time, to take sides in the controversy between collectivism and private
enterprise. The Socialists declare that the wage system, based on
private capital, tends to injustice and oppression; the advocates of the
existing system contend that Socialism would destroy the foundations of
thrift and welfare. The church cannot be the umpire in this contest, nor
can it take sides with either party. Questions of economic method are
beyond its province. Its concern is not with the machinery of society,
but with the moral motive power. Or, it might be truer to say that it
seeks to invigorate the moral life of men, and trusts that reinforced
life to make its own economic forms. Its business is to fill men's minds
with the truth as it is in Jesus, and to make them see that that truth
applies to every human relation; and it ought to believe that when this
truth is thus received and thus applied, it will solve all social
problems. When employers and employed are all filled with the spirit of
Christ, the wage system will not be a system of exploitation, but a
means of social service.
Here is an employer of many hundreds of men, at the head of a very large
business, which is rapidly increasing. This is not an imaginary case.
This employer is a man of flesh and blood, and he is in the very thick
of the competitive mêlée; he is using the machinery of the wage system,
but he is governing all his business by the principles of Christianity,
and the business is thriving in a marvelous way. This does not mean that
the manager is piling up money for himself, for he is not: he is living
very frugally, and is adding nothing to his own accumulation; but the
business is growing by leaps and bounds. The increasing profits, every
year, are distributed in the form of stock among the laborers who do the
work, and the customers who purchase the goods. The men who do the work
are buying for themselves beautiful homes in the vicinity of the
factory; in a few more years they will own a large part of the stock of
the concern. This manager is not getting rich; but he has the
satisfaction of seeing his business prospering in his hands; he is
helping a great many men to find the ways of comfort and independence,
and he insists that he has himself found the secret of a happy life. It
is evident that if all employers were governed by the same motives, the
wage system would be an instrument of philanthropy. Whether this man is
a church member or not does not appear, but he is certainly a Christian;
he has learned the way of Jesus, and is walking in it. If the church
could inspire all its members with this kind of social passion, all
social questions would be solved. And this is the church's business--to
inspire its members with this kind of social passion. Without this
spirit in their hearts, no matter what the social machinery might be,
the outcome would be envying and strife and endless unhappiness.
We have had the inside history of some of the many communistic
enterprises that have come to grief, and all of them have been wrecked
by the selfishness of their members, most of whom were seeking for soft
places, and shirking their duties,--each trying to get as much as he
could out of the commonwealth and to give in return for it as little
service as possible. These contrasted cases show that the machinery of
the wage system cannot prevent the exercise of brotherliness, and that
the machinery of communism will not secure it. No kind of social
machinery will produce happiness or welfare when selfish men are running
it; and no kind of social machinery will keep brotherly men from
behaving brotherly.
We are often told by Socialists that the present régime of individual
initiative and private capital tends to make men selfish and
unbrotherly, while the tendency of Socialism would be to make men
unselfish and fraternal. If the church were sure that this is the truth,
she would be inclined to throw her influence on the side of Socialism.
But, on the other hand, it is urged that Socialism tends to merge the
individual in the mass, to destroy the virtues of self-respect and
self-reliance, and to weaken the fibre of manhood. If the church were
sure that this is true, she would be constrained to pause before
committing herself to the socialistic programme.
She knows, in fact, that there is truth in both these contentions. That
the individualistic régime has bred a fearful amount of heartlessness
and rapacity is painfully evident; that such socialistic experiments as
have been tried have weakened human virtue appears to be true. Under
which régime the greater damage would be done is not yet quite clear.
Therefore the church cannot commit herself to either of these methods.
The best work she can do, at the present time, is to inspire men with a
love of justice and a spirit of service. She must rear up a generation
of men who hate robbery in all its disguises; who are determined never
to prosper at the expense of their neighbors, and who know how to find
their highest pleasure in helping their fellow men. If the Christian
morality means anything, it means all this. A church which represents
Jesus Christ on the earth must set before herself no lower aim than
this. And a generation of men whose hearts are on fire with this purpose
may be trusted to fill the earth with righteousness and peace, whether
they work with the machinery of the wage system or with the machinery of
Socialism.
There are many good men, outside the church as well as within it, who
believe that the existing social order can never be Christianized; that
it must be replaced by a new social system. But most of us are still
clinging to the belief that the existing social order can be
Christianized, so that justice may be established in it, and good-will
find expression through it. That it has been sadly perverted we all
confess; we acknowledge with shame that it has become, in large measure,
the instrument of injustice and oppression. But we believe that it may
be reformed, so that it shall represent, in some fair degree, the
kingdom of God.
