 while our own and others' relationships in 
 business and pleasure, in society and politics, 
 ignore Christian exactions and ideals, wholly 
 or in such large part that our collective life 
 is essentially heathen. This awful dualism 
 is the ethical tragedy of the age. In the vain 
 attempt to live our life on two levels we lose 
 it on both. Our relationships to God our 
 Father are not ' ' saved ' ' if the relations in 
 which we are living with his children, our fel- 
 low men, are ' ' lost. ' ' No more is our social 
 life sound if it is lived only manward and not 
 Godward. Each of us lives one life, not two. 
 There are indeed two tendencies in each life, 
 but one of them is the main stream and the 
 other is only the eddy. In the seventh chap- 
 ter of the Epistle to the Eomans, that great- 
 est and last analysis of an individual human 
 life, St. Paul, indeed, shows us two laws 
 struggling for the mastery of the one life, 
 82 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 the " law of sin " and, the " law of the 
 spirit of life in Christ Jesus. ' ' But through- 
 out the ebb and flow of the desperate strug- 
 gle, above and beneath the soul's cry of 
 despair and defeat, or of triumph and 
 victory, he shows the " I myself " to be 
 living one life after all, dominated by either 
 one or the other of these two laws. 
 
 So Eobert Louis Stevenson's weird tale of 
 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tells the story of 
 only one man, not two. In effect it powerfully 
 dramatised this seventh chapter of Paul's 
 Epistle to the Romans. For however much 
 there may seem to be two men in one, the 
 man of the story is really only the one or the 
 other of these two characters at one and the 
 same time. When he is the better Dr. Jekyll, 
 he is not the worse Mr. Hyde. When he is 
 the worse Mr. Hyde, he is not the better Dr. 
 Jekyll. One of St. Paul's " two laws " dom- 
 inates the other, as Stevenson's hero is dom- 
 inated by the human spirit of a Jekyll or by 
 the fiendish spirit of a Hyde. 
 83 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 When a discharged convict confided to the 
 writer that he himself was these two charac- 
 ters, as he had seen them acted on the stage 
 of a theatre, he was asked whether he had 
 ever been both of them at once. " No," he 
 confessed, " I have been Mr. Hyde most of 
 the time and Dr. Jekyll some of the time. 
 But as I know that the bad man Hyde is hold- 
 ing down the good man Jekyll in me, I have 
 come to you to help turn me over." And 
 then he wistfully asked, as though trying to 
 recover some lost charm from a dream, 
 11 Isn't there something in the Bible, promis- 
 ing rest to a fellow who is tired of himself? " 
 Back to him came the promise, " Come unto 
 me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and 
 I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and 
 my burden is light." Then he murmured, as 
 though talking to himself, as he had in the 
 solitude of prison life, " That's it. I learned 
 it when a little boy in Sunday-school and 
 often tried to remember and repeat it in my 
 cell, but I never knew it meant me until now." 
 84 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 To be " saved " this man had to learn to 
 live one life, and no longer try to live two 
 lives. And his outer life had to be made one 
 with his inner life. In order not " to be 
 conformed to this world " in which he had 
 been living the evil life, his " world " had 
 to be made conformable to his new life, or 
 it would have perished at the birth. To be 
 i ' transformed by the renewing of his mind ' ' 
 involved all the help he could get from 
 Father God and brother men to conform the 
 little world in which he had lived to the 
 new life he was living. And at the trans- 
 formation, men wondered as they did at 
 Pentecost. 
 
 Somehow we must realise in ourselves and 
 in all the world more of that unity of life 
 this side of the judgment-bar, if our souls 
 are to stand the single test of that last 
 assize, or men are to continue to believe 
 in religion as the power to save them in that 
 last great day and in every day through 
 which they approach it. Many men, seem- 
 85 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ingly furthest away from religion, and con- 
 sciously to themselves anti-religious, are 
 found to relate religion little or not at all 
 with their own human lives and relationships. 
 Almost to the last man, a group of radical 
 working men in Chicago insisted that religion 
 was something superimposed by an arbitrary 
 divine authority; or, if they did not recog- 
 nise divine authority at all, that it is some- 
 thing superimposed by a small class of people 
 upon the mass of people, who are held up to 
 reprobation or ostracism if they do not con- 
 form to the creeds and church institutions of 
 the other class. When told that every man 
 of them had a religion of his own, if he did 
 not accept that of Christianity or Judaism; 
 that his religion consisted of his own ideals 
 of his relationship to God and fellow men, if 
 he did not accept Christ's ideal of these rela- 
 tionships, they cried out against any such 
 reasonable definition of religion as unhis- 
 torical and never realised. " That has never 
 been the religion which the Church has 
 86 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 taught or practised in all the wo rid, " was 
 their rejoinder. 
 
 " However that may be admitted or de- 
 nied, nevertheless, " it was claimed, " this is 
 the ideal of religion taught by the Bible and 
 practised by its truest believers. Creeds and 
 churches, sermons and services, rituals of 
 worship and rules of life impress and express 
 religion more or less. But religion itself is 
 relationship. The relationship which each 
 one of us actually has to God as Father, and 
 to fellow men as brothers, is all the religion 
 that any one really has, although the more of 
 it that he aspires to constitutes no small or 
 unreal part of his religious faith and hope." 
 This humanized definition of religion so over- 
 came their objection that some of these very 
 men offered to organize and join a church, 
 1 1 if it could be called by another name." 
 
 At Christ's judgment-bar, if not before, 
 
 we will be confronted by the single supreme 
 
 test of one life, one religion. There the only 
 
 religion that stands the final test is one that 
 
 87 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 covers the whole life and all its relation- 
 ships. There will be found such " unity of 
 faith and knowledge of the Son of God " 
 that there will be no distinction between the 
 individual and the social, the secular and the 
 religious, the physical and the spiritual, the 
 human and the divine, in either life or re- 
 ligion. There it will be no excuse to say 
 that you did not know it was religious to feed 
 the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, take 
 the stranger in, clothe the naked, visit the 
 sick, and come unto the prisoner. Neverthe- 
 less the Saviour-judge will say, " Inasmuch 
 as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye 
 did it not unto me." For so identified is he 
 with each one of us, 
 
 " So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 So near is God to man," 
 
 that the Son of Man from his judgment- 
 throne does not recognise anything to be 
 divine that is not human, does not acknowl- 
 88 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 edge anything as done to him which is denied 
 to his brother men, does not welcome to his 
 presence those claiming relationship to him 
 who ignore or deny their relations with the 
 least and the lowliest, with each and all of 
 woman born. Indeed, ' ' the righteous ' ' seem 
 to be the more welcome from the fact that 
 when rewarded for doing unto their brethren 
 what Christ would have had them do unto 
 him, they answered him saying, " Lord, 
 when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or 
 athirst, and gave thee drink? And when saw 
 we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or 
 naked, and clothed thee? And when saw we 
 thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? ' 
 Just because they did it only for the sake of 
 their brethren themselves, the Christ- judge 
 seems the better pleased to take it as done 
 unto himself. God Almighty thus identifies 
 himself with every human being, and if you 
 and I do not, we are not God-like, we are not 
 yet restored to the likeness of the image of 
 our Father in heaven in which he made us to 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 be man-like. We cannot be like him until 
 " we see Mm as he is." 
 
 This religion of relationship is surely if 
 slowly being attained and never more genu- 
 inely and rapidly than now. There is a shift 
 of emphasis in the appeal of both evangelism 
 and nurture which aligns religion far more 
 closely with the social consciousness of the 
 age. 
 
 The " soul " that is saved is not now 
 said to be any part of a person, not even 
 the highest and best part of us, but it is 
 nothing less than the whole self, all we are 
 or may become, the man, the woman, the 
 child. The emphasis which used to be so 
 exclusively placed upon the future life has 
 shifted a more proportionate part of its 
 weight to the salvation of the present life. 
 Passive submission to the " divine decrees," 
 which used to paralyse effort and classify 
 the very race into the " elect " and the " rep- 
 robate," has been happily supplemented, 
 if not superseded, by practical endeavour 
 90 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 to change those human conditions which are 
 antecedent to and surround every human life 
 and which make so mightily to shape its 
 destiny. The whole life of* the individual 
 and the race, to be saved and built up in the 
 fulness of Christ, is the Holy Grail for which 
 modern Christianity is in' quest. To what 
 salvation saves has fairer emphasis, even if 
 it be somewhat at the expense of the empha- 
 sis which should be laid upon what it delivers 
 us from. Sin is less considered abstractly, 
 apart from the person sinning, and is more 
 closely brought to bear upon turning the self 
 from sin. Eighteousness'is more than " im- 
 puted " and stops not sh'&rt of righting the 
 
 relations of each one of us to God and one's 
 
 it 
 fellows. The humanity* Christ has come 
 
 to be one of the most cMvincing proofs of 
 his divinity. For as wee him to be so 
 much more of a man thH any of us ever 
 has been, we are led to think him to be more 
 than man. This shift in the weight of Chris- 
 tian emphasis is surely taking place. But 
 91 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the emphasis as surely weighs as much as 
 ever, and perhaps even more to the modern 
 mind. 
 
 The old " burden of souls " is on the heart 
 and conscience as much, if not more, than 
 ever. But we have our own ways of bearing 
 it in this day and generation. Our present 
 recognition and assumption of this old bur- 
 den are coming to be more diversified, spon- 
 taneous, scattered, and perhaps more real for 
 being less conventional and less exclusively 
 ecclesiastical in their expression. It may 
 seem, therefore, that breadth in evangelism 
 makes it less intense, concentrated, impress- 
 ive, and therefore yields fewer tangible re- 
 sults. Yet more people really care more 
 for their fellow men than ever before, and 
 show it in a greater variety of practical 
 ways. 
 
 Of William T. Stead, London's distin- 
 guished public-spirited citizen, who was 
 neither a minister nor an evangelist, one of 
 England's greatest and most evangelistic pre- 
 92 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 lates said, " He really cares more for his 
 fellow men than any one I have ever known. ' ' 
 In so saying Cardinal Manning not only gave 
 noteworthy and deserved attestation to one 
 of the foremost Protestant laymen of the 
 world, but he emphasized the modern ex- 
 pression of the burden for souls. 
 
 This greatly increased care for one an- 
 other is evidence of a growing religious con- 
 sciousness. Being a Christian is to become 
 more conscious of God and fellow man, and 
 less self-conscious. That is Christ's way of 
 begetting in each one of us the consciousness 
 of our better, broader, higher, diviner self- 
 hood. It is the way in which he hands back 
 to the one who gives himself away in the 
 service of God and his fellow men a self bet- 
 ter worth the saving, because it is more to 
 God and others, and does more for the world 
 and the Kingdom. Eeligion manifests its 
 hold and growth upon the present people by 
 making us more fully conscious of each oth- 
 er's existence. We are more than " souls ' 
 93 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 to each other, we are selves. We care for 
 each other, not as " a case," but as a man, 
 a woman, a child; as families, partners, 
 schoolmates and shopmates, neighbors and 
 fellow citizens. The burden of the soul has 
 become the burden for the whole self, in all 
 its relationships. To be consistent in claim- 
 ing to love souls and to try to save them, 
 more and more of us profoundly feel it to be 
 incumbent upon us to care for the life and 
 limb, the livelihood and standard of living, 
 the health, and well-being, the growth and 
 the happiness of our fellows. 
 
 This shift in emphasis is indicative both 
 of a stern necessity and of the persistence 
 of religious life in adjusting itself to changed 
 conditions. To manifest and transmit the 
 life of God through the lives of men is the 
 problem of religion in this and every age. 
 tests the faith by its capacity to adjust 
 its vital spirit to the evolving form of life, 
 its permanent principles to the changing 
 modes of living, its eternal life to mortal 
 94 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 ^ 
 lives. Adjustment to changing conditions is 
 
 a necessity to which life must conform, or 
 cease to exist. This is the inexorable law 
 of all life, to which the spiritual life is no 
 exception. No soul, no church is exempt 
 from it. Physically, intellectually, socially, 
 spiritually we must change or die. 
 
 This stern necessity to readjust faith to the 
 changing conditions of life is the tragedy of 
 personal experience as it is the test of reli- 
 gions and churches. It is also the attestation 
 of the religious faith and life that they can 
 stand the test. Trying as the transitions 
 are and sympathetic as we should be with 
 those who are suffering their way through 
 them, there is really more in them to reas- 
 sure than to disturb us. Would we not have 
 valid ground for deep doubt as to whether 
 our religious faith, life, and institutions were 
 God-made if they only, of all things which 
 God made, did not and could not change? 
 Should not the shifting scenes and trying 
 transitions through which not only we, but 
 95 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 all others who have preceded us, have been 
 obliged to pass be to us what those of our 
 Master's days on earth were to him only 
 the unfolding of the Father's purpose, the 
 signal to take the next step forward in the 
 progress of his great plan for our life and 
 work, the call to change our method of proce- 
 dure in employing the differing means now 
 necessary to achieve the same unchanging 
 ends? 
 
 Through no greater test and transition has 
 the life of God in the souls of men passed 
 than in the adjustment it is now making to 
 the human lives now living and working, un- 
 der the most rapid and radical changes ever 
 experienced in the history of the race. Who 
 that is at work can fail to recognise these 
 changes'? They are altering the face of the 
 very earth, are requiring us to use radically 
 different methods of maintaining our own 
 existence, are irresistibly relating us to each 
 other so that we can less and less live apart, 
 and are shifting our innermost points of view 
 96 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 from which we look out upon the world and 
 up to God. 
 
 Thus in the inner life of our thought and 
 feeling the natural and supernatural are be- 
 ing brought nearer together than ever be- 
 fore, though rendered no less distinct, by the 
 approach of modern science and the philoso- 
 phy and experience of religion toward each 
 other. The material and the spiritual, and 
 our own body and soul, are more identified in 
 the unity of our thought by the insight into 
 our selves which modern psychology gives us. 
 The individual and the race are coming to be 
 more inseparable in our consciousness of both 
 sin and salvation. God's world and the 
 kingdom of the Father are beginning to in- 
 tersphere in our thought and work, as they 
 do in the Word itself; and the Church can 
 less and less hold aloof from either. More 
 and more the letter killeth, more and more 
 it is only the spirit that maketh alive. 
 
 In our interpretation of the Scriptures, 
 through our better knowledge of antiquity, 
 97 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the Bible is becoming more human, but all the 
 more divine for that. Evidences of the 
 divinity of Christ grow with increasing rec- 
 ognition of his humanity. The reality of the 
 Christian experience promises to be more 
 pronounced as we gain more accurate psy- 
 chological knowledge of the ways of God's 
 Spirit in a human soul. Child study and the 
 psychology of the child-mind, by teaching us 
 how " this little child receives, " is enabling 
 us to manifest the divine life at each period 
 of the child's growth, so that the growing 
 boy and girl can really see and handle the 
 Word of life. Scientific insight into the 
 choices of the human will emphasises more 
 strongly than ever the essential reasonable- 
 ness and necessity of the legitimate evangel- 
 istic appeal, while at the same time helping 
 us to discriminate between what is sensuous 
 and spiritual, temporary and permanent, su- 
 perficial and real, meretricious and valuable, 
 in evangelistic method and result. 
 In the outer world the transition from an 
 98 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 agricultural to a commercial age ; from rural 
 to urban conditions of life ; from working for 
 a living alone or with a few, to working to- 
 gether with large groups in complicated proc- 
 esses of production ; from sharing a national 
 life with people of our own language and race 
 to living and working in great international 
 and cosmopolitan populations this transi- 
 tion is the greatest change through which the 
 institutions of civilization and religion have 
 ever passed. 
 
 But here again in these mighty changes 
 we should see only the Master's marching 
 orders to his people, the mandate of the liv- 
 ing Lord which his living Church need not 
 fear to obey. They are his commands only 
 to apply the Gospel's age-long, time-tested, 
 saving truths so much further as to bring the 
 whole of a human life under their sway and 
 the whole world into the Kingdom. 
 
 The individual " must be born again," so 
 it must be the function of the Church to give 
 every human life a better chance to be born 
 99 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 right the first time, by improving the heredi- 
 tary and environing conditions of birth and 
 life. Kegeneration is as necessary for the 
 community as for the soul, if either or both 
 are to be fully saved^/ More and more men 
 need to be convicted of and turned away from 
 their social, industrial, and political sins, in 
 order to be made conscious of and penitent 
 for their personal sins. The " cross " loses 
 most of its demand and meaning in modern 
 life, unless, in addition to the individual self- 
 sacrifice and vicarious suffering for others 
 for which it now stands, it also comes to be 
 a cross of industrial, political, social, civic, 
 and economic self-denial. The intercession 
 and mediation of Christ fail to be fully ap- 
 plied unless his followers intercede between 
 brethren at strife and mediate peace in the 
 fratricidal wars which shame the industrial 
 and national life of Christendom. 
 
 This social emphasis in religious feeling 
 and work is not new. It is as old as the 
 second table of the law from Sinai, " Thou 
 100 
 
CHANGING 
 
 shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. " It is 
 as Christian as the law of neighbour love and 
 that rudiment of all Christian ethics, Christ's 
 Golden Eule. It is not a substitute for, or 
 anything that is preferred to, the emphasis 
 upon the individual life. You are not shut 
 up to choose whether to work for the indi- 
 vidual or for the improvement of social con- 
 ditions. " Work for the soul to make a man 
 good! " Surely. " And that good man 
 makes his surroundings better? " That is 
 true, but it is only the half truth. For bet- 
 ter surroundings help to make men good. 
 That is the other half of the whole truth. 
 You cannot work for one without working for 
 the other. The surest way to accomplish 
 either one is to work at the same time for the 
 other. We have kept these essential parts 
 of the same work too far and too long apart. 
 Both ends of this same line should be worked 
 together and at once. That is the only way 
 to save the soul and to save the world too. 
 For the world is only the relationship of all 
 101 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 souls. But it takes more and more of a saved 
 world to save a single soul. 
 
 The social, emphasis, therefore, is per- 
 sonal. Individual emphasis, therefore, is 
 social. Taken together their emphasis in re- 
 ligion is no less reformatory for being all the 
 more formative. It is good to criticise, but 
 better to construct; good to destroy things 
 evil, but better to build and plant good things ; 
 good to know what not to do and be, but bet- 
 ter to know what to be and do; good to be 
 negative, but better to be positive; good to 
 deny, but better to affirm; good to re- 
 form, but better to form. "One formatory 
 is better than ten thousand reformatories," 
 said Horace Mann, the greatest of our pioneer 
 American educators. 
 
 It is, moreover, an impressive fact, worthy 
 of the most reverent consideration, that both 
 Judaism and Christianity now, as in every 
 other age, have put the social emphasis of 
 the religion into life and work, before and 
 always more than into literature and theory. 
 
CHANGING CONDITIONS 
 
 Indeed, the social theory and literature of 
 both Synagogue and Church have always 
 come out of their life. No social institutions 
 and life have survived which were the prod- 
 uct of any mere theory. However uncon- 
 sciously to herself, or however unrecognised 
 by men, the Church has always builded bet- 
 ter than they or she knew. Her family struc- 
 ture is the most indestructible and indispens- 
 able unit of society. Her Christian Associa- 
 tions for young men and young women are 
 forming the conditions and relations which 
 form their characters and shape their des- 
 tiny. Her educational philanthropies are 
 raising the abject and subject classes. Her 
 local households of faith have been, and may 
 be again, natural and necessary centres of 
 the community, co-ordinating and bringing 
 into harmony and co-operation all the forces 
 of neighbourhood and national life that make 
 for righteousness and fraternity. Her mis- 
 sionary agencies, at home and abroad, are 
 founding new civilisations. Slowly but 
 103 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 surely, the social moulds for a new manhood 
 are being forged and fashioned, and the 
 structure of a new heaven and a new earth 
 is evolving. The " kingdom of the Father " 
 is the only centre and circumference of a 
 unity that comprehends the material, social, 
 and spiritual interests of mankind. The gos- 
 pel of the Kingdom is sociology with God left 
 
 
 in it, with the Messianic spirit as the bond of 
 unity, with the new birth of the individual 
 for the regeneration of society, and the dy- 
 namic spirit of religion as the only power 
 adequate to fulfil its social ideals. Sociology 
 may yet be claimed as having derived its 
 birthright from Judaism and Christianity 
 and as the science of " the kingdom " which 
 fulfils the covenants of promise in both 
 Testaments. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE RELIGION OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 IT is not more human to err than to be re- 
 ligious. Man has been described as " an in- 
 corrigibly religious animal." Eeligion of 
 some sort is as natural to human beings as 
 real religion is supernatural in its origin 
 and results. Its rootage is as deep in the 
 social relationships, which associate men, 
 women, and children together, as it is 
 in the individual instincts of each of 
 them. 
 
 The very terms which both Old Testament 
 and New Testament use to describe our rela- 
 tions to God are just those which describe 
 our relations to each other. They are the 
 terms of the known quantities which inter- 
 pret to us the unknown quantities of our 
 spiritual relations. Upon the terms of our 
 105 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 family relationships we are dependent for 
 our knowledge of what God is like, of what he 
 is to us and we are to him and to each other. 
 " Like as a father," " as one whom his 
 mother comf orteth, ' ' so is God. We are 
 " children " " brethren " " sons and 
 daughters of the Lord Almighty " " of the 
 household of faith." Love, obedience, sacri- 
 fice are the home terms which reveal our fun- 
 damental religious duties. " My Father's 
 house " is the one disclosure of the unknown 
 future, which enables us to feel " at home " 
 there. If the family terms were taken 
 out of our Bible, its revelations of our 
 spiritual relationships would cease to re- 
 veal. 
 
 So the activities of the " faith which 
 works " are described in terms of our work- 
 aday life, and of our industrial relations. 
 We are God's " husbandmen " " build- 
 ers " " fishers " " shepherds " " yoke- 
 fellows " " fellow labourers " " workers 
 together with God." By such political terms 
 106 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 of civic relationship as " commonwealth " 
 " fellow citizens r " kingdom of priests " 
 -" holy nation " " city of God " " coun- 
 try of our own," we learn to live that corpo- 
 rate life, to share that community of inter- 
 ests, to realise that ideal social order in which 
 religion unites all who seek " the city which 
 hath foundations, whose builder and maker 
 is God." 
 
 If these terms are figures of speech, they 
 as surely mean the earthly types of the 
 heavenly realities. Without these visible 
 signs, the unseen things signified would be 
 unknown. But their significance rises no 
 higher into the divine than their rootage runs 
 deep into the human. For the whole Old 
 Testament and ancient world both show us 
 how surely the consciousness of self and of 
 God roots in our consciousness of each other. 
 Throughout those ancient times men were 
 more conscious of belonging to the group 
 the family, the tribe, the nation than of be- 
 longing to themselves. Their morality and 
 107 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 religion, their rewards and punishments, 
 their life and destiny were family, tribal, and 
 national characteristics, which were shared 
 by these groups, and were rarely claimed for 
 individuals apart from the group. Indeed, 
 consciousness of the group life was so much 
 stronger than the consciousness of self, as 
 separable from the group, that the family, 
 tribe, or nation was the individual unit, of 
 which persons were but fractions. The 
 household, the kinship, the people were the 
 wholes, of which individuals were only parts. 
 Therefore the prophets and the lawgivers 
 addressed the people as a whole ; punished or 
 rewarded families and tribes, without regard 
 to distinctions between their members ; sum- 
 moned the whole nation to repentance; and 
 addressed all the really religious Israelites 
 as * ' servant of Jehovah the sacrificing, suf- 
 fering, world-saving and -serving Messianic 
 r>eople." The personal Messiah is repre- 
 sented as the culmination of this national 
 Messianic history, and as the initiator of a 
 108 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 still higher social order called the " kingdom 
 of God," and the equivalent of the " Golden 
 Age." 
 
 Thus it was entirely natural for Jesus to 
 come " preaching the gospel of the king- 
 dom." It was inevitable that he should 
 group his followers into a fellowship of " the 
 twelve," "the seventy," "the disciples." 
 It was as historic as it was prophetic for him 
 to expect the " kingdom of the Father " to 
 grow up out of this fellowship. And it was 
 practical for his disciples to gather them- 
 selves within the " communion " of local 
 churches and organize their effort to bring 
 that " kingdom " into the world and trans- 
 form the world into the " kingdom." 
 
 From the very beginning of the Jewish 
 version of human history, God is represented 
 as making the world good and declaring it to 
 be so. And to the very end, " the kingdoms 
 of this world " are promised to become the 
 " kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." 
 What then is " the earth " and " the world " 
 109 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 which are said in the Old Testament to be 
 " the Lord's"? What is " the world " of 
 which Abraham is said to be " the heir," 
 which God " so loved," which Jesus " came 
 not to condemn, but to save," and for which 
 he prayed unto the very last not that his 
 disciples should be taken out of the world 
 but " that the world might believe "! What 
 is it but the natural associations of human 
 lives, the primary relationships in which 
 men, women and children were meant and 
 made by God " to live and move and have 
 their being "! What is it but the " cos- 
 mos," the order of life, or the life-spheres 
 in which human beings naturally and inevita- 
 bly relate themselves to each other? The 
 " world," therefore, which " the kingdom " 
 is to win and sway is nothing more or less 
 than those primary, elemental, essential rela- 
 tionships which we call the family, the neigh- 
 bourhood, industrial associations, fellow citi- 
 zenship, and religious affiliations. These 
 constitute " the world," over which man is 
 110 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 bidden to " have dominion," the evil part of 
 which is judicially decreed to be overcome 
 and to pass away and the redemption of which 
 is declared to be the purpose and triumph of 
 both Judaism and Christianity. 
 
 How fatally fictitious the hard-and-fast 
 and mutually exclusive distinction between 
 " the church " and " the world " really is, 
 and how untenable it is coming to be, let this 
 vigorous protest from the editor of the Hib- 
 bert Journal attest : 
 
 " The statement that the race at large is ' lost ' 
 or ruined escapes criticism only so long as it is 
 kept within the realm of vague generalities; but 
 let the attempt be made to find the seat of this 
 moral bankruptcy, or to rail off the solvent rem- 
 nants from the rest of the race, and the charge 
 will either evaporate or be maintained by its 
 supporters at the cost of their reputation for justice 
 and good sense. ... No doubt there are multi- 
 tudes of lost souls everywhere, but that is very 
 different from saying that the race is ruined. If 
 the race were ruined, no section of the race would 
 111 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 be aware of the fact. In the words of Principal 
 Caird, ' The proposition would be unintelligible 
 unless it were false.' 
 
 11 If by ' the world ' we mean such things as 
 parliamentary or municipal government, the great 
 industries of the nation, the professions of medi- 
 cine, law, and arms, the fine arts, the courts of 
 justice, the hospitals, the enterprises of education, 
 the pursuit of physical science and its application 
 to the arts of life, the domestic economy of millions 
 of homes, the daily work of all the toilers if, in 
 short, we include that huge complex of secular 
 activities which keeps the world up from hour to 
 hour, and society as a going concern then the 
 churches which stand apart and describe all this 
 as morally bankrupt are simply advertising them- 
 selves as the occupiers of a position as mischievous 
 as it is false. 
 
 " If, on the other hand, we exclude these things 
 from our definition, what, in reason, do we mean 
 by ' the world ' ? Or shall we so frame the defini- 
 tion as to ensure beforehand that all the bad ele- 
 ments belong to the world, and all the good to 
 the church? Or, again, shall we take refuge in 
 the customary remark that whatever is best in 
 112 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 these secular activities is the product of Christian 
 influence and teaching in the past? This course, 
 attractive though it seems, is the most fatal of all. 
 For if the world has already absorbed so much of 
 the best the churches have to offer, how can these 
 persist in declaring that the former is morally 
 bankrupt? . . . 
 
 !< Extremists have not yet perceived how dis- 
 astrously this dualistic theory thus recoils upon 
 the cause they would defend. The alienation from 
 church life of so much that is good in modern 
 culture, 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. 
 
 " The false dualism will never be ended by the 
 defeat of either member at the hand of the other. 
 The true solution of this, as of every other problem 
 of history, does not arrive until the opposing ele- 
 ments become merged in a higher unity and the 
 claims of the parts are finally overriden by the 
 claims of the whole. " 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 It is into these world-spheres, therefore, 
 that Jesus sends his disciples, as he himself 
 was sent. His imperative mandate is " Go 
 ye into all the world." And into it, further 
 and further, not out of it, must we go, if we 
 obey and follow him, if we share the fellow- 
 ship of his suffering and of his glory. To 
 do so intelligently, individually or collect- 
 ively, we must know just what these life- 
 spheres are which constitute " the world ' 
 into which we are to bring " the kingdom," 
 in order that the kingdom may possess the 
 world and make it a part of itself. We must 
 know what these primary human relation- 
 ships mean, what they are for, what each of 
 them is expected to do that nothing else can 
 do so well, if at all, what institutions and 
 agencies express and fulfil the functions of 
 each of these essential human partnerships 
 which constitute every local community and 
 society at large. 
 
 There is no better way to study and fulfil 
 our social obligations and opportunities than 
 114. 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 to get a clear idea of the function and sphere 
 of the family relationship, of neighbourship, 
 of industrial conditions and relations, of the 
 humanitarian responsibility and service in- 
 cumbent upon any group of people constitut- 
 ing a township, a village, a county, a city, a 
 state, a nation. To find out just what is to 
 be done and just how to do it in each one 
 of these spheres of life and work, there is no 
 better way than to group the actual or possi- 
 ble agencies available to help each one of us, 
 or every group of us, to fulfil our parts in 
 and through the home, as parents and chil- 
 dren, as husbands and wives, as brothers and 
 sisters ; in and through the neighbourhood, as 
 neighbours to those neighbouring us ; in and 
 through our business partnerships and our 
 industrial fellowships, as those who are part- 
 ners with our Father God and are parts of 
 his very Providence whereby he feeds and 
 clothes, shelters and nourishes all his chil- 
 dren, and " opens his hand to supply the 
 wants of every living thing "; in and through 
 115 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the town and city, as citizens charged with 
 the tremendous responsibilities of building 
 and maintaining the frame-work within which 
 every one in each community is born, grows 
 up, lives and works, meets death and des- 
 tiny ; in and through the Church, as members 
 of Christ and each other, commissioned to 
 reveal and apply the ideals of religion to 
 ourselves and to all others in every one of 
 these life-spheres in which we live, or which 
 is within the reach of our individual and col- 
 lective influence throughout all the world. 
 
 What then is the function of the family re- 
 lationship as expressed and fulfilled through 
 the institution of marriage and the hpme? 
 Is it not the propagation of the race, the nur- 
 ture of child life, the culture of the whole 
 life, the rest and recuperation, character- 
 building and satisfaction, of every human 
 being? Is it not to set the type and inspire 
 the spirit which should characterise and dom- 
 inate human beings in all their other rela- 
 tionships, neighbourly, industrial, civic, and 
 116 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 ecclesiastical? If this idea of what a family 
 is for is borne in upon us, will it not impel 
 us to seek and create every agency that will 
 help us and others to make the most of and 
 do the best by our own homes and others'? 
 Will not our effort thus to group around the 
 family those agencies which are most 
 tributary to it, or to which it may be most 
 tributary, help us the better to define, or- 
 ganise, relate, and utilise these agencies? 
 
 If we realised that most of us depend upon 
 neighbourship for our human fellowships, our 
 recreations, philanthropy, and social prog- 
 ress, would it not mean more to us to be 
 neighbours and to have neighbours, and to 
 rescue and restore, fulfil and enjoy those 
 neighbourly relationships which are well-nigh 
 lost in the readjustments and transitions of 
 modern life? 
 
 If " business " and the " office force " and 
 
 the ' l shop 's crew, ' ' the labour union and the 
 
 employers' association should come to be 
 
 recognised as the means and agencies through 
 
 117 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 which the very Providence of God is provid- 
 ing for the preservation, sustenance, the ma- 
 terial comfort, convenience, equipment, and 
 progress of life, will it not most surely and 
 swiftly free each one of us, and also the 
 world, of that sordidness and selfishness, 
 that fratricidal strife and workaday atheism 
 which lay the heaviest curse upon the human 
 race! Is there any other way of turning 
 business into brotherhood and human broth- 
 erhood into business? Is there a steadier, 
 more equitable, more effective way of making 
 ' ' life more than meat and the body than rai- 
 ment, " of making the physical and material 
 serve the spiritual and not dominate and de- 
 stroy it, of making the way of earning a liv- 
 ing also " the way of life " and not the way 
 to moral destruction and spiritual death? 
 
 If politics were invested with no less a 
 function than the protection of life and prop- 
 erty, the repression of vice and crime, the 
 promotion of virtue, the realisation of the 
 highest ideals of each individual life and of 
 118 
 
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 every family and of each community and of 
 the whole social order, would we talk of 
 " dirty politics "? Would we not consider 
 citizenship as serious as religion and a part 
 of it, would not a city and town be like a 
 sanctuary, and a ward and a precinct be a 
 holy place, and the voting-booth and ballot- 
 box a holy of holies'? 
 
 If all life were invested with such sanctity 
 and every sphere of it were sacred, religion 
 would be no less reverenced and its sanctu- 
 aries would be all the more places of privi- 
 lege and power. For then the supreme 
 function of religion would be recognised as 
 essential to all life. And the unique and pre- 
 eminent prerogatives of the Church would 
 identify it with all that is both divine and 
 human. For to the Church the world would 
 look for the revelation of the divine ideal of 
 life, individual and collective; for the in- 
 spiration to aspire to it; and for the power 
 to realise it in personal experience and all 
 social relationships. 
 
 119 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FAMILY: FIELD, FUNCTION, AND TKIBUTARY 
 AGENCIES 
 
 NOTHING human is so identified with all that 
 that is divine as is the family. Like the sac- 
 rament itself, it is the visible sign of all the 
 invisible sanctities of religion; the type of 
 its relationships, Godward and manward; 
 the mould in which both the form and spirit 
 of the Church were divinely purposed to be 
 cast. Historically the family is the single 
 source to which all the synagogues and tem- 
 ples of Judaism and all the churches of 
 Christendom are to be traced. Wherever, 
 like the sun's rays, their " lines have gone 
 out throughout the earth and their words to 
 the end of the world, " they all converge in 
 Abraham's household, and in " the Church 
 that was in their house " who first accepted 
 120 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 the Christian evangel. The temple on Mount 
 Zion strengthened the stakes and lengthened 
 the cords of the patriarch's tent and of the 
 tabernacle within which the nomad tribes 
 shared with Jehovah, their God, ' i his rest. ' ' 
 The portal through which Christianity 
 found entrance to Europe was the open- 
 hearted households of Lydia and the manly 
 Roman jailer, who " believing in God with 
 all his house," " was baptised, he and all his, 
 straightway. ' ' 
 
 From so natural and ordinary and human 
 a thing as the family, such a supernatural 
 and extraordinary and divine a thing as re- 
 ligion sprang, and ever springs. It is diffi- 
 cult, if not impossible, to conceive of re- 
 ligion apart from the family. It is less diffi- 
 cult to think of reconstituting the human 
 race, and the relations which make the race 
 human, if it had to begin over again, without 
 the Church rather than without the home. 
 Indeed, religion could more readily be repro- 
 duced from the family, if the Church were lost, 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 than it could be maintained by the Church if 
 the family were lost. Prior to, and the norm 
 of, the Church, the family is, therefore, the 
 birthplace of religion. The parent is the 
 first priest. The children and household are 
 the first congregation. The Holy Family is 
 the great seal of Christianity. The mother 
 and the child are its sign manual. The 
 Church was cradled in the manger at Bethle- 
 hem. The incarnation, for which that birth 
 stands, is the all-inclusive, fundamental doc- 
 trine and experience of Christianity, allying 
 it with the Old Testament tenet of the crea- 
 tion by one Creator. 
 
 Biologically, the family is the primary cell 
 of the whole social organism. Church and 
 state therefore exist more for the family 
 than the family for either. In its very first 
 function the reproduction of life, the per- 
 petuation of the race the family shares the 
 creative prerogative of the life-giver. It ful- 
 fils his fiat, " let us make man in our image. " 
 Through the family, as through no other 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 human relationship, God continues to create 
 male and female after his likeness to share 
 his dominion. So the first act of religion is, 
 or should be, to safeguard and promote the 
 family in the fulfilment of its primary func- 
 tions for the individual and social life. 
 
 The first of these is birth the reproduc- 
 tion of the race. It is declared to be such 
 both by nature and revelation. Strong as 
 the sex impulse is, the parental instinct is 
 shown to be deeper. Ethnologists since 
 Westermarck see this in the fact that the 
 pairing of birds and the higher animals sur- 
 vives longer than the sex impulse lasts, and 
 until offspring are born and come to self- 
 support. In all normal beings, parentage 
 roots deeper than passion. The religious 
 emphasis upon reproduction is impressed 
 and re-impressed, from the story of the crea- 
 tion, through the genealogies and heredities 
 of Scripture, to the prophetic vision of the 
 Holy City, " full of boys and girls playing in 
 the streets thereof." 
 
 123 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Here upon the very threshold of the family 
 and within its holy of holies we 'are met by 
 the hard facts with which our modern civ- 
 ilisation faces the fulfilment of this primary 
 family function. The cost of living in rela- 
 tion to the reproduction of life, the restric- 
 tion of the birth-rate and excessive infant 
 mortality over against the divine blessing 
 upon birth, the overwork of women nullify- 
 ing motherhood, child labour stealing from 
 the race its play-time and its years for 
 growth, bad housing and inhuman city ad- 
 ministration making good homes impossible, 
 sex perversions and exploitations substitut- 
 ing sacrilege for the sanctity of marriage and 
 parentage these are as essentially the prob- 
 lems of religion and the Church as of the 
 economic and political sciences, as of legisla- 
 tion and statesmanship. For generation 
 conditions regeneration. The first birth 
 very certainly limits the promise and the 
 effect of the " second birth." Eeligion can 
 serve its own ends no more surely or highly 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 than to assure every child a better chance to 
 be born aright the first time so that it 
 may be reborn more surely and to higher 
 purpose. 
 
 It was a clergyman of the Church of Eng- 
 land, the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, who, 
 in 1798, made the first thorough attempt to 
 relate the birth-rate to the food supply. His 
 purpose was to prove that " among the 
 causes which impede the progress of man- 
 kind toward happiness, the chief is the con- 
 stant tendency in all animated life to increase 
 beyond the nourishment prepared for it." 
 
 Although his statistics by which he sought 
 to establish mathematically the ratio be- 
 tween the increase of the birth-rate and that 
 of the food supply were abandoned by the 
 author himself as untrustworthy, and 
 although some of his arguments have been 
 superseded by the criticisms of other econo- 
 mists, this fundamental " Malthusian " re- 
 lation between birth and food is so vital that 
 it persists, not only in the discussions of the 
 125 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 economists, but among the most serious prac- 
 tical problems involving marriage and fam- 
 ily life. 
 
 The initiative thus given to scientific in- 
 quiry into the propagation of the race is 
 now proceeding from a negative to a positive 
 basis and aim. Daunted by what seemed at 
 first to be a fixed limit to the sustenance of 
 life, Malthus over-emphasised the depend- 
 ence for progress upon the checks on the 
 increase of population famine, war, dis- 
 ease, vice, and the restraints of intelligence 
 and the moral sense. It remained for Annie 
 Besant, nearly a century later, publicly to 
 justify and advocate personally applied arti- 
 ficial checks upon the increase of the family. 
 The little volume in which she did this bore 
 the title, The Law of Population, Its Conse- 
 quences, and Its Bearing upon Human Con- 
 duct and Morals, and was circulated in many 
 cheap editions among all classes of British 
 people, especially the poor of East London, 
 with such unexpectedly evil results that the 
 126 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 authoress herself withdrew the booklet from 
 circulation. 
 
 From this negative attitude of despair, 
 inquiries at last are turning toward a posi- 
 tive attitude and a constructive purpose. 
 But even yet the very consciousness and rec- 
 ognition of the human right to be born aright 
 are being evolved through the pressure of the 
 burden imposed by the deficient upon the 
 efficient. 
 
 The new science of eugenics wisely places 
 its first and greatest emphasis upon the ne- 
 cessity and practicability of preventing par- 
 entage among the unfit. It claims that the 
 segregation of the feeble-minded and epilep- 
 tic under proper public care will prevent the 
 reproduction of nine-tenths of the unfit. It 
 further asserts that defects and inefficiency 
 due to social conditions might well-nigh 
 be eliminated by effective protection from 
 race poisons due to vice-diseases, alcohol, 
 and some occupational infections. If " the 
 ground-work of a real science of heredity ' 
 127 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 is confessed to be as yet " not sufficient to 
 justify any active measures to guide the par- 
 enthood of the worthy, " the possibilities of 
 positive measures are nevertheless the hope 
 of these pioneers who are patiently investi- 
 gating the way toward this new human ad- 
 vance. 
 
 Some noteworthy practical recognitions 
 have already been given this movement of 
 scientists from unexpected quarters. The 
 American stock breeders' faith in the suc- 
 cess of their own efforts to improve the breed 
 of animals is sufficient to inspire them to 
 add a department of eugenics to the investi- 
 gational work of their effective association. 
 The first legislative recognition of a eugenic 
 public policy was given by the British parlia- 
 mentary measures of 1909, providing for a 
 " maternity benefit " in the industrial insur- 
 ance act, and the remission of 7s. 6d. for 
 every child from the income tax upon the 
 head of each family. 
 
 The first ecclesiastical body to act with 
 128 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 practical effect to this end is the Episcopal 
 Cathedral at Chicago. With the approval of 
 Bishop Charles P. Anderson, Dean Walter 
 T. Simmer announces that no persons will be 
 married there who do not present to the 
 clergy a certificate from a reputable physi- 
 cian certifying that they are physically and 
 mentally normal and have neither incurable 
 nor communicable disease. In announcing 
 this decision Dean Sumner well says: 
 "Surely one has only to make a survey of 
 conditions as they exist to-day to be aroused 
 to do something that there shall not be left in 
 the wake of married life sterility, insanity, 
 paralysis, blinded eyes of little babes, the 
 twisted limbs of deformed children, physical 
 rot and mental decay." 
 
 The combined efforts of religion, educa- 
 tion, and economics are nowhere seen to be 
 so necessary to the safety of the individual, 
 the protection and promotion of the family, 
 and the progress of the race as in the regula- 
 tion of sex relationships and the control of 
 129 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the birth-rate. Economic statistics of the 
 cost of living and of the ratio of births to it 
 avail little without the sex education of the 
 individual and the religious motive power 
 behind that. Indeed, economic conditions 
 adverse to family life always increase the 
 temptations of men to gratify sex impulse 
 outside of family relations, multiply illegiti- 
 mate births, and result in desertions of wives 
 and children and ever more divorces. Edu- 
 cational efforts have only begun to be made 
 through literature and school instruction on 
 sex hygiene. As yet a very small proportion 
 of youth are thus informed and safeguarded. 
 Even such attempts as are made are due 
 principally to philanthropic and religious 
 impulses and agencies. How to introduce 
 this delicate, difficult, and dangerous subject 
 in our schools safely and effectively is a 
 question that is still doubtfully and hesitat- 
 ingly considered. It can and should be 
 done. But however well it may be at- 
 tempted in the schools, or through literature, 
 130 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 it will be more than offset by adverse condi- 
 tions in the home life of pupils and can effect 
 little without parental co-operation with 
 teachers. So the school and the printed 
 page, however helpful, are not adequate of 
 themselves. Only the family is closely and 
 constantly enough in contact with the ado- 
 lescent girl and boy to assure their training 
 for self-control. Yet as a matter of fact, 
 any direct and effective family effort to this 
 end is sadly exceptional, and such as is at- 
 tempted is almost always made under the 
 stress of religious duty. If therefore either 
 the home or the school does its duty in this 
 respect, it will be due mainly to the initiative 
 and impulse of religion. And religion must 
 seek other than ecclesiastical agencies to do 
 this most personal and yet vitally public 
 work. Through its Sunday schools and 
 parochial schools, through its pastors and 
 father confessors, the Church may do much. 
 But it requires the best efforts of statesman- 
 ship, education, industry, and religion to do 
 131 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the much more that needs to be done, in 
 order to train not only every child, but 
 adults as well ; to influence parents and home 
 conditions ; to repress vice, and protect youth 
 and the family from it; to maintain and 
 develop economic conditions favourable to 
 early marriage, and working conditions at 
 least compatible with and not destructive 
 of family life; and to secure such local 
 and national administration of government 
 as will make every neighbourhood, town, 
 city, state and nation a federation of 
 families. 
 