The redemption of the social order is, then, the problem now before us.
Can it be accomplished? President Roosevelt thinks that it can, and
those who stand with him and support him assume that the existing
competitive régime can be moralized and made to represent the interests
of equity and fair dealing. If this can be done, nothing more is needed.
If it cannot be done, the existing régime must make way for something
better. The conviction that it can be done is finding expression just
now in the vigorous efforts that are being made to amend and strengthen
the laws which restrain plunderers and oppressors, so that opportunities
may be equalized and the paths to success be kept open for men of all
ranks and capacities. This is simple justice, and for this the church of
God must stand with all the might of her influence.
That she has been derelict in the discharge of this duty must be
confessed. If she had kept the charge committed to her, the inequalities
and spoliations now burdening society would not be in existence. For
although it is not the business of the church to furnish to the world an
economic programme, it is her business to see that no economic programme
is permitted to exist under which injustice and oppression find shelter.
The right to reprove and denounce all social arrangements by which the
few prosper at the expense of the many is one of her chartered rights as
the institute of prophecy. A church which fails to exercise this
function is faithless to her primary obligation.
That the church has incurred heavy blame because of the feebleness of
her testimony against such wrongs must now be confessed, and the least
she can do to make amends for this infidelity is to speak now and
henceforth, with commanding voice, against all the corporate wrongs that
infest society. It may be that by her testimony the magistrates will be
strengthened so to enforce the laws that aggressors shall be restrained,
and freedom and opportunity secured to all; and that thus the existing
industrial order may become, so far as law can make it, the servant of
justice and good-will.
This is the first step toward social redemption. The reënthronement of
justice is the primary obligation. John the Baptist must speak first.
The conviction of social sin is the beginning of social righteousness.
The church has a great work to do in awakening the public conscience to
forms of injustice which are so involved and concealed that our
attention is not fixed upon them. Professor Ross has just announced a
volume with the title "Sin and Society." It is an illuminating word. The
deadliest of the evils which are oppressing the community to-day come
under this category. They are hidden from the public view. They assail
you from ambush and you are helpless. The deadly missiles smite you on
every side, but there is no revealing flash by which you can locate your
foe. The social order is so complex that wrongs of this nature are
easily perpetrated. Many of the transactions by which we are wont to
profit are veiled injustices. They are of a nature so subtle and
indirect that the law has not yet defined and forbidden them. Those who
suffer these injustices are at a distance from us, and there is a
network of legal and commercial relations between ourselves and them; we
know that they will never confront us and call us to account; it is
safe for us to do wrong, and we keep on doing it until our consciences
are dulled, and we are not able to see that any wrong has been done.
The fact is, that such a complex social system as ours needs for its
safe administration a kind of conscientiousness far higher and finer
than that which men needed for honest living fifty years ago. Unless our
minds are trained to see the right and wrong of very intricate
transactions; unless our ethical imagination is sensitive enough to
discern the nature of far-reaching and wide-spreading social relations,
we shall constantly be profiting by the injury of our neighbors.
It is the business of the church to train the consciences of men for the
moral problems that confront them, and this work has been but
indifferently done. The first step in the redemption of the social order
is the education of the Christian conscience to discern the smokeless
sins. It is with evils of this character that the nation is now in a
life and death grapple; the church ought to be able, by its testimony,
to lend effective aid in this conflict.
The nature of the testimony needed may be indicated by a typical
instance.
Not many years ago a very prosperous manufacturing company was doing
business in a thriving American village, giving employment to fifteen
hundred men and women, many of whom had purchased homes, in the
expectation of having permanent occupation and livelihood. It was known
to be a well-paying business; its stock, which was in few hands, was not
in the market.
Suddenly a project of reorganization was announced, and stock amounting
to five times the value of the property was placed upon the market. It
was eagerly taken, for the reputation of the company was very high. With
the proceeds of this sale of securities the managers made themselves
very rich men. It was not necessary for them to do business any longer.
Indeed, they could not have continued to pay dividends on the amount of
stock which they had sold; they had never expected to do any such thing.
What they did was promptly to close the business. The price of the stock
dropped immediately to the neighborhood of zero, millions of values were
canceled, and thousands of investors were made to suffer loss. But the
direct consequences were seen in the village whose prosperity was
suddenly destroyed. Fifteen hundred men and women were deprived, at a
stroke, of employment and livelihood. In many homes there was
destitution and hunger; hundreds of men were compelled to seek
employment elsewhere, sacrificing the homes whose value had been greatly
reduced; businesses that depended on the patronage of the mill hands
were ruined; churches were paralyzed; families were scattered;
discouraged men fell into ways of dissipation; young women were led into
the paths of shame.