 In such fellowships, families thus fed- 
 erated will bring into closest co-operation 
 the voluntary and official agencies of each 
 local community; of infant welfare work 
 with departments of health; of juvenile 
 courts and their probation officers with ju- 
 venile protective associations; of child-help- 
 ing and home-finding societies with the legal 
 supervision of all dependent and delinquent 
 children by state boards of charities, county 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 courts, public guardians, police departments, 
 and judges of juvenile courts. 
 
 To fulfil its function in the nurture of child 
 life and in the development of the adult 
 through the fellowships, rest, and recupera- 
 tion of home life, the family needs the most 
 intimate and active co-operation of school 
 and neighbourhood, local government and 
 church. The child is not fully born until it 
 comes to years of discretion. The. law does 
 not regard the minor as a full-fledged indi- 
 vidual. It holds the parents responsible for 
 the child and appoints a guardian to take the 
 parents' place when it is vacated, perverted, 
 or abandoned. The child 's breach of the law 
 is considered "delinquency" and is no 
 longer classified as " criminal," like that of 
 the adult. Dr. Horace Bushnell well de- 
 scribes the child as held in the " parental 
 matrix " of the home during the years of its 
 minority. So vital and inevitable is the 
 " law of the organic unity of the family " 
 which he profoundly interprets and prac- 
 133 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 tically applies that lie is justified by human 
 experience in claiming the most potent influ- 
 ence over character to be that of the family 
 life, which is unconsciously exerted and in- 
 voluntarily received, especially during the 
 first seven years of a child's life. Then the 
 child becomes more like what the home life 
 is than like what we tell the growing boy or 
 girl to be. This fact either furthers or hin- 
 ders the. work of both school and church, 
 teacher and pastor, accordingly as the family 
 either promotes or hinders the efforts of 
 these. On the other hand, the family needs 
 the help of both school and church, teacher 
 and pastor, law and government, in protect- 
 ing and promoting the development of the 
 child and of the home life which shapes it. 
 The sanctity of marriage and restriction 
 of divorce, upon which the existence of the 
 home depends, can be assured only as mar- 
 riage is hallowed by religion and as it is de- 
 fended by the law from wanton divorce and 
 desertion. Teachers and pastors, legislators 
 134 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 and public officials should consider them- 
 selves as assistants to parents in the defence 
 and upbuilding of the home and should be 
 selected, recognised, and used by them as 
 such. Public health officers and sanitary in- 
 spectors should be considered as more con- 
 stantly serving every family than the family 
 physician. The school, with its provisions 
 for instruction and play, is the public annex 
 added to every private house. The public 
 park, playground, and recreation centre are 
 extensions of every family's backyard or 
 walled-in inner court. The juvenile court 
 and its probation officers, the parental school 
 for truants and the reform school for delin- 
 quents are the state-appointed helpers to 
 parents, to aid them in the discipline of their 
 children, or to take the parents' place when 
 they fail. 
 
 If the nurture of child life therefore is the 
 
 prerogative of religion as truly as it is that 
 
 of the family, then the church as surely as 
 
 the home has the most vital interest and im- 
 
 135 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 perative duty in securing such public funds 
 and officials as will make school and park 
 systems, health and police departments, laws 
 and courts tributary to and not subversive 
 of the normal nurture of the child. Pastor 
 and Sunday-school teacher should exercise 
 watch and care over these public provisions 
 for fostering the health, intelligence, recrea- 
 tion, and morals of the children as vigilantly 
 as they do their work within the Church. 
 
 The kind and degree of influence exerted 
 by the home are conditioned by the house. 
 For the house not only shelters but shapes 
 the family life for better or for worse. Bet- 
 ter or worse housing makes all the difference 
 between normal, abnormal, or sub-normal 
 lives; between decency and modesty, where 
 space enough is allowed, and indecency and 
 immodesty, where over-crowding crowds out 
 self-respect. Wherever shop work is taken 
 into the house, normal family life is crowded 
 out of it. When wives and mothers work 
 away from home, housekeeping and the chil- 
 136 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 dren pay the penalty. Transient rental of 
 furnished rooms strips the family of the last 
 vestige of home equipment. Taking board- 
 ers into overcrowded family apartments de- 
 stroys family unity and privacy, interferes 
 with marital and parental confidences, 
 almost always imperils virtue, and very often 
 destroys it. 
 
 What therefore can be more domestic or 
 religious than to secure the proper housing 
 of families such as will make homes possible 
 and successful? Should the sanctuary of the 
 Church be more sacred to its worshipers than 
 their duty to secure right building ordinances 
 and efficient building departments, garden 
 cities, industrial villages, and decent lodging 
 houses for family-less men and women? 
 Should not every church, or local group of 
 churches, be considered by their members as 
 housing reform associations and playground 
 promoters, just as legitimately as associa- 
 tions of commerce are regarding this to be 
 their function! Was there ever a more 
 137 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 monumental attestation of the religious qual- 
 ity of a public service than characterises the 
 framing and enactment of the new tenement 
 house law of New York, which let no less 
 than a million people out of dark and unven- 
 tilated apartments into the light and air 
 guaranteed them by the " new law tene- 
 ments." 
 
 If, as we have seen, the family furnishes 
 the terms and types by which are revealed 
 our relations to God and each other, then the 
 preservation and development of the family 
 is our primary religious duty. For how can 
 religion itself be preserved and developed if 
 the earthly type of it is lowered or lost? 
 How can we even pray " Our Father which 
 art in heaven, " if earthly fatherhood lacks 
 all human suggestion of the divine! If we 
 become so evil that we know not how to give 
 good gifts unto our children, can we measure 
 up " how much more " our Father which is 
 in heaven gives good things to them that ask 
 him? " My father's house " can mean little 
 138 
 
THE FAMILY 
 
 more that is homelike in another world than 
 it does in this world. " The whole family 
 in heaven " cannot fail to mean less to one 
 who has suffered from a divided home on 
 earth. 
 
 So the family is not more dependent upon 
 religion than religion is upon the family. 
 The hope of the one is identified with that of 
 the other. Therefore all that pertains to 
 family life and promotes it is as religious as 
 religion itself. 
 
 139 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SURVIVAL, AND REVIVAL OF NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 THERE have been neighbours as long as there 
 have been human beings on earth. It is 
 hard to tell whether families or neighbour- 
 hoods came first. In the earliest times sin- 
 gle family groups could not safely live far 
 enough apart to be separated at all. So peo- 
 ple of the same kinship formed larger 
 1 ' households, ' ' which the tribal villages were 
 called. From this rootage in kin there blos- 
 somed the whole cluster of fragrant, fruit- 
 ful relationships, reciprocities, personal and 
 associated interactions, expressed by the fa- 
 miliar words kindred, kind, kindness, the 
 contents of which have enriched almost every 
 human life and made every spot on earth 
 where they have rooted and flowered more 
 homelike and heavenly. 
 140 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 Neighbours were those next to each other, 
 both in kinship and locality. To be next to 
 another was to owe him something, and to 
 have some rights which he was bound to 
 respect. Neighbourly obligations were as 
 sacred as those of religion. Indeed, the most 
 ancient faiths found their highest expression 
 in kinship and its neighbourship. Even 
 after the tribes and kindreds began to mingle 
 and merge with each other, neighbourliness 
 survived. It is therefore our most primitive 
 possession, our most ancient treasure, the 
 heritage of the race, the one thing common to 
 all who share the same origin, and to all of 
 different origins who live near each other. 
 
 By an instinct as primitive as this racial 
 possession we shrink from losing it. It lin- 
 gers, however, more among the poor than 
 among the rich, more among the plain people 
 than the so-called privileged class, more 
 among those who have only a " common 
 school education " than among those who 
 are said to have a " liberal education." 
 141 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Whatever other forms of association we sub- 
 stitute for this old-time neighbourship, the 
 loss of it is the tragedy of our new times. 
 The substitution of artificial relations for 
 this instinctive natural relationship accounts 
 for this loss. It is due chiefly to the 
 different ways in which most of us in mod- 
 ern times make our living. In the olden 
 times, people lived in small communities, 
 where they all knew each other and neigh- 
 bours lived and worked together. Neigh- 
 bourship was partnership at least to some 
 extent. Now modern industry has swept 
 thousands, even millions, away from their 
 old belongings. Immigration fortuitously 
 mixes people of many languages and races, 
 both in smaller and larger places, in country 
 and city communities. The adult genera- 
 tions of native and foreign people, thus lit- 
 erally thrown together, cannot mingle with 
 each other, and never would, were it not for 
 their children's ministry of interpretation 
 and mediation. They cannot understand each 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 other's language, customs, antecedents, 
 ideals, except as their children act their part 
 as natural linguists and interpreters of the 
 universal and the human. The stranger in 
 the strange land is almost the commonest 
 figure we meet, almost the commonest expe- 
 rience the newest or the oldest of us have. 
 For in many places where there are many 
 more newcomers than long-stayers, the ex- 
 perience of an Irish neighbour becomes com- 
 mon, and " the longer one stays, the more 
 of a stranger one becomes. ' ' The immigrant 
 family is not more a stranger in a strange 
 land than is the native country family which 
 moves into the city. Both feel utterly lost 
 and alone. 
 
 Although more interdependent than ever, 
 the subdivisions of labor and the divisive 
 interests they introduce divide people of the 
 same community more than ever. Other 
 centres than those of the neighbourhood 
 gather some together and isolate others. 
 Seasonal or intermittent occupations, tem- 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 porary jobs, commercial depressions, occa- 
 sional unemployment, and a general sense of 
 the lack of permanency in the tenure of their 
 industrial positions, pull settled families up 
 by the roots and seldom leave them long 
 enough in one place to take root again. Our 
 manual workers are more and more tran- 
 sient. Many among them are forced to be- 
 come tramping families. More and more 
 men leave their families for a whole season 
 of work in distant parts of the country, or 
 even in foreign lands. When times are dull, 
 or the " season " is over, they try to make 
 their way " back home." More and more 
 of these multitudes of wandering men go 
 back and forth from foreign lands to 
 America, neither they nor their families 
 being at home anywhere. The family can 
 thus afford less household equipment. They 
 have less at stake in living anywhere. 
 
 What it means for the family group thus 
 to lose attachments with others and live de- 
 tached from their fellows, few of us who 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 have never approached this experience can 
 imagine. At first it may drive father, 
 mother, and children closer together, but 
 only at first. For after a little while, one or 
 another member of the family craves a larger 
 life than its own little home circle can afford. 
 As its community of interests narrows and 
 shrivels, each member of the family turns in- 
 stinctively outward, or shrinks up within a 
 hermit self. Instead of going together they 
 go apart. Instead of having friends in com- 
 mon, they form individual friendships, which 
 other members of the family do not share. 
 Americanised children often grow to be 
 ashamed of their foreign-born parents. 
 The education of the second generation be- 
 comes the tragedy of the self-sacrificing first 
 generation. Parents become more depend- 
 ent upon even their little children, to inter- 
 pret to them the strange language and 
 strange ways of the strange land, than the 
 children are dependent upon their parents. 
 There is no more pathetic figure in America 
 145 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 than the immigrant mother desperately cling- 
 ing to her youngest children to keep them all 
 her own, while she vainly struggles to keep 
 pace with her elder children, who are grow- 
 ing away from her. Worse still, some of 
 these children and youth who thus have to 
 grow up alone even at home, or, still more 
 tragically, away from home, yield to the 
 temptations which appeal to the lonely life 
 and feed the starved heart with the stones 
 of impersonal relations and try to live on 
 lusts instead of the bread of natural af- 
 fection. 
 
 Under these unnatural conditions, it is 
 almost impossible for neighbourship to exist, 
 or even for the family to survive. Racial 
 antipathies array fellow immigrants against 
 each otheir. Suspicions born of the igno- 
 rance of strangers' ways keep at arm's 
 length, or bring only within striking distance, 
 the native and foreign-born citizens of the 
 same town. 
 
 These are some of the factors and forces 
 146 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 of our industrial era that destroy neighbour- 
 ship and disintegrate families. Temporari- 
 ness characterises every feature and pros- 
 pect of such a population. The thought of 
 staying in a tenement, or on the street, or in 
 the district in which they have first landed, 
 or where they are not succeeding well, is in- 
 tolerable to those who have aspirations for 
 themselves or their children. Truancy is as 
 natural as the school is new to the pupil and 
 strange to the parent. Neighbourly fellow- 
 ship, the Sunday-school and church connec- 
 tion, too easily seem not worth while, when 
 the family expects to move in a month or 
 two, or not later than next spring. No pro- 
 vision is made by the parent for the play of 
 the child, the pleasure of youth, the social 
 relation of the sexes in a majority of homes. 
 These recreations become as little and low, 
 as unsatisfying and questionable, as danger- 
 ously exciting and demoralizing as they are 
 merely for the moment, or on the spot, as 
 they are provided to catch only the loose 
 147 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 penny, the idle hour, and the purposeless and 
 detached mind. Thus people lose their sense 
 of belonging to anything or anybody, to the 
 neighbourhood, the craft fellowship, the 
 church membership, to citizenship, and at 
 last to the family circle itself. 
 
 But this is only one side of the picture. 
 For the struggle of neighbourliness to sur- 
 vive and express itself in forms adapted to 
 our new industrial times is as brave and 
 hopeful as the loss of it is pathetic and dis- 
 astrous. Sometimes the old neighbourly re- 
 lationship is transplanted bodily by the im- 
 migrants themselves to the soil of the New 
 World. When those who have been neigh- 
 bours in the fatherland find themselves near 
 each other in some American city, they form 
 a brotherhood, usually under the sanction of 
 their church, sometimes bearing the name of 
 the town or district from which they emi- 
 grated, or the name of its patron saint. 
 Thus they struggle to perpetuate their old- 
 time village or town fellowship. These 
 148 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 transplanted villages or town neighbour- 
 hoods, however, are not destined long to sur- 
 vive the rapid and irresistible changes in 
 American industrial conditions. 
 
 The sodalities and orders of the Catholic 
 Church, the memberships and brotherhoods 
 of Protestant Churches, the family-like fel- 
 lowships persistently growing out of and 
 around the Jewish synagogue, which is the 
 most ancient type of the neighbourhood still 
 surviving, perpetuate the spirit of neighbour- 
 liness and give it more or less flexible, but 
 long accepted, forms of development. The 
 fraternal orders and insurance fraternities 
 utilise the old neighbourly instinct to stand 
 by each other in the rainy day, in order 
 to cement a bond which binds together those 
 of different race, language, creed, and condi- 
 tion, perhaps more closely than was done by 
 the old-time neighbourhood itself. The mod- 
 ern clubs to a less degree furnish circles of 
 association around commercial, intellectual, 
 social, and political centres, which, however, 
 149 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 rarely survive the individual member's abil- 
 ity to pay the dues. 
 
 Trade unions come nearer to being a 
 natural substitute, in some instances, for 
 the old neighbourliness that has passed 
 away. Though not lineal descendants from 
 the old craft-guilds, they inherit their fra- 
 ternity loyalty. Community of interest in 
 the same crafts, the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion, which leads fellow craftsmen to feel 
 that they must hang together, or they will 
 hang separately, women's auxiliaries which 
 add to some unions the social and charita- 
 ble features of the family, the sole de- 
 pendence upon the benefit of the union for 
 refuge from losses by accident, sickness, 
 lack of work, the lockout and strike, old age, 
 and the death of the breadwinner ; these very 
 human bonds and benefits make the labour 
 unions the only possible neighbourship for 
 many thousands of wage-earners in America, 
 who would otherwise cease to be or to have 
 real neighbours. 
 
 150 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 Parallel with these survivals of neighbour- 
 ship, other efforts and agencies have arisen 
 to revive it. These deliberate and definite 
 efforts for the revival of neighbourhood rela- 
 tionships chiefly centre about the public 
 school, the public playground and recreation 
 centre, the public library, churches of an in- 
 stitutional type, and social settlements. 
 
 No more hopeful movement to unify and 
 advance local communities, and no more in- 
 spiring prospect of doing so, is to be noted 
 in America than that which seeks to use 
 public school buildings as neighbourhood cen- 
 tres. The common school is common ground. 
 It is, as it always has been and will be more 
 and more, that little patch of Mother Earth 
 which belongs to all of us, to which every 
 one, the newest immigrant as much as the 
 oldest inhabitant, has equal claim, where all 
 of us equally have common rights and feel 
 at home more than anywhere else. The pub- 
 lic school is therefore our greatest social 
 asset as well as our only natural educational 
 151 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 equipment. It is our one great and only 
 smelting furnace where the most " intract- 
 able " ores of our cosmopolitan population 
 can be reduced, by the steady glow of civic 
 patriotism and neighbourhood fellowship, to 
 unalloyed American citizenship. It is the 
 common denominator for the solution of the 
 problem of assimilating the diverse elements 
 of our population into one body politic. It 
 continues to be such long after the town 
 meeting and the " centre church " ceased to 
 be the centres of social unity which they once 
 were, but could not continue to be under the 
 increasing diversity of our political and re- 
 ligious development. As such, both the pub- 
 lic school systems and buildings should be put 
 to their utmost use, not only educationally 
 but socially, not only for the schooling of 
 children but for the training of adults, the 
 development of home and neighbourhood life, 
 the safeguarding and promotion of the local 
 community. Public school alumni associa- 
 tions, parents' meetings, evening sessions, 
 152 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 assembly halls and roof gardens, art exhib- 
 its, gymnasiums and recreational equipments 
 and neighbourhood centre uses are new and 
 invaluable assets in the possession of and at 
 the command of every local community. 
 
 Apparently in most places the only thing 
 lacking to give the community the widest use 
 of its own school property is the education of 
 the Board of Education to a view of its func- 
 tion as wide as the demands of the people's 
 needs upon their schools, and to a manage- 
 ment of school property that shall be more 
 educational, sanitary, and social than jani- 
 torial. 
 
 We are only beginning to share the atten- 
 tion we have paid to the education of our 
 children with the equally serious problem of 
 their recreation. We have been content 
 merely with their physical exercise and have 
 been stupidly obtuse to awakening and satis- 
 fying the pleasurable interest of the child 
 in his play and in the organisation of it. 
 But at last we are coming to see, with dear 
 153 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 old Froebel, that the divinely implanted and 
 imperious instinct for play is childhood's 
 chief concern and the educator's most mas- 
 terful asset. But it is far more than this, 
 for neighbourhoods and cities are discover- 
 ing the civic and social value of recreation 
 centres for the well-directed play of the citi- 
 zenship of to-morrow. 
 
 Chicago clearly leads the world 's way in its 
 emphasis upon this discovery. Not since old 
 Borne 's Coliseum and the Olympic games of 
 Greece has any city, ancient or modern, made 
 such provision for the recreation of all its 
 people, older and younger, as is to be found 
 in Chicago's great playfields, surrounding its 
 beautifully designed and well-equipped field- 
 houses, which at a cost of over $12,000,000 of 
 the taxpayers' money, have become the so- 
 cial centres of its most cosmopolitan, densely 
 populated industrial and residential districts. 
 No better investment of a city's money was 
 ever made than in this equipment for free 
 and innocent play, without the deteriorative 
 154 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 and demoralising influences which the ex- 
 ploiters of youth's natural recreative instinct 
 have been allowed to coin into gold at the 
 cost of character and health, even without 
 competition with the vastly superior public 
 resources. But this well-invested public ex- 
 pense for recreational space and equipment 
 imperatively demands the appropriation of 
 enough more money and talent to secure the 
 best trained and most capable management 
 of playgrounds and direction of play that 
 can be produced by our universities and tech- 
 nical schools for social training. 
 
 The National Playground Association by 
 its leadership towards all these ends, by its 
 practical promotion of their realisation in 
 any community seeking its counsel and by its 
 printed proceedings, which include the best 
 literature on play, is doing a country-wide 
 work of great educational, civic, moral, and 
 religious value, as are the Young Men's and 
 Young Women's Christian Associations, in 
 the practical evangelism of their physical de- 
 155 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 partments. For, whoever and whatever helps 
 children and youth, and adults also, to have a 
 good time without being bad, is doing a 
 great and manifold good, which is not only 
 none the less, but all the more, religious for 
 being so human. 
 
 Equally with our schools and playgrounds, 
 our public library buildings and branches are 
 proving to be neighbourhood centres of great 
 civic value. They share with the schools and 
 the playgrounds the opportunity for widest 
 usefulness. Where they are combined in the 
 same building, the response of the people to 
 each of them is all the greater. Both their 
 opportunity and their utility as neighbour- 
 hood centres demonstrate the necessity for 
 trained children's librarians. Delivery sta- 
 tions and loan collections of books in fac- 
 tories, schools, churches, and settlements, are 
 proving inexpensive and effective agencies of 
 library extension. The public library, like 
 the public school and playground, is open to 
 all comers. Under expert, enterprising, 
 156 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 practical management, it can lift an ever in- 
 creasingly large proportion of its neighbour- 
 hood up to higher standards of taste and as- 
 piration and fellowship. And besides the 
 democratising of culture, it confers citizen- 
 ship in that time-long, world-wide democracy 
 of the " Eepublic of Letters." 
 
 The neighbourhood church continues to 
 hold up the common ideals of religion and 
 generate the power for self-sacrificing serv- 
 ice. But like the town meeting, it could not 
 continue to be the neighbourhood centre for 
 all the people as they became more diverse in 
 religious antecedents and conviction. Like 
 the political parties the churches of different 
 faiths divide the people in separate fellow- 
 ships. But because of that very division 
 they often unite more closely together those 
 within their respective communions. This 
 compact group, if it sees and seizes its op- 
 portunity, will serve its church and faith the 
 best by serving its neighbourhood and the 
 whole community most. By being tributary 
 157 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 to every human interest of its neighbours, 
 they will be all the more impelled to be neigh- 
 bours to the Church. But the Church must 
 be a neighbour itself, in order to have the 
 people of its community outside of its mem- 
 bership, neighbourly to it. Neither the 
 neighbourhood nor the Church can afford to 
 lack or lose anything of neighbourliness 
 which it can promote. One of the supreme 
 tests which the Bible in both Testaments ap- 
 plies is the question put to every one, the 
 answer to which measures the religious value 
 of the character of each: " Who is my 
 neighbour? " 
 
 Where neighbourliness has died out or 
 never been born, or has been weakened by 
 removals, or is difficult because of the differ- 
 ences of race, language, religion, customs, 
 and condition, there a social settlement finds 
 its field to express the neighbourship that 
 remains, revive that which wanes, or create 
 that which is lacking. Whatever else it is 
 or does, the settlement should be the neigh- 
 158 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 bourhood's own centre for the enjoyment, 
 practical expression, and use of its neigh- 
 bourliness. Self-initiated and self-governed 
 neighbourhood organisations should be as 
 much at home there as the supplementary 
 clubs and classes organised and managed by 
 the residents. They should work not to do 
 things for, but with, all people of the neigh- 
 bourhood. The settlement exists not to su- 
 perimpose the ideals or standards of one 
 class or locality upon another, but to help the 
 neighbours develop their own ideals and 
 standards. Its aim is to make neighbourli- 
 ness more interesting, necessary, practicable, 
 and valuable to every man, woman, and child. 
 The settlement succeeds most and best when 
 the neighbourhood comes to the conscious- 
 ness of itself, awakens to the possibility of 
 doing for itself, and realises its ambition to 
 control itself and improve its conditions. 
 
 In the effort to bring this about, this fact 
 demonstrates itself, that neighbourship is 
 best promoted when neighbours have recog- 
 159 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 nised their neighbourhood to be a part of the 
 whole city. Likewise the interests of the 
 whole city are best promoted by cultivating 
 this neighbourhood consciousness among all 
 the people of every locality. 
 
 A sense of detachment of the part from 
 the whole, or .the whole from any part, is as 
 demoralising, belittling or paralysing to one 
 as the other. People lose pride and power 
 in their citizenship with the loss of their 
 neighbourly relations to each other. And on 
 the other hand, their neighbourly relations 
 become interesting, influential, and so well 
 worth while that they cannot afford to lose 
 them, when they are made effective in pro- 
 moting the progress of the whole city. 
 
 Both of these tendencies have been strik- 
 ingly illustrated in the political rehabilita- 
 tion of the city council in Chicago. Seven- 
 teen years ago the voters in most of the 
 wards had lost their sense of responsibility 
 for the character and qualifications of the 
 aldermen they sent to the city council to leg- 
 160 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 islate for the entire city. Their local pride 
 and neighbourhood self-respect in being 
 properly represented there disappeared with 
 their civic consciousness. The Municipal 
 Voters' League, however, had faith in the 
 people to believe that both could be revived. 
 So they entered upon the struggle for the 
 " long distance championship " by inform- 
 ing the citizens and appealing to their loyalty 
 to the home-rule principle, applied to ward 
 politics. And the people did the rest. Ward 
 clubs independently arose, within and be- 
 tween party lines. Local improvement asso- 
 ciations, women's clubs, parish societies, 
 men's organisations began to play politics 
 with a public purpose. As these local groups 
 became conscious of a city-wide sphere and 
 influence they began to take hold of the prob- 
 lems of their home localities far more effect- 
 ively than ever before. The political revolu- 
 tion found the source of its sustained sup- 
 port in the revival of the neighbourhood 
 spirit. And yet the neighbourhood spirit 
 161 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 revived only at the call for civic loyalty. In 
 no other way can the decisive victories of 
 the people in electing the candidates endorsed 
 by the Municipal Voters' League be accounted 
 for. This revolution could not have taken 
 place and maintained its increasing power 
 during the past seventeen years, had it not 
 been rooted in a quickened neighbourhood 
 life throughout the city. 
 
 Very notably did these two influences re- 
 ciprocally develop each other in one of the 
 largest family tenement-house wards in the 
 city. The racial transformation of its immi- 
 grant population had begun to set in. 
 Northern Europeans began to disintegrate 
 and lose heart in the maintenance of their 
 ascendancy in the population. Judged by 
 their representatives in the council, however, 
 their political ideals and independence had 
 not for several years been worthy of their 
 personal character or standards of family 
 life. But when the city's appeal for better 
 representatives from this ward in the city 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 council was put up to its citizens at Chicago 
 Commons, they responded as promptly and 
 effectively as those of any ward in the city. 
 Swinging the independent vote as a balance 
 of power, for sixteen years in succession they 
 have selected and elected the better men for 
 aldermen irrespective of party. And they 
 have superseded the very worst men in the 
 council by aldermen who have ranked among 
 the very best in their work for the ward not 
 only, but in their service of the whole city. 
 Meanwhile people who found it possible 
 to do this great service for the city were 
 roused thereby to serve their own neighbour- 
 hoods. Street paving, street lighting, and 
 street cleaning were greatly improved. The 
 ward got its share of new school buildings 
 and secured one of the best of the new recrea- 
 tion centres. Vicious resorts and gambling 
 houses were suppressed. The number of sa- 
 loons decreased. Recreations of a higher 
 type were supported. While these things 
 could not have been done without the influ- 
 163 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ence of the ward's better aldermen in the 
 council, it would not have had influential 
 aldermen, and they could not have gotten the 
 necessary support from their constituents, 
 without the revived neighbourship which 
 united the people of twenty-five different 
 nationalities in organisations of their own 
 to overthrow the bosses and ignore the ma- 
 chines and take their own affairs into their 
 own hands. The example set by this popula- 
 tion of 70,000 immigrant working people in- 
 spired similar efforts all over the city. 
 
 If the plans for the city beautiful promoted 
 by Chicago's commercial leaders and de- 
 signed by its artist-architects furnish the 
 goal toward which the development of the 
 city shall work, the realisation of the greater 
 and better Chicago will be made possible 
 only by this revival of the family virtues, 
 working through good neighbourship to make 
 the city worthier of its homes, a better place 
 for the next little child to be born in, 
 and where its boys and girls may grow 
 
NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 
 into a nobler manhood and womanhood. 
 
 Neighbourhoods are the source of civic 
 strength for progress, and the city is the 
 source of inspiration for neighbourhood 
 spirit and co-operation. If detachment re- 
 sults in the apathy and demoralisation of 
 both, then in the re-attachment of each to the 
 other, and in the identification of both in the 
 common cause, is to be found the open secret 
 of successful democracy. 
 
 To be friends in citizenship and neighbour- 
 ship is necessary to both. Friendship among 
 neighbours and citizens as such, in securing 
 justice and opportunity for themselves and 
 all others, is the real thing which is only be- 
 ginning to supersede the perversion of it in 
 politics. It is both the opportunity and obli- 
 gation of religion to promote such friend- 
 ship, because through it only can be obtained 
 not charity alone, but that justice which, by 
 giving equality of opportunity to the citizen, 
 makes possible the progress of the city and 
 the state. "If citizens be friends they have 
 165 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 no need of justice, but though they be just 
 they need friendship or love also ; indeed, the 
 completest realisation of justice seems to be 
 the realisation of friendship and love also." 
 The neighbourhood is to be regarded as an 
 extension of the home and the Church, and 
 is identified closely with both. As such it 
 should be sacred both to the family and the 
 religious instincts and interests in every 
 community. Indeed the community of fam- 
 ily interests and the communion of the 
 Church fellowship are akin to those of the 
 neighbourhood. In all three of these vital 
 human relationships having in common and 
 sharing in common are the sacramental signs 
 of membership. All three, home, neighbour- 
 hood, and Church, share a common religious 
 origin, sanction, aim, and spirit. No one 
 of them can fulfil its function without the 
 co-operation of the others. They are inter- 
 sphering circles whose circumference in- 
 cludes most that is human and whose centre 
 is divine. 
 
 166 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 INDUSTRY AND RELIGION: THEIR COMMON 
 GROUND AND INTERDEPENDENCE * 
 
 INDUSTRY and religion with education state 
 and solve the problem of human life when 
 on common ground. Apart, much more in 
 antagonism, they prove existence to be a 
 tragedy. For what is industry? In human 
 terms, it is the base-line, the rootage, the 
 very condition of existence. And religion 
 with education is the sky-line, the atmos- 
 phere, the horizon of life, which makes it 
 more than meat, and the body more than 
 raiment, and without which life is not worth 
 the living. 
 
 Apart from religion and education, and 
 the human value with which they invest toil, 
 its process and its product, we have a body 
 
 * This chapter appeared in The Merrick Lectures, 1907-08, 
 under the title "The Social Application of Religion," Jen- 
 nings and Graham, New York. 
 
 167 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 without a soul, lungs without any air to 
 breathe, eyes without any light to see 
 through, earth without atmosphere or sky. 
 On the other hand, religion and education 
 without industry give us only disembodied 
 spirit, life on earth without the conditions of 
 an earthly existence. 
 
 The essentials of industry and religion, 
 not their organisations, are our first consid- 
 eration. Common ground is sought on which 
 to consider their overarching ideals and their 
 undergirding motives which hold the con- 
 stituency of each together, reserving for sub- 
 sequent inquiry the relations between the 
 Church or other ecclesiastical expressions of 
 organised religion and the agencies of em- 
 ploying capital and of organised labour. 
 Have religion and industry, in their largest 
 and most essential human significance,- any- 
 thing in common! What have they to do 
 with each other? Is there any common 
 ground where they can, and ought, and must 
 stand together, if these two essential func- 
 168 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 tions and ideals of human life are to fulfil 
 their part in the order of existence? 
 
 In the foreground of our discussion lies 
 the portentous fact that the religions of the 
 western world are entering the second indus- 
 trial century of human history. What that 
 means we have scarcely begun to imagine. 
 But the first century of modern industry 
 stands in the clear. The nineteenth century 
 was ushered into history by the whir of the 
 power-loom which had then just fairly got to 
 work. When the hand-loom ceased to beat 
 the measured tread of all the centuries gone 
 by, and the power-loom began to set the pace 
 of modern life, then medievalism ended and 
 times altogether new began. So much more 
 rapid and radical than any other change 
 through which civilisation has ever passed 
 was the transformation wrought by the in- 
 troduction of machinery, the concentration 
 of capital, the establishment of the competi- 
 tive order, and the subdivision and organisa- 
 tion of labour that the appearance of those 
 169 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 new factors among men is recognised as 
 " the industrial revolution." More than 
 anything else which had yet been introduced 
 into the world they began to weave human 
 life itself not only into a new pattern but 
 into a new texture. In less than thirty years 
 the new machinery virtually revolutionised 
 the world's life and began to change the very 
 face of the earth. 
 
 We are far enough away from that abrupt 
 break with the past to inquire whither we are 
 being borne on the still rising tides of the 
 new times. Whither away is modern indus- 
 trialism bearing human life upon its resist- 
 less streams of tendency! From the course 
 it took through its first hundred years we 
 can discern at least the direction of the chan- 
 nels through which its swift and tumultuous 
 tendencies are forging their way into the 
 times that are to be. 
 
 With the French revolution the individual 
 began to gain a new independence. That 
 mighty revolt against the order of life which 
 170 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 had for centuries merged the one man in 
 the mass, forever broke up the ancient sol- 
 idarity. Out of the death of feudalism came 
 the birth of democracy. The democratic in- 
 dividual was being born politically when ma- 
 chinery appeared to give him a new world to 
 conquer. All the inherent and attendant 
 forces of machine production conspired to 
 intensify the independent individuality of 
 those who exploited the tools of production. 
 Even the many more who were left to work 
 with their bare hands, without either the ma- 
 terial or the machinery for producing their 
 own living, were individualised as never be- 
 fore. The serf was no longer tied to the soil. 
 Liberty of movement came in for the first 
 time with the world market, and labour could 
 go where there was the greatest demand for 
 it. The individual became the new unit of 
 society. 
 
 No sooner had the type of this new indi- 
 vidual unit been fairly and firmly set than 
 the same forces immediately began to put 
 171 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 together those who had been separated from 
 their groups. The industrial process of re- 
 integration set in. The forces resident in or 
 centred about machine production and the 
 subdivision of labour began to assert their 
 superiority to the domination of the very 
 individuals who created and until recently 
 controlled them. The tendency of this new 
 industrial society has been more and more 
 from individual independence to the interde- 
 pendence of man upon man, craft upon craft, 
 class upon class, nation upon nation. Be- 
 fore this century was half over industrial life 
 swept away from unrestricted competition to 
 a combination of capital and labour as inevi- 
 table and involuntary as the pull of the moon 
 upon the tides. From the personal main- 
 tenance of the freedom of contract, the wage- 
 workers were driven to the only possible 
 exercise of that right by collective bargain- 
 ing. Politically, the trend has been from 
 local autonomy and state rights to national 
 and international consolidation. Socially, 
 112 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 whole racial populations have been blended 
 more and more in huge cosmopolitan, com- 
 posite citizenships. The irresistible ground 
 swell and tidal movement of the present 
 quarter century has been away from indi- 
 vidualism toward a new solidarity. 
 
 Yet beneath all the overlying turmoil and 
 friction, injustice, and menace attending this 
 rapid and radical readjustment, there is cer- 
 tainly developing a larger liberty at least for 
 the class, a rising standard of living for the 
 mass, a stronger defence against the aggres- 
 sion of one class upon another, and a firmer 
 basis and more authoritative power to make 
 and maintain peaceful and permanent settle- 
 ments of industrial differences. More 
 slowly but surely there are developing legal 
 forms and sanctions which not only make for 
 justice and peace between employers and 
 employes, but for the recognition of the 
 rights and final authority of that third and 
 greatest party to every industrial interest 
 and issue the public. 
 
 173 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 All Christian and Jewish faiths are inex- 
 tricably identified with these human factors 
 of the industrial problem. Their destiny is 
 inevitably involved in these irresistible tend- 
 encies in our industrial democracy. Not for 
 the first time is the power of the Christian 
 ideal and faith being tested by its ability to 
 solve the problems it has raised. For Chris- 
 tianity has ever intensified, if it did not 
 create, the industrial crises which attended 
 its birth and rejuvenescence. The Christian 
 evangel has all along held the ideal overhead 
 and the dynamic within the heart which have 
 inspired a divine discontent. Every now 
 and then the Gospel strikes the earth under 
 the feet of the common man, and he rises up 
 and demands to be counted as one. Old John 
 Wyclif's categorical imperative, " Father 
 he bade us all him call, masters we have 
 none," inspired Piers Ploughman, the first 
 great labour song; John Ball, whose field 
 preaching was a declaration of rights; and 
 Wat Tyler, who led the peasants' strike. 
 174 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 Many another labour movement has inscribed 
 no more nor less upon its banners than the 
 Swabian peasants had upon theirs, a serf 
 kneeling at the cross with the legend, " Noth- 
 ing but God's justice. " The progress of the 
 democracy has often halted in passing tem- 
 ple and church, and listened at their oracles 
 to hear whether they could express religious 
 ideals and precepts in terms of industrial 
 relationship ; whether it would let the worker 
 be the man the free gospel and the free 
 school have taught him to know himself to be. 
 Protestant Christianity has from its very 
 birth been persistently faced with the de- 
 mand for the economic justice and industrial 
 peace promised by the prophets and pro- 
 claimed in the name of Christ. The Refor* 
 mation of the sixteenth century must be ad- 
 mitted to have fallen short, however excus- 
 ably, of the great moral and social results 
 which would have been its legitimate con- 
 summation if its splendid beginnings could 
 have been carried on and out. For it was 
 175 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 made possible, more perhaps than by any- 
 thing else, by the social discontent of the 
 oppressed peasantry. Luther's protest 
 found its most fertile soil in those suffering 
 from the oppressive industrial conditions 
 under which people had been robbed and 
 beaten to the point of revolt. The economic 
 side of the great Eeformation is yet to be 
 written. So far it has received scant em- 
 phasis except in the radical literature of 
 writers avowedly inimical to Christianity. 
 
 At the rise of the evangelical movement in 
 the eighteenth century the Wesleys had no 
 sooner raised that standard of reality in re- 
 ligion than they found themselves face to 
 face with this same imperative industrial 
 problem. The Methodist chapels and class 
 meetings trained both the leaders and the 
 mass of the British working people for their 
 trade union movement, which was one of the 
 incidental and most far-reaching results of 
 the revival in England. The rise of the 
 great middle classes to their activity in social 
 176 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 reforms is due to this same evangel which 
 brought the sunrise of a new day out of the 
 leaden skies of eighteenth century England. 
 Further, the rise of the factory system sud- 
 denly put the Christianity of the nineteenth 
 century to the test of its supreme crisis. It 
 was the evangel of the seventh Earl of 
 Shaftesbury, of Frederick Denison Maurice, 
 and of Charles Kingsley, which, more than 
 the Duke of Wellington's battalions, saved 
 Great Britain from the revolution threatened 
 by the Chartist movement to the evolution 
 which has sanely and surely developed Eng- 
 land's magnificent legislative, municipal, and 
 social progress in the last quarter century. 
 
 The present crisis in industrial relation- 
 ship tests the capacity of the Christianity 
 of the churches to adapt itself to the modern 
 conditions of life, and marks the point at 
 which it will either make another great ad- 
 vance or suffer a sharp decline. It must find 
 terms of economic and industrial relationship 
 in which to express and impress its sanc- 
 177 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 tions, if it is to survive, much more guide 
 and dominate life in this industrial age. And 
 our system and methods of industry must 
 find terms of religious spirit and fellowship 
 in which to justify their claim to be forces 
 making for righteousness and for the prog- 
 ress of the race. This interdependence of 
 religion and industry states the problem of 
 finding common ground, on which they make 
 it possible for each other to fulfil their 
 essential function, a common ground upon 
 which religious industrial life may become 
 actual in this age of the world. 
 
 There are at least three human interests 
 upon which both industry and religion set 
 their value. At three points the industrial 
 and religious valuations must either find a 
 common denominator or be fatally exclusive 
 of each other. Eeligion and industry test 
 each other by the valuation which each puts 
 upon every human life, upon the standard 
 of living, upon union through sacrifice as 
 essential to progress. 
 
 178 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 Upon each human life religion has ever 
 placed a divine valuation. In both the 
 Jewish and Christian faiths God identifies 
 himself with each single self, by creating 
 man in his own image and likeness and by 
 standing in between each life and self-neglect 
 or the aggression of others. When the king 
 of Israel was self-convicted of blood-guilti- 
 ness in sending a common soldier to his 
 death, he cried out, as though he had struck 
 at the very life of God, l ' Against thee, thee 
 only, have I sinned. " The Roman who was 
 capable of coining the sentiment " Nothing 
 that is common to man is foreign to me," 
 was also capable of divorcing his wife be- 
 cause she did not expose to death the girl- 
 baby born in his absence, so disappointed 
 was he that the child was not a boy. Yet at 
 that very time Christianity began to invest 
 every life with such a divine sanctity that 
 the law of every Christian nation has ever 
 since gotten in between, not only the parent 
 and the child, but between even the mother 
 179 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 and the unborn babe. In America we put a 
 valuation upon every child so great that we 
 can afford to make the school tax heavy 
 rather than to have any boy or girl grow up 
 uneducated. The right to life is so sacred 
 that every community in Christendom bears 
 the burden of providing food, clothing, and 
 shelter to every helpless person, no matter 
 how useless to self or others such an one 
 may be. More than by any speech, symbol, 
 or act of man, " the cross " sets God's esti- 
 mate upon the value of every man, woman, 
 and child. And it has imposed upon the re- 
 ligious conscience that sense of the worth of 
 a life which is expressed in what we call " the 
 burden of the soul." 
 
 How then does the industrial valuation of 
 the same life accord with the religious value 
 of the soul? Our economists, indeed, esti- 
 mate each able-bodied working-man's life to 
 be worth at least two thousand dollars to the 
 working wealth of the nation. But in shame- 
 less inconsistency with these estimates of 
 180 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 our religions, ideal, and economic valuation 
 stands the industrial depreciation of the 
 value of a human life. Let the price-mark 
 on a life be set by the overwork of women, 
 with which the courts are interfering to pro- 
 tect the nation and the race from the de- 
 terioration of their offspring. Let the insa- 
 tiable waste of child labour be measured by 
 the instinct of self-protection which forces 
 nations to protect themselves from the in- 
 dustrial depletion of the very stock of the 
 race. Let the frightful industrial casualties 
 in America sound the depths of our own dis- 
 regard of human life and safety by the lists 
 of the dead and wounded, disabled and miss- 
 ing, which in some industries exceed the 
 casualties of the deadliest battle-fields of our 
 worst wars. Let our conscienceless indiffer- 
 ence to the grievous burden imposed by the 
 breadwinner's death be arraigned by our 
 prolonged refusal to distribute that burden 
 of supporting the dependent families of the 
 slain or disabled workers as it is distributed 
 181 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 in other lands between the owners of the in- 
 dustry, the taxpayers of the state, and the 
 wage-earners. 
 