All this was done under the forms of law, and yet it would be hard to
find in the annals of crime an instance more flagitious. And the men who
did this thing were church members--members in good standing, leading
members of an evangelical church. Nor does it appear that they suffered
any discredit in the church to which they belonged, and to whose
revenues they continued to contribute out of the plunder by which they
had impoverished and ruined so many. The church had not sufficient moral
sense to reprove and denounce this iniquity. What is worse, the church
had not had enough moral sense to make these men see beforehand that
such an act was infamous.
Undoubtedly they would have promptly justified themselves. "Such
transactions," they would have said, "are occurring every day; what the
law does not forbid, and what everybody else does, cannot be wrong. The
property was ours, and we had a right to put our own price on it, and
sell it for what it would bring. The business was ours, and we had a
right to do what we pleased with it, to keep it running or shut it down
when we got ready: it is a free country: do you think you can compel a
man to go on doing business when he prefers to quit? We never guaranteed
permanent employment to these people: we paid them their wages while
they worked for us, and that is the end of our obligation to them."
Some such answer they would, no doubt, have made to any one who called
in question their conduct; and by such an answer they would have
revealed the failure of the church to which they belonged to bring home
to them their social obligations.
The existing social order can never be redeemed unless a fire can be
kindled on the earth in whose clear shining light such deeds as these
can be seen in all their deformity, and in whose purifying flame such
excuses as these will be utterly consumed. We must have laws to make
such wrongs impossible; but behind the laws must be the moral insight
and the social passion which shall make them effective, and it is the
business of the church to furnish these. When this is done we shall have
made a good beginning in the work of social redemption.
But it will be only a beginning. The work of John the Baptist comes
first, but one mightier than he must follow. The voice of one crying in
the wilderness is but the prelude of that larger revelation which is
made upon the mountain top. To bring home to men the obligations of the
law, and to show them wherein they are failing to obey it, is the first
duty of the church in the present crisis; but it is the gospel with
which she is primarily put in charge.
Clearer teaching about social morality is fundamental, but the great
need, after all, is the vitalization of morality. The moral code, no
matter how accurate may be its precepts, tends to become a dead letter,
unless it is constantly revivified by the spirit of religion.
The Sermon on the Mount is often conceived of as purely ethical
teaching, but the heart of it all is religion. The revelation of the
Fatherhood of God is the light which shines through all these words and
furnishes the motive of all this morality. If we do the things here
commanded, in the way that Jesus expects us to do them, it is because we
know ourselves to be the children of our Father in heaven, living in his
presence, rejoicing in the great love wherewith he has loved us,
trusting in his care, seeking his kingdom, doing his will. The church
which represents Jesus Christ in the world will never forget that its
business is the leavening of society with the life of Christ; but
neither can it forget that the life of Christ can only be maintained by
constant communion with the Father. That the spiritual life of Jesus
himself was thus maintained, the record makes clear. The central fact of
his experience was his living union with the Father. We talk of "the
practice of the presence of God;" Jesus was the only man who has ever
perfectly realized it. And no one who knew him ever failed to see that
it was the Father's kindness and compassion and grace and truth that
were being manifested in his life. It was because he was filled with
all the fullness of God that he imparted to those who received him the
spirit of good-will, the passion for social service.
The church which represents him in the world will need, for its social
service, the same inspiration. Unless its life is fed from this
fountain, its stream will soon run dry. There are those who seem to
think that sociology can solve all the problems of our modern life. If
sociology be sufficiently expanded, this may be true; for a truly
scientific sociology would have to explain how men came to be social
beings, and what is the bond that unites them. If it finds that their
relation to a common Father is the fundamental fact of their existence,
then it would know that religion is at the heart of it, and that right
relations with God are the spring and source of right relations with
men. But a sociology which ignores this primary fact has in it no
redemptive power.
The more earnestly, therefore, we contend that the business of the
church is the Christianization of the social order, the more strenuously
we must maintain that she is powerless to do this work except as her
life is fed by faith and prayer. The redemption of the social order is
the greatest task she has undertaken, and she needs for it a strength
that can only come from conscious fellowship with God. If she ever
needed inspiration, she needs it now. If there ever was a time when she
could dispense with the divine guidance and grace, that time is not now.
The churches which desert the places of prayer, and think to substitute
the wisdom of men for the power of God, are not going to give much aid
in this struggle.