 What makes the workaday life a tragedy 
 is the hopelessly inconsistent disparity be- 
 tween the valuation which the industries and 
 the religion of the same people put upon the 
 same life. The claim of religious people to 
 love the " soul," seems the cruelest hypoc- 
 risy when identified with the heedless care- 
 lessness for the very life of the same person. 
 It would seem that to make good its claims 
 to bearing the burden of souls, religion must 
 find concrete measures of industrial protec- 
 tion in which to express its care for the lives 
 of men. And yet, until very recently, the 
 working people of America have been left 
 alone by the influential constituencies of the 
 churches to make their hard and heroic 
 struggle for self-protection. First in the 
 field, hardest at work has organised labour 
 been to protect the religious and educational 
 sanctity cf each working life, to regulate or 
 182 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 suppress child labour, to shorten the hours 
 and improve the conditions of women's work. 
 But efforts of others should not be for- 
 gotten. The splendid initiative of the Earl 
 of Shaftesbury in placing the factory acts 
 on the statute books of England two genera- 
 tions ago has led men and women from all 
 classes ever since, and never more than now, 
 to unite to protect and enhance the value of 
 life. More and more the forces of religion 
 and civilisation are uniting in such concerted 
 movements as the National Child Labour 
 Committee, the Consumers' League, the 
 Visiting Nurses' Association, and many other 
 voluntary agencies to co-operate with fac- 
 tory inspectors, truant officers, and juvenile 
 courts in the enforcement of just and humane 
 legislation. Thus the sanctions of religion 
 and education upon the value of a life are 
 being translated in terms, economic and in- 
 dustrial, by every protected piece of ma- 
 chinery which keeps the fingers on the hand 
 and the hand on the arm ; by all the hygienic 
 183 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 and sanitary conditions provided for in 
 shops; by all the efforts for industrial in- 
 surance ; by all the life-saving appliances and 
 conditions on the waterways and the rail- 
 ways of the land ; and wherever safety is in 
 peril in the working world. 
 
 The standard of living affords another 
 common ground on which religion and indus- 
 try are found to be interdependent. In rais- 
 ing the standard of living to be compatible 
 with the value of life, both industry and re- 
 ligion realise their ideal. By holding over 
 every one's head the ideal of what a human 
 life was meant and made to be, religion lifts 
 the standards of that life, creates a divine 
 discontent with anything less and lower, and 
 stirs men to struggle singly and together to 
 maintain and advance a rising scale of living 
 which comes to be as dear as life itself. The 
 response of industry to this ideal of religion 
 is the demand for the opportunity to earn 
 such a livelihood as will make the realisation 
 of that idea possible. The struggle of work- 
 184 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 ing people to raise and maintain their stand- 
 ard of living is due to the best that is in them 
 and not to the worst. " If this is the kind of 
 a man or woman religion and education 
 teach me to be," the worker naturally con- 
 cludes, l ' I should be given the chance to earn 
 the living of such a man or woman. " Inter- 
 preted in human terms " the standard of 
 living " means the rest which the son of a 
 working mother thinks she should have in 
 her old age, the exemption which his wife 
 should have from wage-earning in order to 
 mother his children, the schooling his boy or 
 girl should get before going out into the 
 working world. The rising standards of 
 living are due to the ideal which religion has 
 taught us all to have of manhood and woman- 
 hood, fatherhood and motherhood, wifehood 
 and childhood. 
 
 Employers who have too long and too 
 
 widely united to hold down and retard the rise 
 
 in labour's standard of living, have more and 
 
 more to their credit many and varied unself- 
 
 185 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ish efforts and achievements in lifting the 
 standards of labour's livelihood and opening 
 to ever-increasing multitudes the opportunity 
 and means of realising it. Both among em- 
 ployers and employes the struggle to achieve 
 the rising standard of living for the class 
 and the mass should be sanctified by re- 
 ligion. It should be no small part of our 
 personal and collective religious aim and 
 effort not only to protect our fellow men from 
 lowering the standard of their living by 
 establishing a minimum wage, but also to 
 help them raise it, and keep it rising, 
 above a mere living wage, as far as the con- 
 ditions of the trade or craft will allow. Un- 
 til we thus translate our religious love of 
 souls into pur economic care for selves, 
 religion will mean very little to those who 
 are in the struggle for life and livelihood in 
 an industrial age. 
 
 A third common ground on which religion 
 and industry are seen to be interdependent 
 is defined by the fact that both have taught 
 186 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 men to sacrifice in order to unite for the com- 
 mon good. Have we not been teaching, drill- 
 ing, disciplining our men, women, and chil- 
 dren at home, at school, and at church; by 
 their loyalty to family, party, patriotism, and 
 faith to sacrifice self and stand together 
 for the common good of all or any of them? 
 Have we not invested with patriotic and even 
 religious sanctity those who sacrifice them- 
 selves for " their own " folk, fatherland, or 
 faith! How then do these virtues suddenly 
 become vices, these heroes and heroines all 
 at once become sordid conspirators when 
 they combine, stake everything dear to each, 
 risk all, and stop short of the loss of nothing, 
 in united action to save their own or 
 their fellow workers' standard of living? 
 They may do so in unwise or even unjust 
 ways, but we submit that what is by common 
 consent considered wholly meritorious in 
 every other sphere for self-sacrifice cannot 
 be wholly reprehensible in that of industrial 
 relationship where it is hardest and costliest 
 187 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 to exercise the virtues of altruism. What is 
 attributed to the very best in men elsewhere 
 cannot be attributed to the very worst in men 
 here. The * l union ' ' of labourers cannot dif- 
 fer, per se, morally and as an economic ne- 
 cessity from a combination of capitalists or 
 the communion of members of the same re- 
 ligious faith. If, at this age of the world, 
 combination is necessary to success, where is 
 the justice in forcing these competitors of 
 ours to do their business with us as though 
 they lived in that former age of the world 
 when each one could mind his own business 
 without combining with others? 
 
 It looks then as though the industrial world 
 has outgrown our moral sense, as though our 
 ethics are hopelessly belated, for we seem to 
 want to make our profits under the modern 
 method of combining all available resources, 
 while at the same time insisting that our fel- 
 low workers shall deal with us under the old 
 outworn and discarded system of individual 
 industry. That is, we want others to do unto 
 188 
 
INDUSTRY AND RELIGION 
 
 us as we are not willing to do unto them. 
 It looks as though some of us were being 
 tried and found wanting. Of " times that 
 try men's souls " we speak as though they 
 were to be dreaded and yet belong to the 
 " heroic age," but when we look back upon 
 them from safe distance, we are generally 
 forced to confess that the " times " were not 
 more out of joint than that the " souls " 
 our own or others' needed to be tried. 
 
 These war times in industry are indeed to 
 be dreaded, but like all great crises that turn 
 the course of history or personal experience, 
 they too are heroic. But the heroism should 
 not be confined to the strikes and lockouts of 
 the irrepressible conflict. Industrial peace 
 should have its victories at the hand of 
 religion, no less renowned than war. The 
 cross and its sacrifice, if they are to mean 
 anything in this industrial age, must be 
 translated by religion into terms of indus- 
 trial conciliation, intercessorial mediation 
 and sacrificial service, which will bring the 
 189 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 pact of Christ 's own peace in human brother- 
 hood out of fratricidal strife. 
 
 Industry has its cross as surely as religion. 
 There is no other way to the crown for either 
 than the passion of sacrificial service. Sac- 
 rifice not only for self but for others, is the 
 only way by which either the strong or the 
 weak can be crowned with that equality of 
 opportunity which is the God-given right of 
 manhood. Until industry takes up its cross 
 with the self-sacrificing passion of religion, 
 neither labourer nor capitalist, employe nor 
 employer, can really come into his own. Un- 
 less religion transforms its cross into terms 
 of economic value and of industrial relation- 
 ships it can never hold its supremacy over 
 human life in an industrial age. Industry 
 and religion must unite if either is to realise 
 its ideal or function in human life. For they 
 are interdependent, and only on the common 
 ground of their community of human inter- 
 ests can they ever bring " the new heavens 
 and the new earth ' ' which God has promised 
 to man through them. 
 190 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 OKGANISED INDUSTKY AND ORGANISED KELIGION 
 
 A New England mill manager did some 
 thinking out loud in the hearing of the writer 
 to this effect: " I am manager of the mill 
 and a member of the Church in my town. 
 As mill manager I have the livelihood and 
 workaday lives of over 2,000 men and women 
 employes and their families under my care 
 and influence. As church member I bear my 
 share of responsibility for the spiritual wel- 
 fare of these and other fellow townsfolk. 
 And yet the mill and the Church have too lit- 
 tle to do with each other to aid me in fulfill- 
 ing my responsibility in each for the other. 
 Have I not a right to expect my church to 
 help me work for my mill people? Should 
 I not be able to make the mill more help- 
 ful to the Church than by contributing 
 191 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 directly or indirectly toward its financial 
 support? " 
 
 Another loyal churchman and generous 
 giver to social and church work for improv- 
 ing living and working conditions found him- 
 self in this dilemma. The secretary of the 
 manufacturers' association, to which this 
 employer belongs, attacked the social work- 
 ers for promoting legislation protecting em- 
 ployes from dangerous machinery because ex- 
 pensive to the manufacturers. Its pro- 
 moters defended themselves and their pro- 
 posed laws on the ground that existing con- 
 ditions subverted the aims and success of 
 religious and social work. " I find myself 
 paying two sets of people to undo each 
 other's efforts, while the industrial and re- 
 ligious interests with which I am personally 
 identified are arrayed against each other. " 
 
 These are concrete statements of the de- 
 mand for the help, and the protest against 
 the harm, which organised industry and or- 
 ganised religion may be to each other. If, 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 then, industry and religion have so much in 
 common and are so interdependent in fulfill- 
 ing their essential human functions, should 
 there not be less antagonism, or less of a 
 sense of irrelevancy, and more sympathetic 
 co-operation between the organisations of 
 both? If so, what shall it be? What may 
 religious and industrial organisations do for 
 and with each other? 
 
 First of all they may secure and exchange 
 information of the actual conditions under 
 which work is being done and the workers 
 are living in any locality or community. It 
 is the business of the churches, of employing 
 corporations, and labour unions to know just 
 what these conditions are. It is to the inter- 
 est of each of these organised interests to be 
 thus informed. Publicity is good public pol- 
 icy. Secretiveness is worse only than igno- 
 rance of, or indifference to, the facts. Each 
 interest owes it to itself, and to the other, to 
 know and make known whatever is condition- 
 ing life for better or worse. If the churches 
 193 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ignore these facts they stultify their own 
 prayers, preaching, aims, and hopes. If em- 
 ploying industries pay all attention to the 
 material interests of their plants and prod- 
 ucts and none to the human factors of their 
 problem, they are bringing back upon them- 
 selves disasters which their neglect or injus- 
 tice has brought upon others. If labour or- 
 ganisations heed not the conditions of the 
 trade and market which their employers are 
 facing, as well as the working and living con- 
 ditions under which they themselves live and 
 work, they are in no position to get or keep 
 their rights to bargain for their members or 
 with their employers. 
 
 Labour organisations have been foremost in 
 calling public attention to and demanding 
 the recognition of the conditions against 
 which their members are struggling. In- 
 deed, they are to be credited with forcing the 
 observation of these facts both upon employ- 
 ers and upon political economists. Had they 
 not done so political economy might have 
 194 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 continued to be the " dismal science " which 
 so long faced practical conditions with ab- 
 stract theories; employers would have reck- 
 oned less with the cost of living in fixing 
 wages; and legislation would have been 
 slower and feebler in enacting laws against 
 child labour, the overwork of women, unpro- 
 tected dangerous machinery, and occupa- 
 tional diseases ; laws for the minimum wage, 
 industrial insurance, and old age pensions. 
 Employing corporations are following 
 quickly and fully in studying conditions and 
 basing far-reaching and effective policies for 
 preventing injury, assuring safety or insur- 
 ing against loss, furnishing facilities and 
 comforts, encouraging thrift and community 
 interests, and promoting welfare and prog- 
 ress. 
 
 These things are and can be attained by 
 industrial organisations, seldom by indi- 
 viduals, however well disposed. Only or- 
 ganised effort is adequate to produce them. 
 Some of them require the united effort of 
 195 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 employers' and employes' organisations 
 working together in effective co-operation. 
 Heavy have been the losses, disastrous the 
 delays due to the refusal of employers and 
 employes to exchange their knowledge of 
 facts. Complaints of the conditions existing 
 at the Chicago Stock Yards were made by 
 their employes, but were unheeded both by 
 the companies and the public, years before 
 the government investigation warned the 
 world against them and inflicted the national 
 scandal and loss. The dynamiting and vio- 
 lence which have inflicted upon organised 
 labour its deepest disgrace and damage 
 might have been prevented had it not been 
 for labour's distrust of all sources of infor- 
 mation outside its own ranks. 
 
 Is it not possible yes, even probable that 
 if a third party commanding public confi- 
 dence were known to be accurately informed 
 of living and working conditions, the other 
 two parties directly at issue would have less 
 occasion for distrusting, misunderstanding, 
 196 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 and fighting each other? Would not each of 
 them fear an informed and aroused public 
 opinion more than they do each other? 
 Would they not be more inclined to get to- 
 gether by mutual concession than to stand 
 out against each other in the face of the 
 facts thus firmly held between them by those 
 friendly to both? Is this not the function of 
 religion thus to anticipate and prevent in- 
 justice and discontent, misunderstanding 
 and strife? 
 
 Dramatically did the first such survey 
 of industrial and social conditions make 
 its entrance upon the arena of our contem- 
 porary religious life and action. It was 
 after the despairing East London mission- 
 aries had raised their " exceeding bitter 
 cry " over the conditions under which lives 
 were lost in that great and terrible city wil- 
 derness, that the British Empire and the 
 civilised world were startled by their little 
 pamphlet bearing the arousing title The Bit- 
 ter Cry of Outcast London. Amidst the 
 197 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 many hysterical responses immediately elic- 
 ited by it, one man went to work like a mas- 
 ter workman. He was Charles Booth, the 
 merchantman shipper whose ships were car- 
 riers of British industries across many seas. 
 He alone set out upon a voyage of discovery 
 to find the facts as to the conditions of life 
 and labour in London. As one after another 
 of his seventeen volumes appeared, during 
 the twenty years of research, such move- 
 ments as these met the complex situation as 
 it came to be better understood. The social 
 settlements arose. The Salvation Army was 
 marshalled. The London county and other 
 borough and county councils developed their 
 reconstruction work. Garden cities grew. 
 Town-planning evolved from the new science 
 of cities. In great succession the industrial 
 acts of Parliament carried on and out the 
 factory acts of the last century and began to 
 transform and supersede the poor-laws of 
 nearly four hundred years. Before the bar 
 of public opinion, Mr. Booth and other in- 
 198 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 quirers for the facts of social conditions 
 were cited to give the evidence upon which 
 parliamentary elections turned and imperial 
 policies were determined. 
 
 In America, the Pittsburgh survey led the 
 progressive people and agencies of that city 
 to initiate far-reaching movements which are 
 destined to improve the conditions of life and 
 labour. The United States Steel Corporation 
 instituted an inquiry of its own into working 
 conditions in its plants, and its stock-holders 
 endorsed the order to abolish the seven-day 
 week and the recommendations to reduce the 
 twelve-hour day and to guard against over- 
 speeding, accepting more direct responsi- 
 bility for knowing and improving the sani- 
 tary, economic, and social interests and rela- 
 tions of the employes. The local surveys 
 made for the Men and Eeligion Forward 
 Movement have laid the basis for the 
 churches' new interest in and understanding 
 of their fields; for new enterprise and poli- 
 cies in their work; for new co-operation be- 
 199 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 tween themselves and with public and volun- 
 teer agencies. 
 
 Already the churches of many localities 
 have found that they could achieve together 
 what they could not have attempted apart. 
 Moreover, the federation of all the churches 
 could fearlessly face local conditions as no 
 group of local churches did, or perhaps could, 
 do. The way in which the issue between the 
 steel workers and churches at South Bethle- 
 hem, Pa., over Sunday labour and other mal- 
 adjustments was handled is in evidence. 
 The declaration of industrial faith and policy 
 by the Federal Council of the United 
 Churches of Christ set a standard for all 
 the churches such as no single church or 
 small group of churches could have set for 
 themselves. 
 
 The churches, therefore, can discover the 
 living and working conditions of their own 
 communities for themselves and others. 
 The more they co-operate in so doing the 
 wider, more accurate and authoritative, and 
 200 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 the more practically useful will be their sur- 
 veys of conditions and their efforts to im- 
 prove them. 
 
 The judicial impartiality with which these 
 facts must be gathered and interpreted 
 should also characterise the attitude of the 
 churches toward the organisations of both 
 labour and capital. Inconsistent with this 
 fidelity to fact and judicial judgment is it 
 for churches and ministers to ally them- 
 selves with one more than the other. De- 
 nominational committees or departments 
 should bear a title which includes both. 
 " Industrial " is a better surname for the 
 committee or department than " labour. " 
 " Fraternal delegates " are as much needed 
 by employers' associations as by federations 
 of labour. Ministers, who are not crafts- 
 men, have no more claim or right to belong 
 to a labour union than to a manufacturers' 
 association. In either case it is either dis- 
 ingenuous or emptily honorary. The Church 
 stands for all, if for any. Its ministry is 
 201 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 mediatorial. As such the minister should 
 refuse to be classified, should be a mass-man 
 not a class-man, should stand in between, 
 and by the fatherhood of God declare " All 
 ye are brethren. " 
 
 Such intermediary position and attitude 
 of the churches allow of no weak, non-com- 
 mittal, timidly compromising spirit. They 
 call for a stern sense of justice, a squaring 
 to facts, a peace-making, with emphasis upon 
 the making. It means insistence upon fair 
 play, and the free speech and the full hearing 
 of the other side, without which nothing is 
 fair. It sometimes involves a demand for 
 the impartial enforcement of law, and at 
 other times a protest against the abuse of 
 the police power to silence the voice or crush 
 the rights of the weaker, poorer party, or the 
 one taken unawares or unprepared. 
 
 To these ends " free-floor " discussions 
 
 are sometimes valuable. When and where 
 
 demanded to give voice to the silenced, to 
 
 assert and maintain the freedom of speech 
 
 202 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 and the right of public assembly, the Church 
 cannot consistently deny the claim of the 
 wronged or the weak. But there are many 
 risks and more hard experiences involved in 
 assuming responsibility for the use and 
 abuse of this carte blanche bill of rights. If 
 each one's claim is limited to three minutes, 
 we can all stand anything three minutes, 
 especially if the others must endure the exer- 
 cise of that liberty by us. 
 
 But discussions which ring with reality 
 at first tend to become spectacular at last. 
 Fearless, frank utterance of sincere convic- 
 tion plays to the galleries after a while in re- 
 sponse to the applause which it elicits from 
 others. It proves to be as difficult to keep 
 all sides on the floor, as to keep one side from 
 monopolising it. When those who should be 
 participants become spectators; when those 
 who should stand up for their own convic- 
 tions and answer back those who attack them, 
 only urge the loose talker to be wilder ; when 
 the worse such men become the better they 
 203 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 are liked for the fun they give the others, 
 then the free floor becomes a circus-ring, the 
 speakers are clowns, and the chairman, how- 
 ever sacrificial his sincerity may be, becomes 
 a mere ringmaster. So whenever the free- 
 dom becomes license, and the floor becomes a 
 stage, and the speech becomes unreal, stop 
 it. For it has fulfilled its purpose and is now 
 undoing the good it has done. Good history 
 may be poor policy. Begin over again with 
 a smaller group, all of whose members seek 
 light, or plan to carry out in action some 
 line of talk that can be translated into deed. 
 
 If what was at first taken seriously comes 
 to be facetious and insincere, let it not give 
 room to cynicism. The real struggle goes 
 on, grim, hard, hand to hand, just beyond 
 this mimicry. Doubt not the need of inter- 
 position, human and divine. 
 
 Here, then, if anywhere, is the world's call 
 
 for the Church's religion of intercession and 
 
 vicarious sacrifice. If there is a cross, here 
 
 is where by its sign we conquer or it is con- 
 
 204 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 quered. Is there anything more subversive 
 of what religion is bound to do for every 
 man, woman, and child, than to allow the 
 worst passions to be aroused by injustice, 
 than to fail to prevent fratricidal strife, than 
 to stand aside and let organised industry be 
 organised warfare! 
 
 Does this ministry of mediation, this at- 
 titude of interposition, this intercessorial 
 study of concrete situations, general condi- 
 tions, and authoritative facts, transcend the 
 capacity of the modern Church? It surely 
 does surpass the courage and faith, the influ- 
 ence and resources of the divided churches. 
 But it did not daunt the Church when more 
 united. Then it interceded between warring 
 nations and races. Then it interposed its 
 truce between armies in battle array. Then 
 it mediated the very " peace of God " on 
 earth. Even now when the divided churches 
 temporarily unite, much more permanently 
 federate, their cross of self-sacrifice is still 
 the sign by which they conquer. The united 
 205 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 religious forces are still adequate to meet 
 and master the situation in almost every 
 community. But their mastery is only that 
 of truth, no longer that of asserted authority. 
 It is the mastery of authoritative facts, pa- 
 tiently, practically, intelligently applied to 
 concrete situations that wins religion's way. 
 New bases are being laid, new fulcrums 
 are being fixed for the levers of religion 's old 
 power, in the surveys, the parish policies and 
 the federated efforts which the churches are 
 making on their local fields and within the 
 denominational and national spheres of ac- 
 tion. In the enactment and enforcement of 
 laws the churches should take their full, large 
 share with and through the National Child 
 Labour Committee, the national and local 
 Consumers' Leagues, the Association for 
 Labour Legislation, and the Woman's Trade 
 Union League. Collectively by parish, de- 
 nomination, and inter-denominational agita- 
 tion and education they can watch or initiate, 
 influence and help enact laws for protecting 
 206 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 and promoting the interests of working men, 
 women and children. They can, without be- 
 ing partial to mere class interests, unite with 
 employers or with organised labour, either 
 or both, in securing legislation clearly de- 
 manded by public welfare. How well worth 
 while it is to promote and join in such co- 
 operative efforts was strikingly demonstrated 
 in the success of four Illinois commis- 
 sions. 
 
 Fire protection of mines from any recur- 
 rence of the Cherry mine conflagration and 
 the revision of the mining laws of Illinois 
 were accomplished by miners, operators, and 
 three representatives of the public, without 
 opposition from the legislature and without 
 hindrance from a large strike in the industry. 
 The law to prevent occupational diseases 
 was formulated and passed in the same way. 
 Labour's representatives on the employers' 
 liability commission proposed this toast to 
 the principal employer serving on the com- 
 mission : 
 
 207 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 " Here is to Charles Piez! One of the best fel- 
 lows of our long remembrance ; one of the finest of 
 Chicago's citizens; one of the most unselfish of 
 Illinois captains of industry ; whose good fellowship 
 has been our good fortune and pleasure; whose 
 sterling citizenship has been our inspiration ; whose 
 unselfish, public-spirited service has been the glory 
 of a, worthy life. All hail, Charles Piez! " 
 
 At the final session of the Illinois Indus- 
 trial Commission for protection from dan- 
 gerous machinery, the labour members sur- 
 prised the others by presenting a little sou- 
 venir with these generous sentiments : 
 
 11 We believe that the spirit of fairness mani- 
 fested by the members of the commission repre- 
 senting the employers emphasises greatly the value 
 of conference and a discussion of our problems to 
 the end that we may find the common ground upon 
 which both sides may stand without sacrifice of 
 either principle or self-respect." 
 
 Appreciative of " those unselfish repre- 
 sentatives of the great third interest the 
 public," the working men added this tribute: 
 208 
 
ORGANISED INDUSTRY 
 
 " Under less favourable circumstances the duty 
 imposed on this section of the commission would 
 have been to hold the balance of power, to act as 
 mediators in an effort toward harmony. In the 
 presence of such able men much of this spirit of 
 mutual confidence was born because in the pres- 
 ence of such gentlemen the evil spirits of sharp 
 practice, undue influence or mutual distrust would 
 have fled abashed. " 
 
 Was not this a coming of " the kingdom 
 of righteousness, peace and joy in the holy 
 spirit ' ' 1 Would it not have been the func- 
 tion and glory of the churches to have 
 prompted and promoted such a translation 
 of the faith and hope of the Gospel into the 
 deeds of men and the act of legislature? 
 Could anything but the joint influence of or- 
 ganised industry and organised religion have 
 brought about such a triumph of the spirit of 
 God? 
 
 Let the churches organise within their de- 
 nominations to educate their own fellowship. 
 Let the Social Service Commission of the 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in 
 America organise, represent, and express 
 their interdenominational attitude and ac- 
 tion. Then in the still larger fellowship em- 
 bracing the Jewish and Eoman Catholic 
 faiths, there will be the organised religion to 
 co-operate with the organised industry of 
 the American people for the peace and prog- 
 ress of our great democracy and for the com- 
 ing of the " kingdom of the Father." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 CITY AND CHURCH RE-APPROACHING EACH 
 OTHER 
 
 THE city and the Church have not always 
 been friends, but they have never been 
 strangers. The Church was born in the city. 
 It was christened with the very name of 
 " town-meeting. " Its membership was so 
 identified with citizenship that those beyond 
 the Church's pale were called " pagans, " the 
 Latin term for countrymen. Its organisa- 
 tion conformed more to the type of the cities 
 out of whose soil it grew than to that of 
 either temple or synagogue. Next to the 
 terms of family relationship, those of po- 
 litical and civic significance were used by its 
 founders to describe how its members were 
 related to each other, and the function it 
 was founded to fulfil. It was a " common- 
 ail 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 wealth," a " kingdom," a " holy city," the 
 " city of God," the " new Jerusalem." 
 
 This identification of the Church with the 
 city is the most astonishing vision of the 
 seers of Scripture. It must have seemed a 
 wilder flight of the imagination to the con- 
 temporaries of the prophets and the apostles 
 than it does to us. Yet notwithstanding Je- 
 rusalem which stoned the prophets, Corinth 
 which corrupted the Church, Athens which 
 ignored Paul, and Rome which persecuted 
 the saints, the last of the apostles so iden- 
 tified the city with the Church, in the 
 final glimpse he caught of the triumph 
 of the Christian faith, that he even lost 
 sight of the temple when he saw " the 
 city." 
 
 Aggressions upon each other's rights and 
 functions have often made Church and city 
 enemies. And when one was not dominated 
 by the other, they maintained an armed 
 truce. Nevertheless, even when fleeing from 
 that domination, our Pilgrim forefathers 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 brought city and Church to a pact of peace, 
 which has never yet been broken, either by 
 law or war, in the new world. At the centre 
 of every one of their New England towns 
 they planted their " centre " church and the 
 " town-meeting, " those units of the most 
 absolute spiritual and political democracy 
 the world has ever seen. The Church was 
 the religious fellowship of the citizens. The 
 " town-meeting " was the civic fellowship 
 of the Church members. Ships were not 
 more necessary to bring the discoverers and 
 colonists to the new world than were these 
 " centres " for political and spiritual fel- 
 lowship and action essential to hold them 
 together. So interdependent were they that 
 they grew up together like the intertwining 
 vines, representing the three pioneer 
 churches, or the three towns they estab- 
 lished in Connecticut, on the great seal of 
 that state. Whether the churches twine 
 around the towns, or the towns around 
 the churches, is left to each citizen to 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 imagine, now one way and then perhaps the 
 other, as changing circumstances or moods 
 incline. 
 
 But even in New England, town and 
 Church soon began to lose the bond "between 
 their two interdependent sources of the peo- 
 ple 's liberty and power. Always afraid even 
 to approach the blunder of the organic unity 
 between the Church and state, from which 
 their fathers had fled in terror, the people 
 soon began to separate them in fact as in 
 form. As the population scattered and grew 
 diversified, the colonists could not longer 
 unite at any single spiritual centre. Party 
 spirit also broke up the unity of the " town- 
 meeting. " And so Church and town, though 
 never hostile, became so distinct and separate 
 with the years as to be far less helpful to each 
 other than they need to be, if they fulfil their 
 highest function in the people's life. Never, 
 and nowhere as in America, have the Church 
 and the town had less to do with each 
 other. Their organic separation grew into 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 a sense of detachment, if not into a decree 
 of divorce, almost equally demoralising to 
 each. 
 
 Meanwhile the urban age was dawning. 
 The municipalised man was taking the field 
 of action. The city-state once more became 
 ascendant. 
 
 De Tocqueville registered a way-mark by 
 which we may measure how rapidly and rad- 
 ically the change in our population has taken 
 place. Writing in 1830 when New York 
 numbered only 202,000 citizens, our friendly 
 critic prophesied : 
 
 " I look upon the size of certain American cities, 
 and especially upon the nature of their population 
 as a real danger which threatens the future security 
 of the democratic republic of the new world. And 
 I venture to predict that they will perish from this 
 circumstance unless the government succeeds in 
 creating an armed force which, while it remains 
 under the control of the majority of the nation, 
 will be independent of the town population and 
 able to repress its excess/' 
 215 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 But the reason for this reassurance sounds 
 more strangely than his dark prophecy. 
 For he asserts : 
 
 " The country is no wise alarmed by them, be- 
 cause the population of the cities has hitherto ex- 
 ercised neither power nor influence over the rural 
 districts. " 
 
 Yet now, in less than one hundred years since 
 that fact could be recorded, the urban type of 
 life, the city standards of living and condi- 
 tions of labour are superseding rural cus- 
 toms, manners and methods and transform- 
 ing the countryside into a vast suburb whose 
 populations share every year more and more 
 of the facilities and advantages, not to say 
 the perils, of city life. " The twentieth cen- 
 tury opens with two distinguishing fea- 
 tures," Frederick C. Howe affirms, " the 
 dominant city and a militant democracy." 
 Closing his luminous volume on The City the 
 Hope of Democracy with this portentous 
 statement, he opens it with the assertion, 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 which has only just begun to startle us out 
 of our security, that " the distrust of the 
 democracy "las long dominated our municipal 
 law and literature. " 
 
 Two other facts, however, become more 
 impressive with each current year: The 
 fact that both city and Church are learning 
 that neither succeeds if the other fails, and 
 the fact that they are moving toward each 
 other. The city fails, and, failing, defeats 
 the Church if without religious reverence 
 and passion to serve the people. And the 
 Church fails to accomplish its full mission 
 without the inspiration of working for civic 
 ideals, and without the co-operation of the 
 body politic. 
 
 That Church and city are moving toward 
 each other is equally obvious. This reborn 
 civic spirit is not only raising political and 
 administrative standards toward higher 
 ideals of integrity and efficiency, but is also 
 extending the function of the city, town, 
 county, and rural community further and fur- 
 217 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 ther into the field once claimed and exclu- 
 sively possessed by the Church. This tend- 
 ency of the body politic to assume and exer- 
 cise prerogatives hitherto claimed and ful- 
 filled solely by the Church raises grave ques- 
 tions. What does it mean that the state is 
 more and more, and the Church is less and 
 less the educator of the people, the adminis- 
 trator of alms to the poor, the protector of 
 the orphan and the widow, the healer of the 
 sick, the maker of peace, the dispenser of 
 justice, and the great frame-work within 
 which we live and move and have our being? 
 How does it come to pass that the state and 
 not the Church is the great builder? What 
 does it mean that the greatest structures are 
 no longer cathedrals and churches, but 
 courts of justice, state capitols, city halls, 
 marts of trade? The really great buildings 
 which have weathered the centuries and 
 stand as the great memorials to the past 
 were built by the Church. Why do the peo- 
 ple more and more organise and operate 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 their educational, charitable, reformatory, 
 and fraternal co-operation through the town, 
 the city, the state, and the nation, and not 
 through the Church only, as they used to? 
 Does this mean that the Church is losing 
 its function, that it is being superseded by 
 the state and is passing away? Neither the 
 story of our past, nor the demands of the 
 present allow any such conclusion. History 
 will never let us forget very long that the 
 churches were once the only courts of justice, 
 asylums, and hospitals which the people had. 
 Their strong oak doors swung wide to re- 
 ceive those fleeing for life from the pursuer 
 or the avenger, those who laid hold upon 
 " the horns of the altar " as their only hope. 
 The silent walls of the cathedral became a 
 refuge for the oppressed. Eloquent with 
 stories of tragedy and interposition, of the 
 battle -clash without and strange serenity 
 within, are the low-browed, age-worn, time- 
 scarred portals through the ancient walls of 
 what were half fortress and half sanctuary. 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Ancient baptistries still stand to give archi- 
 tectural emphasis to the central place given 
 to the little child in the heart and the concern 
 of religion ages before schools were dreamed 
 of for the children of the people. The alms 
 disbursed, more generously than wisely, with 
 more charity than justice, at the doors of the 
 synagogue and the church, far and away 
 led all of the sentiment and action which 
 evolved the modern shelter and provision for 
 the poor, public or private. Labour ex- 
 changes and other forms of co-operation be- 
 tween the strong and the weak, to promote 
 equality of opportunity, were first sheltered 
 under cathedral arches and centred about 
 parish households of faith. The very craft- 
 guilds had religious origin, organisation, and 
 mysteries. The care of the sick, invalid, or- 
 phans, and aged was nobly assumed by 
 religious communities long before it was 
 recognised to be the responsibility of the 
 body politic and the obligation of the tax- 
 payer. The canon law of the Church was an 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 established and elaborate system of legal 
 procedure when and where there was no 
 jurisprudence which could claim to be either 
 common practice or a body of law. The tow- 
 ering walls and far-flung roofs of the mediae- 
 val temples were built by the people and for 
 the people. They were the people's place, 
 the people's palace. 
 
 Do these facts not show that the civic 
 forms which religion now takes on are 
 founded upon and have grown up out of the 
 old faith of the synagogue and the old gospel 
 of the Church? Are they not evidences that 
 religion was never more irrepressible than 
 now; now that it cannot contain itself, or be 
 contained, within church walls, within the 
 limits of creeds, within the rituals of wor- 
 ship, within ecclesiastical control; now that 
 it is out in the open, under the stars of all 
 heavens, among the trees and the rocks of 
 God's green earth; now that it has leavened, 
 the common life of the very race? Have not 
 the churches been building better than they 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 knew to have built so many of their ideals, 
 their impulses, their methods of human serv- 
 ice, their prophecies of the city of God into 
 the facts and functions, the laws and policies, 
 the better present and the brighter prospects 
 of our towns and cities, our counties and 
 states, our communities and nation, our in- 
 ternational courts and our federations of 
 peace? 
 
 Not only by the much that has been done, 
 but by the more that is now demanded, both 
 city and Church lay claim to each other as 
 never before. If politics are to be more and 
 more a direct democracy, then patriotism 
 must depend for its unselfishness and for its 
 service of others upon the good-will of the 
 individual which it is the function of religion 
 to beget, and of the Church to nurture. 
 Whence, if not from worship, the worship 
 of what is best for each and all, is the com- 
 munity to evolve its ideals of the individual 
 and the collective life? How else than by 
 the dependence of faith and the aspiration of 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 prayer may the body of citizenship recog- 
 nise the fact that power to realise civic ideals 
 is spiritual and not material, is a force from 
 within and above, and not resident in mere 
 organisation or laws? Upon what can the 
 state depend to generate the power of the 
 self-emptied, self-sacrificing life, the only 
 power for progress? 
 
 If religion is to realise its ideal and fulfil 
 its function, not only in the life of the one, 
 but also in the relations and destiny of the 
 many, not only in personal piety, but also in 
 public policy, not only in saved souls, but 
 also in the saved world, then the Church by 
 itself alone is not sufficient to fulfil the func- 
 tion of religion and realise its ideal in human 
 life. Indeed as human lives become more 
 interdependent upon each other, and there- 
 fore more dependent upon the antecedents 
 and surroundings, upon the conditions and 
 laws, upon the frame-work of the organised 
 community for which others are responsible, 
 the Church is less and less able to save even 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the individual life through its own organised 
 agencies only and without the co-operation 
 of the local community and the larger state 
 in the work of human redemption. Much 
 more must it have what only the whole com- 
 munity, with all its resources, and the full 
 force of its highest laws and best adminis- 
 tration can furnish, in order to fulfil the so- 
 cial ideal and tho social function of religion, 
 to which it is committed by the prophecy of 
 the seers and the " great commission " of 
 the Church. The state is not more commit- 
 ted to the humanising of religion than the 
 Church to the spiritualising and sanctifying 
 of the state. 
 
 Only by the religious passion in politics 
 and the passion of patriotism in religion can 
 the mighty task of readjusting the Church 
 and the state to each other be undertaken or 
 fulfilled. They must be aligned first in the 
 individual lives of those who are citizens be- 
 cause they are churchmen and churchmen be- 
 cause they are citizens; those whose religion 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 insists upon expressing itself in the political 
 and civic terms of real life; those to whom 
 the Church is an institution whose highest 
 mission is to build the community up out of 
 itself, not itself out of the community; those 
 who cannot and will not abide a community 
 of Christians which is not a Christian com- 
 munity. And the words hold if we substi- 
 tute Jewish for Christian. 
 
 In The Stones of Venice Buskin thus de- 
 ciphers for us what becomes of a community 
 of such Christians and of so-called Chris- 
 tians in such a community: 
 
 " The most curious phenomenon in all Venetian 
 history is the vitality of religion in private life 
 and its deadness in public policy. The habit of 
 assigning to religion a direct influence over all 
 his own actions and all the affairs of his own daily 
 life, is remarkable in every great Venetian during 
 the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are 
 instances wanting in which the private feeling of 
 the citizens reaches the sphere of their policy, and 
 even becomes the guide of its course where the 
 225 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. . . . 
 But the heart of Venice is shown only in her 
 hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the 
 ascendency whenever she has time to calculate the 
 probabilities of advantage, or when they are suffi- 
 ciently distinct to need no calculation; and the 
 entire subjection of private piety to national policy 
 is remarkable throughout the almost endless series 
 of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire 
 was enlarged.' . . . The evidence from the arts 
 of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, 
 that the decline of her political prosperity was 
 exactly coincident with that of domestic and in- 
 dividual religion." 
 
 Such duplicity in morals and hypocrisy in 
 religion are happily less and less self -decep- 
 tive. The time is not far distant when nei- 
 ther a church member nor a citizen will be 
 thought " good " if his citizenship is not 
 really as good as church membership certi- 
 fies manhood and womanhood to be. The 
 home which a family has will be less a crite- 
 rion of its character than the tenement house 
 226 
 
CITY AND CHURCH 
 
 in which in the same town the families of the 
 poor live. A citizen will not pass as law- 
 abiding, unless he stands for equality for all 
 before the law. Personal virtue will be 
 measured by the effectiveness with which it 
 promotes public virtue. The character of a 
 town will be judged not only by the personal 
 virtues of its people, but by their standards 
 of its public life and social conditions for 
 which they are responsible. The efficiency of 
 the Church will be tested by the extent to 
 which social conditions and town government 
 make it easier to be good and harder to be 
 bad. The claim of being a community of 
 Christians will not be conceded to those who 
 do not constitute a Christian community. 
 
 227 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHURCH AND COMMUNITY THEIR INTERRELA- 
 TION AND COMMON AIM 
 
 COMMON words, such as " community " and 
 " communion," lose much of their signifi- 
 cance in being specialised. The institutions 
 which exclusively appropriate their special 
 usage thereby lose the vital meaning and 
 force which their common use carries. On 
 the other hand, this specialised significance 
 of common terms may give an added and 
 higher meaning to the ordinary things of life 
 which they usually designate. 
 
 All human interests need nothing so much 
 as to have the ordinary things of life invested 
 with extraordinary importance, common ex- 
 periences with special interest, the natural 
 relationships with exceptional significance, 
 routine with zest, the most human with the 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 divine st meaning. It is the genius of re- 
 ligion to do just this thing. The state also 
 dignifies and enhances the lesser things of 
 individual life by massing them together into 
 great public interests and by raising them 
 out of mere personal concern up to the plane 
 of public policy and national significance. 
 While both the Church and the state do this 
 thing for the common life, yet each of them 
 needs the common life to do it for them. 
 
 For, by special and exclusive religious 
 usage, the terms of common life do lose sig- 
 nificance. " Righteousness " thus became 
 an abstraction, something unreal, fictitious, 
 apart from personal experience, when it lost 
 the simple sense of " right " with which it 
 is always invested in common use. Its re- 
 ligious value therefore can be kept vital only 
 by keeping^ it in constant connection with the 
 common use of the term which describes 
 right relations between man and man. And 
 yet the religious emphasis upon the necessity 
 of right relations with God furnishes the 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 standards and the power to realise those be- 
 tween man and man. So, also, the political 
 use of common terms empties them of mean- 
 ing. For instance, " the city " in the par- 
 lance of the politician, the job-giver and 
 seeker, and the caucus regulars, stands only 
 for what they, one and all, can get out of the 
 body politic for themselves, their faction, or 
 their party. It is thus emptied of all those 
 human values, which are even ignored by 
 multitudes of the very people who thereby 
 permit their most personal interests to be 
 bartered away and lost. Political usage 
 needs to have put back into it the common 
 human sense of the city, the town, the county, 
 the village, as a group of human beings, as 
 families of men, women, and children, with 
 all their experiences of loss and gain, pain 
 and pleasure, death and life. What is this 
 but religion's " city of God "! 
 
 From this point of view we may best ap- 
 proach our inquiry as to what the Church 
 and the local community have to do with and 
 230 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 for each other. In both the ordinary and 
 special use of these terms, " community " 
 and " communion, " there is more of spirit 
 than of form. Each breathes the sharing 
 spirit. Both express, within different 
 spheres or relationships of life, the having-in- 
 common and the sharing-in-common. This 
 idea lies at the one tap-root, from which 
 both of these terms derive their origin. 
 And each of them carries the likeness 
 of their common family lineage into the 
 spheres of religious and political action. 
 In the Church's " communion, " the fact and 
 idea of fellowship were felt long before 
 the term was connected with a sacramental 
 rite, or with the membership of an organisa- 
 tion, in which senses the term is almost ex- 
 clusively used within certain circles. So also 
 in the local " community, " as it is regarded 
 by its members, there is still more of the fact 
 and idea of a community of interests than 
 of any organised agency of government or 
 of party. 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Back of and above all our modern forms 
 and ideas of local government, especially 
 city government, lies the primitive concep- 
 tion of the ' ' ancient city ' ' in its original use, 
 descriptive of the earliest experiences of the 
 race. The " city " was not any kind of an 
 organisation, political or administrative. It 
 was not even a locality, or a collection of 
 streets and houses. It was a federation of 
 tribes or families. Two of them met in the 
 wilderness of their wanderings. Finding 
 more to unite than to divide them, they thus 
 entered into a pact of peace. They built an 
 altar of stones. They dug a little trench 
 about it. They encircled both with a light 
 fire of brush. Then representatives of each 
 tribe or household ran through the fire to 
 show that everything that could divide them 
 was consumed, and they filled the trench with 
 handfuls of earth from native soils to show 
 that every cleavage that could separate them 
 was filled up. At the altar, thus doubly sanc- 
 tified and safeguarded, they offered a sacri- 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 fice to the gods, who were considered mem- 
 bers of the tribes. And thus they founded 
 their " city " as a federation of families. 
 Around that altar grew the citadel, about 
 which the aged, the weak, and the young with 
 their protectors, gradually came to linger, 
 while the many and the strong moved on to 
 pasture their herds and flocks, but to return 
 now and again when the moon marked the 
 time for reunion. 
 
 Here, then, at the heart of the home, the 
 village or city community, as well as the 
 synagogue and the church, had their com- 
 mon origin. For the synagogue was more 
 like a household than like the ancient temple, 
 and the earliest church was the " church in 
 the house, " with households for its member- 
 ship. However necessary the organisation 
 of the Church and the state may have been, 
 whatever agencies the polity of the one and 
 the politics of the other may take on, it is 
 still necessary to go back to the idea of a 
 federation of families in order to define 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 what both church and local government are 
 for, and how to make the organisation and 
 agencies of each fulfil its purpose. Local 
 government is an extension of housekeeping. 
 The local church should be the source of 
 power, and the very breath of life, for home- 
 building. The officials of each fulfil their 
 highest functions in aiding and supplement- 
 ing the priesthood and kingship of the par- 
 ents. The sacraments of the Passover and 
 Holy Communion could find no symbol more 
 sacred than the family supper, no service 
 more holy than to pervade the household of 
 faith with the family feeling. The city could 
 discover no more dignified title for its gov- 
 erning officials than " aldermen," and the 
 church than " elders," that is " city 
 fathers " and " fathers of the faithful " or 
 " elder brethren." So we may take the 
 homelike ;church and the family-like com- 
 munity to be both the formative ideals and 
 the constructive forces of religion and poli- 
 tics alike. 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 The function of the Church in the political 
 sphere as in that of the family, the neigh- 
 bourhood, and industry, is threefold ; to have 
 and give a formative ideal of what the com- 
 munity is to be and do; to initiate, inspire, 
 and support movements and agencies for the 
 realisation of civic ideals; and to generate 
 and apply the power of a self-sacrificing 
 public spirit, which is the only force ade- 
 quate to promote social progress. 
 