"It must be claimed," says one, "on behalf of the passion for God, that
where it exists it will--automatically, as has been said--set charity,
love, all sweet graces of philanthropic activity, into quick and
ceaseless play.... If the emphasis of religious thought be made to fall
upon the idea of life, this cannot fail to be; for to have the divine
life is to be possessed of and to give out the divine love.... The
regeneration of human society is found to come from the dominance of
spiritual passion, even though it be not the first thing on which
spiritual passion is set; the saint will be--just because he is a
saint--a philanthropist too, since a true sainthood must number love
among the graces of character it brings. It is a fact--one has to make
the sad admission--that religious people, professedly spiritual men and
women, have been and still are in some cases eaten through and through
by selfishness; these are those who, so that they can declare heaven to
be their own, have no care for the present hell in which so many of
their fellows spend their days and years. But that is not because they
are too deeply immersed in the passion for God,--it is because they have
not really immersed themselves in its flood. And in claiming for a
Godward passion the regulative and supreme place among the elements of
life, we do but secure a fuller tenancy among those elements of a
manward love; for the nature which sets itself to receive the whole of
God will, ere it knows it, and as an automatic effect of the new life it
wins, give itself to its brethren in their need. For God is love, and he
must dwell in love who dwells in God."[27]
We may hesitate to say that when the passion for God is the only thing
aimed at it is bound to result in social regeneration; there are too
many facts which prove the contrary. The aim must always include both
the Godward and the manward obligations; the first and the second great
commandments are of equal rank; what needs to be insisted on is the
impossibility of divorcing them.
The church which seeks the redemption of society cannot, then, dispense
with its religion. Nothing has been made plainer, during the recent
exposures of social decay, than the fact that our social morality must
have a religious foundation. Even the man on the street is ready to
concede that no righteousness is adequate for the present emergency but
that which springs from faith in a righteous God. And nothing is more
needed, at this hour, than the deepening of men's faith in the great
religious verities.
It is often said that the only cure for existing social ills is a great
revival of religion, and this is true. But the revival of religion which
is needed is not the kind which the churches are most apt to seek. The
religion which needs to be revived is not that which puts the sole
emphasis on the safety and welfare of the individual, but that which
equally exalts the social welfare; which identifies the interests of
each with the interests of all; which makes men see and feel that no
salvation is worth anything to any man that does not put that man into
Christian relations with his neighbors. Nothing but religion will do
this for any man, and the religion which fails to do this is a spurious
Christianity.
A great revival we shall see, one of these days, which will have this
character. It will bind together the two great commandments of the law,
and make men feel the weight of both of them. It will compel them to
recognize the truth that, while the root of their religion is faith in
God, the fruit of their religion is love for men. It will drive home the
fact that the religion which does not hinder a man from being a boodler
or a grafter; which permits a man to enjoy religion while fleecing his
neighbors by crafty schemes of finance or artful legalized robberies;
which allows the love of gain to triumph over truth and honor and
brotherly kindness; which sits serene and complacent while social
classes make war on each other, and children's lives are consumed by
grinding toil, and women are forced by want into the ways of shame, and
the enemies of society are set free to make gain by the ruin of human
souls, is a religion which is not worth having. It will insist that a
religion which is rightly described as the life of God in the souls of
men, would begin in the house of God itself, and kindle there a
consuming flame before which such iniquities could not stand. Perhaps it
would set men to saying--they might not feel like singing--Thomas
Hughes's great hymn:--
"O God of truth, whose living word
Upholds whate'er hath breath,
Look down on thy creation, Lord,
Enslaved by sin and death.
"Set up thy standard, Lord, that we
Who claim a heavenly birth
May march with thee to smite the lies
That vex thy groaning earth.
"_We_ fight for truth, _we_ fight for God,
Poor slaves of lies and sin!
He who would fight for thee on earth
Must first be true within.
"Thou God of truth, for whom we long,
Thou who wilt hear our prayer,
Do thine own battle in our hearts,
And slay the falsehood there.
"Still smite! still burn! till naught is left
But God's own truth and love;
Then, Lord, as morning dew come down,
Rest on us from above.
"Yea, come! thus tried as in the fire,
From every lie set free,
Thy perfect truth shall dwell in us
And we shall live in thee."
It is hardly needful to say that the redemption of the social order will
not be wrought out without sacrifice. "The redemption of the soul is
costly," says the Psalmist. No man is rescued from moral degradation and
death without suffering and sacrifice. Those who are saved are more
often saved by the suffering of others in their behalf than by their own
suffering. But the price of a soul is apt to be high, and love is
sometimes able to pay it.
The redemption of society from the welter of selfishness and brutishness
and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking.
The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work;
and it must not expect to accomplish it without suffering. "It is enough
for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord."
If the Church is Christ's servant, she must not expect to find any
better way than his way of saving the world.