 To reveal the idealism of religion has 
 always been the unique prerogative and dis- 
 tinctive service of the Church in human life 
 and society. Art and literature have shared 
 this function, but the Church has brought 
 ideals far more directly to bear upon many 
 more people and kinds of people. It has 
 used art and letters more effectively to this 
 end than they have been put to use apart 
 from religion. 
 
 It is not true, as is so often asserted, that 
 the Church has had an ideal only for the in- 
 dividual, not for society. It has always had 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 a golden age, a millennium, and beyond it a 
 heaven, to hold up as its social ideal for the 
 world. But it has almost always reserved 
 these social ideals for " the last days," and 
 taught them as a part of its ' l eschatology, ' ' 
 its teaching about last things; as its 
 " apocalypse, " its vision of the end. In- 
 deed some schools of its teachings have for- 
 bidden any hope of a social ideal, or even of 
 human progress, by putting all hope beyond 
 the earthly end and allowing for a progress 
 only from worse to worse, until the final 
 catastrophe annihilates the present order for 
 the better one which is to take its place. 
 
 Spasmodically, now and then, here and 
 there, through the Christian centuries, lead- 
 ers and groups, filled with the Pentecostal 
 spirit, have attempted to realise in life or 
 literature the ideal of a Christian community, 
 which began to be achieved at Pentecost. St. 
 John, as the last of the apostles, saw it from 
 afar to be " the new Jerusalem." Augus- 
 tine, greatest of the fathers, reconstructed 
 236 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 it in his City of God. Sir Thomas More 
 dreamed it in his Utopia. Constantine and 
 the imperial popes attempted it in the Holy 
 Eoman Empire. St. Francis of Assisi, child 
 of the earth and sky, reunited nature and 
 spirit, the human and the divine, in the one 
 realm of his love and life. Savonarola gave 
 his life to make over Florence after the pat- 
 tern of the heavenly city. John Calvin ruled 
 Geneva in the fear of God. Oliver Cromwell 
 established the commonwealth of the Cove- 
 nanters. John Knox struggled to make 
 Scotland a regenerate land. Our Pilgrim 
 Fathers established commonwealths governed 
 by church members. Joseph Mazzini tried 
 to make old Eome new, as the democratic 
 centre for the association of the peoples. 
 Thomas Chalmers wrote of the Christian and 
 civic economy of large towns, and applied 
 it to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Our own 
 Mulford held high our American ideals in his 
 lofty thought on The Nation and The Repub- 
 lic of God. Some of these attempts were 
 237 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTIO-N 
 
 more theocratic and theological than civic 
 or democratic. 
 
 But only in our own times have our re- 
 ligious social ideals been held close enough 
 to earth to be applicable to the local com- 
 munity. Only just now are we beginning to 
 ask, " What is a town for? " And for an 
 answer we are putting our ideals into town 
 planning and municipal policies. Should not 
 the whole church of a town and city think 
 and say something of the town and city as a 
 whole? Should those who claim to have 
 " the oracles of God " and to interpret the 
 prophecies, have nothing to say or suggest 
 as to the immediate or remoter future of 
 their own town or city? Should they who 
 bear ' * the burden of the soul ' ' have no part 
 in determining the conditions, and in shaping 
 the public policies and plans which will influ- 
 ence the destiny of souls? If in the life to 
 come heaven is held up as " the mansions of 
 our Father's house, " a " place prepared " 
 for each, surely in the life that now is some 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 care should be taken to provide some place 
 for men, women, and children, and the kind 
 of house a ' ' soul ' ' can live in. 
 
 The community cannot fail to profit by 
 being faced with a religious ideal of what it 
 ought to be. And a church cannot fail to 
 gain by having and proclaiming an ideal for 
 its community. The mere effort to form its 
 own ideal of what its town should aim to be 
 
 will enlarge the Church's view of its own 
 function and field. Its purpose and policy 
 will be more public and practical,, and no less 
 personal. To be looked to for some contri- 
 bution toward the community ideals and 
 progress, will lead the Church to look beyond 
 itself for its raison d'etre. To be identified 
 with the life of the whole community will de- 
 liver it from that institutional self-conscious- 
 ness which paralyses spiritual purpose and 
 power. For, with strange and fatal facility, 
 men do forget the purpose of established in- 
 stitutions, and the reason for their existence. 
 They thus lose the value and even the sight 
 239 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 of the ends for which they exist in forgetting 
 that all institutions are means. 
 
 This institutionalism which substitutes 
 means for ends, and subverts the ends in 
 slavishly serving the means, is the very in- 
 sanity of history political, industrial, edu- 
 cational, and ecclesiastical. Thus the state, 
 the municipality, and the town lose their hold 
 on the life and the loyalty of the people by 
 becoming partisan machines instead of pub- 
 lic service utilities. Thus commercialism 
 overreaches itself in sacrificing the many to 
 the few and prevents a gainful co-operation 
 in order to promote a destructively unre- 
 stricted competition. Thus schools and uni- 
 versities, by making knowledge an end in- 
 stead of a means, and apotheosising culture 
 for culture's sake, fail in their mission, which 
 is not only " to minister to industrial ad- 
 vancement, but to enable technical advance- 
 ment to minister to the life of the people." 
 Thus, too, churches lose not only their power, 
 but their very soul in building themselves up 
 240 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 out of the community, instead of the com- 
 munity up out of themselves. The conscious- 
 ness of being identified with the greater 
 cause of the whole community and with the 
 Kingdom of God, of which it is a part, mag- 
 nifies even the greatest institutions, gives 
 power to every least agency, dignifies each 
 humblest duty, and adds zest to every most 
 routine service. Quite as much, then, for 
 the Church's own sake, as for the communi- 
 ty's sake, should there be a religious ideal of 
 the community life and progress. Worship 
 worth-ship is the Church's means of ex- 
 pressing and holding high overhead what is 
 worthiest, the divine ideal of human life, in- 
 dividual and collective. Public worship is 
 the flag of the Kingdom. The Church which 
 maintains it is the color-guard of the com- 
 munity. 
 
 To initiate, inspire, and support the move- 
 ments and agencies for realising these ideals 
 practically and progressively is the second 
 civic and social function of the Church. But 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 in and through its own organisation, the 
 Church is seldom, if ever, to attempt to be 
 the executive even of its own initiative, much 
 less that of the community. The social 
 ideals of the Gospel have borne their best 
 fruits in society when the churches have given 
 the initiative toward higher conceptions of 
 civic and national life; have supplied towns, 
 cities, state, and nation with citizens inspired 
 with these ideals of Christian social relation- 
 ship and with the willingness to sacrifice to 
 realise them ; and have given no suspicion of 
 making any attempt, either formal or vir- 
 tual, to usurp the functions of government. 
 The churches should be the last to tolerate, 
 much less to claim or secure, special legisla- 
 tion for their own or others ' benefit, for they 
 stand for all if for any. Not in their cor- 
 porate capacity should the churches assume 
 the function of reformatory agencies for the 
 enactment or enforcement of law. For, on 
 the one hand, neither in their constituency 
 nor in their form of organisation are they 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 adapted to or effective in such service ; and on 
 the other hand, if they were, theirs is the 
 higher function and even the harder work of 
 maintaining the standards and generating 
 the sacrificial spirit that make such strife at 
 law unnecessary, or, if necessary, trium- 
 phant. 
 
 If, therefore, the churches may not be the 
 executive of social action, even in the effort 
 to realise their own ideals, they may give ini- 
 tiative to every such effort by fulfilling their 
 function of inspiring, educating, and unify- 
 ing the people. Where other institutions 
 of the community the homes, the neighbour- 
 hood centres for culture and social inter- 
 course, and the municipal provisions for so- 
 cial needs can be made to meet and minis- 
 ter to the wants of the people, the Church 
 should inspire and support them in so doing, 
 and not supersede or duplicate them. Where 
 they fail, it is not only justifiable but obliga- 
 tory for the churches to provide substitutes 
 for them. Thus " institutional " churches 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 and social settlements are the ministering 
 body of the Son of Man, incarnating the 
 spirit of Christ in their ministry to the 
 physical and social, educational and civic, 
 moral and spiritual necessities of our city 
 centres, not only saving souls out of the 
 wreck, but also helping to save the wreck 
 itself. 
 
 But very rarely, if ever, is it necessary or 
 advisable to turn the pulpit into a lectureship 
 on economics and politics, or the Sunday 
 service into a free forum for the discussion 
 of social theories. Far more effective is it for 
 the churches to take the social point of view, 
 and thence faithfully and fearlessly, by word 
 and in deed to extend the application of the 
 righteousness of the prophets, the gospel of 
 Christ, and the ethics of the apostles. From 
 their old work of righting the one man's re- 
 lation to the one God to the new work of 
 righting the relation of each to all and of all 
 to each, the churches are now called to extend 
 their mission. To unify all the forces which 
 244 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 make for righteousness and inspire them to 
 realise the highest ideals attainable, is the 
 formative function of the churches in a com- 
 munity. It will have far more of a reforma- 
 tory effect than all the effort they could make 
 to lead reforms which are always more effec- 
 tively promoted by other agencies. This func- 
 tion of the Church is more formatory than re- 
 formatory. There can be no reform without 
 the concept of the ideal form. Reformation, 
 therefore, must ever be subsidiary to the 
 creative function of forming the ideal. In 
 the language of Horace Mann, " Where any- 
 thing is growing, one formatory is worth a 
 thousand reformatories." 
 
 The history of the English people began 
 when upon the tomb of a forgotten hero 
 might have been inscribed the words which 
 Charles Kingsley in Hereward, wrote over 
 his name, ' i Here lies the first of the new 
 English, who by the grace of God began to 
 drain the fens." So it is said the imperial 
 supremacy of the English people dates from 
 245 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the time the nation went home from Water- 
 loo to attend to her own housekeeping, to 
 work for her daily bread, to care for her 
 women and children, to build roads, shops, 
 and schools, to cleanse houses and streets, 
 and care for her sick. And the church which 
 will initiate this world-work of the kingdom 
 will begin to write a new and glorious page 
 in the history of the commonwealth of Israel 
 and the covenants of promise. 
 
 The final function of the Church, the fulfil- 
 ment of which is most essential to all social 
 and civic organisations, is to generate that 
 public spirit and self-sacrifice which serve 
 the common interests at the cost of personal 
 ease and gain, or of class and institutional 
 aggrandisement. Without this social self- 
 denial no patriotic, philanthropic, or pro- 
 gressive organisation of a community can 
 succeed or survive. It is the very soul of the 
 body politic, without which it is dead while 
 it lives. It is the dynamic of progress, with- 
 out which the community is powerless to 
 246 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 make any real advancement toward higher 
 ideals. For the generation of this social 
 power and for putting each citizen in posses- 
 sion of it the community rightfully looks to 
 the Church more than to any other agency. 
 The school should inspire the children with 
 this spirit, but the Church only can carry on 
 and out the cultivation of self-denial among 
 people of all ages and classes. The sign un- 
 der which it claims to live and work, and by 
 which it has ever conquered, is the cross. 
 Only by raising up cross-bearers in social 
 and civic self-denial will it win from the 
 state and society its crown. Only by yield- 
 ing this service as its most fundamental obli- 
 gation to the community can it expect the 
 popular recognition of its right to be and its 
 room to work. 
 
 Imperious in the interest of both Church 
 and community is the religious imposition of 
 the duty and privilege of self-sacrifice in 
 public service upon every conscience and 
 heart. To impart this power of self-denial 
 247 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 the Church must be mastered by it herself. 
 To give it she must not only have it, but ex- 
 emplify it. Upon a much farther-sighted 
 view of non-sectarian policy and of interde- 
 nominational comity and co-operation, will 
 depend not only the importance of the 
 Church in the life of the community, but also 
 the moral and financial support which the 
 Church may expect from the people. It is 
 sure to become more of a question whether 
 the churches can survive if they do not sacri- 
 fice self-interest in saving the life of the 
 people, than whether the people's social life 
 can be saved without the Church. Christ's 
 words are as true of his Church as of his 
 disciples, that the Church which " will save " 
 its life shall lose it, and the Church which is 
 willing to lose its institutional or denomina- 
 tional life for Christ's sake and the people's 
 may "find it." 
 
 With the passion of love for the Church, 
 consistent with his larger loyalty to the 
 Kingdom, William E. Huntington pleaded be- 
 248 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 fore the convention of the Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church the demand which the organisa- 
 tion of the world makes for the co-operative 
 unity of the churches. He said : 
 
 " Four great questions confront the American 
 people at this solemn hour when they are passing 
 from an old century to a new. These questions 
 are: the sanctity of the family, the training of 
 youth to good citizenship and good character, the 
 purification of the municipal life of our great cities, 
 and the relation of capital and labour. But tower- 
 ing above them all, as a snow mountain towers up 
 over the more conspicuous but less important foot- 
 hills that cluster about its base, rises the question 
 of every American citizen who is a believer in 
 the religion of Jesus Christ : How may we correlate 
 and unite and consolidate the religious forces of 
 the republic ? Those other questions are in a meas- 
 ure independent of one another, whereas the ques- 
 tion of correlation of the religious forces of the 
 republic touches every one of them intimately, 
 vitally. 
 
 " Our whole attitude toward the unity question 
 depends upon our notion of what the church to 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 which we are attached is really like. One view 
 is that each church is a little working model of 
 what a true church ought to be, kept under a glass 
 case, provided with its own little boiler and its own 
 little dynamo, the admiration of all who look at 
 it, but by no means and under no circumstances 
 to be connected either by belt or cable with the 
 throbbing, vibrant religious forces of the outer 
 works through broad America, lest they wreck the 
 petite mechanism by the violence of their thrill. 
 We sit here debating these petty technicalities, de- 
 vising the ingenious restraints, and meanwhile out- 
 of-doors the organisation of the world goes on." 
 
 Wherever the churches are endeavoring to 
 meet the demands of the world's organisa- 
 tion they do not find any basis for practical 
 unity in trying to think alike, or worship 
 alike, or be governed alike. As the bond of 
 comity between themselves is the Christian 
 spirit, so the basis of their common service 
 to the community is their co-operative unity. 
 How reasonably practical it is for the 
 churches in any community, large or small, 
 250 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 to co-operate for the common good, Wash- 
 ington Gladden long ago set forth in his story 
 of The Christian League of Connecticut. 
 The churches in the state of Maine were 
 among the first to form an interdenomina- 
 tional committee to act as a final court in 
 preserving comity and promoting co-opera- 
 tion. That state of rural communities is 
 thus beginning to find relief from the un- 
 godly sectarian rivalry which is dividing the 
 forces of righteousness hopelessly and is 
 overburdening every little village with a 
 multiplicity of paralytic churches. In New 
 York the Federation of Churches and Re- 
 ligious Workers has successfully set the type 
 for the National Federation of Churches 
 which is pressing the cause of co-operative 
 unity. But prior to these newer movements 
 the foreign missionaries of all our churches 
 have found it so necessary and feasible that 
 they should unite their forces in the over- 
 shadowing presence of the united forces of 
 evil, that the churches of the home-land are 
 251 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 likely to receive the boon of their own unity 
 in return for the chivalrous service bestowed 
 abroad. 
 
 A working example and demonstration of 
 the advantage of combining our religious re- 
 sources may be seen in many rural communi- 
 ties in the consolidation of school districts, 
 which makes one strong and effective educa- 
 tional centre possible. Why may not sev- 
 eral denominational churches, too small for 
 any effective service, unite at least in a com- 
 mon effort to inspire the people of their com- 
 munity with the highest ideals of social and 
 civic relationship, to educate the citizens in 
 organising progressive movements and in 
 supplying the self-sacrificing spirit which 
 must always be necessary to realise every 
 hope of progress? 
 
 The final test of the capacity and right of 
 the churches to fulfil their high function in 
 the community is not the attitude of the peo- 
 ple toward the Church, but the willingness 
 and capacity of the Church to serve the real 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 interest of all the people. The country, 
 town, or city church which thus serves its 
 community the most will serve itself the best, 
 and, within the bounds of its legitimate func- 
 tion, will be a source and centre from which 
 will proceed ideal, initiative, and power to 
 the people. 
 
 Democracy, coming to its own in local self- 
 government, especially in cities, challenges 
 our times with no more categorical impera- 
 tive than the question, ' l Will the Church be- 
 come the democracy?" It is conceded that, 
 as another has said, " The reformer's con- 
 science earns the right to audit the books of 
 society, must enter politics and conquer the 
 earth. The Holy Land to be redeemed is 
 under the feet of the peasant and the la- 
 bourer." But speaking as a churchman, Pro- 
 fessor H. S. Nash, who makes this concession 
 also insists that democracy 
 
 " lays on the will the heaviest tax of all. The 
 sincere believer in democracy must have a dogmatic 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 conviction that the principle of individuality shall 
 some time have the widest possible spread. His 
 right to be an individual himself puts him under 
 the highest conceivable obligation to create indi- 
 viduality in others. He is a gentleman in a true 
 democratic sense just in the measure that he has 
 the art of finding himself in an ever-growing num- 
 ber of persons of all sorts and conditions. He 
 must carry the campaign against caste into larger 
 issues. He must face all that is disagreeable and 
 problematic in democracy, concealing nothing, 
 blinking nothing away, and at the same time he 
 must keep his will strong and temperate, so that 
 its edge will never turn. To meet all his social 
 obligations properly, to pay all his political debts 
 joyously, never to throw a glance over his shoulder 
 to the monastery this is a mighty day's work.'' 
 
 The question whether the Church will be 
 the democracy is raising the question 
 whether the democracy will be the Church. 
 Richard Whiteing, one of the keenest, satirical 
 critics of conventional ecclesiasticism which 
 current fiction has produced, makes this 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 startlingly frank and final answer in his Num- 
 ber 5 John Street: 
 
 " Nothing but a church will do. All the other 
 schemes of democracy come to naught for want 
 of that. The lecture platform is no substitute for 
 Sinai. Democracy is a religion or nothing, with its 
 doctrine, its forms, its ritual, its ceremonies, its 
 government as a church above all, its organised 
 sacrifice of the altar, the sacrifice of self. De- 
 mocracy must get rid of the natural man, of each 
 for himself, and have a new birth into the spiritual 
 man, the ideal self of each for all. Without re- 
 ligion, how is man, the essentially religious animal, 
 to face the most tremendous of all problems, social 
 justice? " 
 
 The social ideals of Christianity have all 
 along the history of their revelation inspired 
 the initiative of many others than men of 
 the spirit. Over the men of 1798 there hung 
 like a mirage in the desolation of their des- 
 ert, the dimly seen ideals of that Kingdom 
 which is " righteousness, peace and joy." 
 255 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL ACTION 
 
 Had their initiative been " in the spirit, " 
 then " liberty, eqnality, and fraternity " 
 might have been the translation of those an- 
 cient terms in Pentecostal tongues to the 
 modern world. Then the revolution might 
 have been the world's second Pentecost, the 
 spirit's social regeneration, the birth of the 
 coming nation in a day. For the social re- 
 generation is the function of the Messianic 
 spirit. But that spirit has never wrought 
 the social regeneration without having the 
 cross of self-sacrifice to work through, with- 
 out having as at Pentecost, and at every so- 
 cial revival since, Messianic people to sacri- 
 fice themselves to bear away the sin of soci- 
 ety and to bring in the " kingdom of the 
 Father. " The cross of social self-denial is 
 the Christ-man's burden now as ever now, 
 in some respects, as never before. For there 
 is an ethical tragedy at hand, such as has not 
 tested Christendom since the Eeformation, 
 such as did not test it then at a point of such 
 close contact with the people of the whole 
 256 
 
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 
 
 world. It remains to be seen where the 
 cross-bearing spirit will find the Messianic 
 people " the servant of Jehovah " to serve 
 the peoples, the community-serving Church, 
 and therefore the Church of the community. 
 
 257 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 PHELPS, AUSTIN 
 Men and Books. Chapters 1-2. Scribner. 
 
 New York. 1882. 
 VAN DYKE, HENRY 
 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. Chapter 4. 
 
 Macmillan. New York. 1896. 
 SPEER, ROBERT E. 
 Studies of the Man Christ Jesus. Revell. 
 
 New York. 1896. 
 
 
 HARNACK and HERRMANN 
 The Social Gospel. Putnam. New York. 1907. 
 
 KING, HENRY C. 
 Religion as Life. Macmillan. New York. 1913. 
 
 NASH, H. S. 
 
 Genesis of the Social Conscience. Macmillan. 
 
 New York. 1897. 
 PARADISE, FRANK ILSLEY 
 
 The Church and the Individual. Moffat. 
 
 New York. 1910. 
 RAUSCHENBUSCH, WALTER 
 
 Christianity and the Social Crisis. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1907. 
 
 259 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 Prayers of the Social Awakening. Pilgrim 
 Press. Boston. 1910. 
 
 DENNIS, JAMES S. 
 
 Christian Missions and Social Progress. Vol. I, 
 Chapters 1-4. Revell. New York. 1897. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HUMAN POINT OP VIEW 
 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL 
 
 Consular Experiences. In volume " Our Old 
 Home." Houghton, Mifflin. Boston. 1901. 
 IRVINE, ALEXANDER 
 From the Bottom Up. Doubleday, Page. New 
 
 York. 1910. 
 
 Compare transformation of character as 
 sketched by RALPH CONNOR, HAROLD BEGBIE, 
 CHARLES M. SHELDON. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 PERSONALITY A SOCIAL PRODUCT AND FORCE 
 
 WORTMAN, DENIS 
 Reliques of the Christ. Revell. New York. 
 
 1896. 
 
 The Divine Processional. Revell. New York. 
 1902. 
 
 MCKENZIE, ALEXANDER 
 
 Address at Annual Meeting of American 
 Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mis- 
 sions. 1893. 
 
 260 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 BALDWIN, J. MARK 
 
 Social and Ethical Interpretation of Mental 
 Development. Pp. 7-89, 557-563. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1897. 
 COOLEY, CHARLES H. 
 
 Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribner. 
 New York. 1902. 
 
 BROOKS, PHILLIPS 
 
 Self-Culture and Self-Sacrifice. Address be- 
 fore St. Andrew's Brotherhood. St. An- 
 drew's Cross, November, 1892. Boston. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CALL AND EQUIPMENT FOR EFFECTIVE SERVICE 
 BURTON, NATHANIEL J. 
 
 Yale Lectures on Preaching. Pilgrim Press. 
 
 Boston. 1888. 
 BROOKS, PHILLIPS 
 
 Yale Lectures on Preaching. Button. New 
 York. 1878. 
 
 BRUCE, A. B. 
 
 The Training of the Twelve. Clark. Edin- 
 burgh. 1883. 
 STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER 
 
 The Minister's Wooing. Houghton, Mifflin. 
 
 Boston. 
 
 ALLEN, WILLIAM H. 
 
 Efficient Democracy. Dodd, Mead. New York. 
 1907. 
 
 261 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CHANGING CONDITIONS OP A WORKING FAITH 
 RAUSCHENBUSCH, WALTER 
 
 Christianising the Social Order. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1912. 
 
 / BATTEN, SAMUEL Z. 
 
 The Social Task of Christianity. Revell. New 
 
 York. 1911. 
 MATHEWS, SHAILER 
 
 The Church and the Changing Order. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1907. 
 
 TUCKER, WILLIAM JEWETT 
 
 The Function of the Church in Modern So- 
 ciety. Houghton, Mifflin. Boston. 1911. 
 
 GLADDEN, WASHINGTON 
 
 The Church and Modern Life. Houghton, 
 Mifflin. Boston. 1908. 
 
 WARD, H. F., and others 
 Social Creed of the Churches. Eaton & Mains. 
 
 New York. 1912. 
 Social Ministry. Eaton & Mains. New York. 
 
 1910. 
 
 TIPPT, W. M., and others 
 The Socialised Church. Eaton & Mains. New 
 
 York. 1908. 
 MACPARLAND, CHARLES S., and others 
 
 The Christian Ministry and the Social Order. 
 Yale University Press. New Haven. 1909. 
 
 262 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 BROWN, CHARLES R. 
 
 The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit. 
 Scribner. New York. 1906. 
 
 DAVENPORT, F. M. 
 
 Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1905. 
 
 STRONG, JOSIAH 
 
 Our World The New World Life. Double- 
 day, Page. New York. 1913. 
 
 HYDE, H. D. 
 
 Outlines of Social Theology. Macmillan. New 
 York. 1895. 
 
 KING, HENRY C. 
 
 Theology and the Social Consciousness. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1902. 
 
 SMITH, G. B. 
 
 Social Idealism and the Changing Theology. 
 MacmiUan. New York. 1913. 
 
 EUCKEN, RUDOLF C. 
 
 Christianity and the New Idealism. Harper. 
 New York. 1909. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE RELIGION OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 MOZLEY, J. B. 
 
 Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, pp. 37-63, 83-125. 
 Dutton. New York. 1881. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 GLADDEN, WASHINGTON 
 
 Ruling Ideas of the Present Age. Houghton, 
 Mifflin. Boston. 1895. 
 
 HEARN, W. E. 
 
 The Aryan Household, pp. 26-127, 162. 
 Longmans. London. 1891. 
 
 JACKS, L. P. 
 
 Church and World. Hibbert Journal, Octo- 
 ber, 1906. London. 
 
 FREMANTLE, W. H. 
 The World as the Subject of Redemption. 
 
 Longmans. London. 1892. 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. Scribner. 
 
 New York. 1883. 
 
 SEELEY, J. R. 
 
 Ecce Homo. Roberts Bros. Boston. 1867. 
 CHAD WICK, W. E. 
 
 Social Relationships in the Light of Christian- 
 ity. Longmans. New York. 1910. 
 
 EARP, EDWIN L. 
 
 Social Aspects of Religious Institutions. Eaton 
 & Mains. New York. 1908. 
 
 SCHMIDT, C. 
 
 Social Results of Early Christianity. Isbister. 
 London. 1885. 
 
 BRACE, CHARLES LORING 
 
 Gesta Christi. Armstrong. New York. 1883. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 STORES, RICHARD S. 
 Divine Origin of Christianity. Randolph & 
 
 Co. New York. 1884. 
 MAZZINI, JOSEPH 
 
 Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe. Smith, 
 
 Elder & Co. London. 1891. 
 On the Duties of Man. Smith, Elder & Co. 
 God and the People. Excerpts by C. W. 
 STUBBS. T. Fisher Unwin. London. 1896. 
 Memoir. By Mrs. E. A. VENTURI. H. S. King 
 
 & Co. London. 1875. 
 MEN AND RELIGION MESSAGES 
 
 Vol. II. Social Service. Association Press. 
 New York. 1912. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE FAMILY : ^FIELD, FUNCTION, AND TRIBUTARY 
 
 AGENCIES 
 WESTERMARCK, E. 
 
 History of Human Marriage. Macmillan. 
 
 London. 1891. 
 HOWARD, GEORGE E. 
 
 History of Matrimonial Institutions. Uni- 
 versity of Chicago Press. 1904. 
 DRUMMOND, HENRY 
 
 The Ascent of Man. Chapters 7-9. James 
 
 Pott & Co. New York. 1894. 
 DEALEY, J. Q. 
 
 The Family in Its Sociological Aspects. 
 Houghton, Mifflin. Boston. 1912. 
 
 265 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 PARSONS, MRS. E. C. 
 
 The Family. Putnam. New York. 1906. 
 
 BOSANQUET, HELEN 
 
 The Family. Macmillan. London. 1906. 
 
 . DEVINE, EDWARD T. 
 
 The Family and Social Work. Survey Asso- 
 ciates. New York. 1912. 
 
 BLISS, WILLIAM D. P. 
 
 Encyclopedia of Social Reform. Articles 
 ' ' Family, " ' ' Malthusianism. ' ' Funk & 
 Wagnalls. New York. 1908. 
 
 MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT 
 
 Essay on Principles of Population. Reeves. 
 London. 1888. 
 
 HADLEY, ARTHUR T. 
 
 Economics. Pp. 41-51. Putnam. New York. 
 1899. 
 
 HOBHOUSE, L. T. 
 
 Social Evolution and Political Theory. Pp. 
 13-79, on " Progress and the Struggle for 
 Existence " and " Value and Limitations of 
 Eugenics." Columbia University Press. 
 New York. 1911. 
 
 BUSHNELL, HORACE 
 
 Christian Nurture. Chapter 4, on " The Or- 
 ganic Unity of the Family." Scribner. 
 New York. 1886. 
 
 266 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 NEWSHOLME, ARTHUR 
 Declining Birth-rate. Moffat, Yard & Co. 
 
 New York. 1911. 
 SALEEBY, C. W. 
 Method of Race Regeneration. Moffat. New 
 
 York. 1911. 
 ELLIS, HAVELOCK 
 Problem of Race Regeneration. Moffat. New 
 
 York. 1911. 
 THE SURVEY 
 The Right to be Well Born. Symposium. 
 
 March 2, 1912. 
 SELIGMAN, E. E. A. 
 
 The Social Evil. Putnam. New York. 1912. 
 ADDAMS, JANE 
 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. Mae- 
 
 millan. New York. 1912. 
 BUREAU OF SOCIAL HYGIENE, PUBLICATIONS OP 
 Century Co. New York. 1913. 
 
 VICE COMMISSION OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO, RE- t " 
 
 PORT OF 
 
 The Social Evil in Chicago. American Vigi- 
 lance Association. New York. 1912. 
 JUVENILE PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION OF CHICAGO,^ 
 
 REPORTS OF 
 
 BRECKINRIDGE and ABBOTT L-- 
 
 The Delinquent Child and the Home. Chari- 
 ties Publication Committee. New York. 
 1912. 
 
 267 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 The Child in the City. Chicago Child Wel- 
 fare Conference Papers. Chicago School of 
 Civics and Philanthropy. 1912. 
 
 DEFOREST and VEILLER 
 
 The Tenement House Problem. Two volumes. 
 Macmillan. New York. 1903. 
 
 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY, PUBLICATIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 Volume III. The Family. University of Chi- 
 cago Press. 1908. 
 
 NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND COR- 
 RECTION, PROCEEDINGS OF 
 Family. See Alexander Johnson's Index, 
 Guide. Indianapolis. 1908. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SURVIVAL AND REVIVAL OF NEIGHBOURSHIP 
 HEARN, W. E. 
 
 The Aryan Household. Longmans. London. 
 1891. 
 
 MAINE, HENRY SUMNER 
 
 Village Communities in the East and West. 
 Holt. New York. 1889. 
 
 SHALER, NATHANIEL S. 
 
 The Neighbour. Houghton, Mifflin. Boston. 
 1904. 
 
 RICHMOND, MARY E. 
 
 The Good Neighbour. Lippincott. Philadel- 
 phia. 1912. 
 
 268 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 WOODS and KENNEDY 
 
 Handbook of Settlements. Charities Publica- 
 tion Committee. New York. 1911. 
 
 Young Working Girls. Houghton, Mifflin. 
 Boston. 1913. 
 
 The Settlement Horizon. Survey Associates. 
 New York. 1913. 
 
 ADDAMS, JANE 
 
 Twenty Years at Hull House. Macmillan. 
 
 New York. 1910. 
 
 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. 
 Macmillan. New York. 1909. 
 
 TAYLOR, GRAHAM 
 
 The Social Settlement, Church and Religion. 
 The Survey. July 5, 1913. 
 
 PERRY, CLARENCE A. 
 
 The Larger Use of the School Plant. Charities 
 Publication Committee. New York. 1910. 
 
 WARD, EDWARD J. 
 
 The Social Centre. Appleton. New York. 
 1913. 
 
 NATIONAL PLAYGROUND ASSOCIATION, PUBLICA- 
 TIONS OF 
 New York City. 
 
 NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND COR- 
 RECTION, PROCEEDINGS OF 
 " Neighbourhood." S ; ee Alexander Johnson's 
 Index, Guide. Indianapolis. 1908. 
 
 269 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 CONYNGTON, MARY 
 
 How to Help. Macmillan. New York. 1912. 
 
 BYINGTON, MARGARET F. 
 
 What Social Workers Should Know About 
 Their Own Communities. Charities Pub- 
 lication Committee. New York. 1912. 
 
 ACADEMY OP POLITICAL SCIENCE IN THE CITY OP 
 
 NEW YORK, PROCEEDINGS OP 
 Organisation for Social Work. July, 1912. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 INDUSTRY AND RELIGION: THEIR COMMON GROUND 
 
 AND INTERDEPENDENCE 
 BAX, E. BELFORT 
 
 The Peasants' War in Germany. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1899. 
 
 LlNSAY, T. M. 
 
 History of the Reformation. Vol. I. Scribner. 
 
 New York. 1906. 
 RYAN, JOHN A. 
 
 The Living Wage. Macmillan. New York. 
 
 1906. 
 
 NATIONAL CONFERENCE OP CHARITIES AND COR- 
 RECTION, PROCEEDINGS OF 
 1910-1913. Reports of Committee on Stand- 
 ards of Living and Labour. 
 
 RAUSCHENBUSCH, WALTER 
 
 Christianising the Social Order. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1912. 
 
 270 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 BLISS, WILLIAM D. P. 
 
 Encyclopedia of Social Reform. Articles 
 on " Christianity and Social Reform," 
 11 Church and Social Reform," " The 
 Church and the Workingman, ' ' * ' Poverty, ' ' 
 " Socialism." Funk & Wagnalls. New 
 York. 1908. 
 GLADDEN, WASHINGTON 
 
 Tools and the Man. Houghton, Mifflin. Bos- 
 ton. 1893. 
 The Labour Question. Pilgrim Press. Boston. 
 
 1911. 
 
 STELZLE, CHARLES 
 American Social and Religious Conditions. 
 
 Revell. New York. 1912. 
 ABBOTT, EDITH 
 Women in Industry. Appleton. New York. 
 
 1910. 
 
 GOLDMARK, JOSEPHINE 
 Fatigue and Efficiency. Charities Publication 
 
 Committee. New York. 1912. 
 NATIONAL CHILD LABOUR COMMITTEE, PUBLICA- 
 TIONS OF 
 New York City. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ORGANISED INDUSTRY AND ORGANISED RELIGION 
 BOOTH, CHARLES 
 Life and Labour in London. Volumes on Pov- 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 erty, and Poverty-Producing Trades. Mac- 
 millan. London. 1902. 
 THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY 
 
 The Steel Workers, by JOHN A. FITCH ; Home- 
 stead: The Households of a Mill Town, by 
 MARGARET F. BYINGTON; Work Accidents 
 and the Law, by CRYSTAL EASTMAN; 
 Women and the Trades, by ELIZABETH B. 
 BUTLER. Charities Publication Committee. 
 New York. 1909-1911. 
 HOBSON, JOHN A. 
 
 Evolution of Modern Capitalism. Scribner. 
 
 New York. 1894. 
 WEBB, SIDNEY and BEATRICE 
 Industrial Democracy. Longmans. London. 
 
 1897. 
 MITCHELL, JOHN 
 
 Organised Labour. American Book and Bible 
 
 House. Philadelphia. 1903. 
 WOMER, PARLEY PAUL 
 
 The Church and the Labour Conflict. Mac- 
 
 millan. New York. 1913. 
 SMITH, SAMUEL G. 
 The Industrial Conflict. Revell. New York. 
 
 1908. 
 
 SPARGO, JOHN 
 
 Syndicalism. Industrial Unionism and Social- 
 ism. Huebsch. New York. 1913. 
 SPARGO and ARNER 
 
 Elements of Socialism. Macmillan. New 
 York. 1912. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 CITY AND CHURCH REAPPROACHING EACH OTHER 
 
 DE TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS 
 
 Democracy in America. Appleton. New York. 
 1904. 
 
 BRYCE, JAMES 
 
 American Commonwealth. Vol. I. Part 2. 
 Chapters 48-52. Macmillan. New York. 
 1889. 
 
 CHALMERS, THOMAS 
 
 Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. 
 Edited by C. R. Henderson. Scribner. New 
 York. 1900. 
 
 STRONG, JOSIAH 
 
 The Challenge of the City. Young People's 
 
 Missionary Movement. New York. 1907. 
 The Next Great Awakening. Baker & Taylor. 
 
 New York. 1902. 
 
 STELZLE, CHARLES 
 
 Christianity's Storm Centre A Study of the 
 Modern City. Revell. New York. 1907. 
 
 CUTTING, R. FULTON 
 
 The Church and Society. Macmillan. New 
 York. 1912. 
 
 RUSKIN, JOHN 
 
 The Stones of Venice. Library Edition. 
 Grant Allen. London. 1903. 
 
 273 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 CROLY, H. D. 
 
 The Promise of American Life. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1909. 
 
 ANTIN, MARY 
 
 The Promised Land. Houghton, Mifflin. Bos- 
 ton. 1912. 
 
 ROBERTS, PETER 
 
 The New Immigration. Macmillan. New 
 York. 1912. 
 
 SMITH, J. A. 
 
 The Spirit of American Government. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1911. 
 
 MULFORD, ELISHA 
 
 The Nation. Hurd & Houghton. Boston. 
 
 1877. 
 The Republic of God. Houghton, Mifflin. 
 
 Boston. 1882. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 CHURCH AND COMMUNITY : THEIR INTERRELATION 
 
 AND COMMON AIM 
 FISKE, JOHN 
 American Political Ideas. Houghton, Mifflin. 
 
 Boston. 1911. 
 The Beginnings of New England. Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin. Boston. 1891. 
 ANDERSON, W. L. 
 
 The Country Town. Baker & Taylor. New 
 York. 1906. 
 
 274 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 WILSON, WARREN H. 
 
 Evolution of the Country Community. Pil- 
 grim Press. Boston. 1912. 
 
 BUTTERFIELD, KENYON L. 
 
 The Country Church and the Rural Problem. 
 University of Chicago Press. 1911. 
 
 McVEY, FRANK L. 
 
 The Making of a Town. McClurg. Chicago. 
 1913. 
 
 PLUNKETT, HORACE 
 
 Rural Life Problem of the United States. 
 Macmillan. New York. 1910. 
 
 BAILEY, L. H. 
 
 Country Life Movement in the United States. 
 Macmillan. New York. 1911. 
 
 GILL and PINCHOT 
 
 The Country Church. Macmillan. New York. 
 1913. 
 
 CARVER, T. N. 
 
 Principles of Rural Economics. Ginn & Co. 
 New York. 1911. 
 
 GILLETTE, JOHN M. 
 
 Constructive Rural Sociology. Sturgis & Wal- 
 ton. New York. 1913. 
 
 FISKE, G. W. 
 
 The Challenge of the Country. Association 
 Press. New York. 1912. 
 
 275 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 HOWE, FREDERICK C. 
 
 The City the Hope of Democracy. Scribner. 
 New York. 1909. 
 
 STEAD, WILLIAM T. 
 
 If Christ Came to Chicago. Laird & Lee. 
 Chicago. 1894. 
 
 ZUEBLIN, CHARLES 
 
 American Municipal Progress. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1902. 
 
 KOBINSON, CHARLES MULFORD 
 
 Improvement of Cities and Towns. Putnam. 
 New York. 1901. 
 
 TAYLOR, GRAHAM ROMEYN 
 
 Satellite Cities. The Survey. Oct. 5, Nov. 2, 
 Dec. 7, 1912; Feb. 1, Mar. 1, June 7, 1913. 
 
 ALLEN, W. H. 
 
 Civics and Health. Ginn & Co. Boston. 1909. 
 
 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 Public Recreation Facilities. Philadelphia. 
 March, 1910. 
 
 VEILLER, LAWRENCE 
 
 Housing Reform. Charities Publication Com- 
 mittee. New York. 1910. 
 
 UNWIN, RAYMOND 
 
 Town Planning in Practice. T. Fisher Unwin. 
 London. 1909. 
 
 276 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 HUNTINGTON, WlLLIAM E. 
 
 The Church Idea. Scribner. New York. 
 
 1899. 
 A National Church. Scribner. New York. 
 
 NASH, H. S. 
 
 Genesis of the Social Conscience. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1897. 
 
 WHITEING, RICHARD 
 
 Number 5 John Street. Century Co. New 
 York. 1899. 
 
 HATCH, EDWIN 
 Organisation of Early Christian Churches. 
 
 Longmans. London. 1892. 
 The Influence of Greek Ideas. Williams & 
 
 Norgate. London. 1892. 
 
 HORT, F. J. A. 
 
 Christian Ecclesia. Macmillan. London. 1897. 
 
 STEAD, F. HERBERT 
 
 The Kingdom and the Church. In volume of 
 essays, " Faith and Criticism." Button. 
 New York. 
 
 The Kingdom of God. T. & T. Clark. Edin- 
 burgh. 
 
 GLADDEN, WASHINGTON 
 The Church and the Kingdom. Revell. New 
 
 York. 1894. 
 The Church and Modern Life. Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin. Boston. 1908. 
 
 277 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 MATHEWS, SHAILER 
 
 The Social Teachings of Jesus. Macmillan. 
 
 New York. 1897. 
 PEABODY, FRANCIS G. 
 
 Jesus Christ and the Social Question. Mac- 
 millan. New York. 1900. 
 
 ALLEN, A. V. G. 
 
 Continuity of Christian Thought. Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin. Boston. 1884. 
 NITTI, FRANCESCO S. 
 
 Catholic Socialism. Macmillan. New York. 
 
 1895. 
 
 SMITH, SAMUEL G. 
 Democracy and the Church. Appleton. New 
 
 York. 1912. 
 PIKE, GRANVILLE Ross 
 
 The Divine Drama. Macmillan. New York. 
 
 1899. 
 HALL, THOMAS C. 
 
 Social Solutions in the Light of Christian 
 Ethics. Eaton & Mains. New York. 1910. 
 History of Ethics within Organised Christian- 
 ity. Scribner. New York. 1910. 
 DOLE, CHARLES F. 
 
 The Ethics of Progress. Crowell & Co. New 
 
 York. 1909. 
 PATTEN, SIMON N. 
 
 The New Basis of Civilisation. Macmillan. 
 New York. 1908. 
 
 278 
 
REFERENCES 
 
 FERGUSON, CHARLES 
 
 The Religion of Democracy. Kansas City. 
 
 1907. 
 ADDAMS, JANE 
 
 Democracy and Social Ethics. Macmillan. 
 
 New York. 1902. 
 LLOYD, HENRY D. 
 
 Man, the Social Creator. Doubleday, Page. 
 
 New York. 1906. 
 CHATTERTON-HILL, GEORGES 
 The Sociological Value of Christianity. Black. 
 London. 1912. 
 
 HENDERSON, CHARLES R. 
 
 Social Programmes in the West. University of 
 Chicago Press. 1913. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM 
 Edited by JOSIAH STRONG. Monthly studies in 
 Social Reform. The American Institute of 
 Social Service. New York. 
 
 THE SURVEY 
 
 A magazine for descriptive, constructive and 
 critical discussion of current movements, 
 agencies and literature. New York. 
 
 IDEAL COMMONWEALTHS 
 The Republic, PLATO; Ethics, ARISTOTLE; 
 Utopia, THOMAS MORE; City of the Sun, 
 CAMPANELLA; News from Nowhere, WIL- 
 LIAM MORRIS ; ISAIAH ; The Holy City in THE 
 REVELATION OP ST. JOHN. 
 279 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on thedateto whichj;eQpjiTd ^ 
 Renewed boofc!* ajte suBfect to immediate rlcall. 
 
 F 
 
 REG D LD 
 
 JUN2 '65-12M 
 
 INTER LIBRARY 
 
 JAN 04 1993 
 
 LD 21A-40m-4,'63 
 (D6471slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
YB 07233 
 
 U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY