IV

The purposes of Christianity involve social reform, not only, as we

have said, because we must accomplish environmental change if we are to

achieve widespread individual transformation, but also because we must

reorganize social life and the ideas that underlie it if we are to

maintain and get adequately expressed the individual's Christian spirit

when once he has been transformed. Granted a man with an inwardly

remotived life, sincerely desirous of living Christianly, see what a

situation faces him in the present organization of our economic world!

Selfishness consists in facing any human relationship with the main

intent of getting from it for oneself all the pleasure and profit that

one can. There are folk who use their families so. They live like

parasites on the beautiful institution of family life, getting as much

as possible for as little as possible. There are folk who use the

nation so. To them their country is a gigantic grab-bag from which

their greedy hands may snatch civic security and commercial gain. For

such we have hard and bitter names. There is, however, one

relationship--business--where we take for granted this very attitude

which everywhere else we heartily condemn. Multitudes of folk go up to

that central human relationship with the frank and unabashed confession

that their primary motive is to make out of it all that they can for

themselves. They never have organized their motives around the idea

that the major meaning of business is public service.

The fact is, however, that all around us forms of business already have

developed where we count it shame for a man to be chiefly motived by a

desire for private gain. If you thought that the preacher were in love

with his purse more than with his Gospel, you would not come again to

hear him, and you would be right; if you thought that the teacher of

your children cared for payday first and for teaching second, you would

find another teacher for them tomorrow, and you ought to; if you

thought that your physician cared more for his fees than he did for his

patients, you would discharge him to-night and seek for a man more

worthy of his high profession; if you had reason to suppose that the

judges of the Supreme Court in Washington cared more for their salary

than they did for justice, you could not easily measure your

indignation and your shame. In the development of human life few

things are nobler than the growth of the professional spirit, where in

wide areas of enterprise, not private gain, but fine workmanship and

public service have become the major motives. If one says that a sharp

line of distinction is to be drawn between what we call professions and

what we call business, he does not know history. Nursing, as a gainful

calling, a hundred years ago was a mercenary affair into which

undesirable people went for what they could get out of it. If nursing

to-day is a great profession, where pride of workmanship and love of

service increasingly are in control, it is because Florence

Nightingale, and a noble company after her, have insisted that nursing

essentially is service and that all nurses ought to organize their

motives around that idea.

What is the essential difference between professions and business? Why

should the building of a schoolhouse be a carnival of private profit

for labourers and contractors alike, when the teaching in it is

expected to be full of the love of fine workmanship and the joy of

usefulness? Why, when a war is on, must the making of munitions here

be a wild debauch of private profits, but the firing of them "over

there" be a matter of self-forgetful sacrifice? Why, in selling a food

which is essential to health, should the head of a sugar corporation

say with impunity, "I think it is fair to get out of the consumers all

you can, consistent with the business proposition," when the physician

is expected to care for the undernourished with a devoted professional

spirit utterly different from the sugar magnate's words? There is no

real answer to that "why." The fact is that for multitudes of people

business is still in the unredeemed state in which nursing and teaching

and doctoring were at the beginning, and nothing can save us from the

personal and social consequence of this unhappy situation except the

clear vision of the basic meaning of business in terms of service, and

the courageous reorganization of personal motive and economic

institutions around that idea.

If, then, Christianity is sincerely interested in the quality of human

spirits, in the motives and ideals which dominate personality, she must

be interested in the economic and industrial problems of our day. To

be sure, many ministers make fools of themselves when they pass

judgment on questions which they do not understand. It is true that a

church is much more peaceable and undisturbing when it tries

experiments upon religious emotions with colored lights than when it

makes reports upon the steel trust. Many are tempted, therefore, to

give in to irritation over misdirected ministerial energy or to a

desire for emotional comfort rather than an aroused conscience. One

has only to listen where respectable folk most congregate to hear the

cry: let the Church keep her hands off!

Let me talk for a moment directly to that group. If you mean, by your

distaste for the Church's interest in a fairer economic life, that most

ministers are unfitted by temperament and training to talk wisely on

economic policies and programs, you are right. Do you suppose that we

ministers do not know how we must appear to you when we try to discuss

the details of business? While, however, you are free to say anything

you wish about the ineptitude of ministers in economic affairs (and we,

from our inside information, will probably agree with you), yet as we

thus put ourselves in your places and try to see the situation through

your eyes, do you also put yourselves in our places and try to see it

through our eyes!

I speak, I am sure, in the name of thousands of Christian ministers in

this country endeavouring to do their duty in this trying time. We did

not go into the ministry of Jesus Christ either for money or for fun.

If we had wanted either one primarily, we would have done something

else than preach. We went in because we believed in Jesus Christ and

were assured that only he and his truth could medicine the sorry ills

of this sick world. And now, ministers of Christ, with such a motive,

we see continually some of the dearest things we work for, some of the

fairest results that we achieve, going to pieces on the rocks of the

business world.

You wish us to preach against sin, but you forget that, as one of our

leading sociologists has said, the master iniquities of our time are

connected with money-making. You wish us to imbue your boys and girls

with ideal standards of life, but all too often we see them, having

left our schools and colleges, full of the knightly chivalry of youth,

torn in the world of business between the ideal of Christlikeness and

the selfish rivalry of commercial conflict. We watch them growing

sordid, disillusioned, mercenary, spoiled at last and bereft of their

youth's fine promise. You wish us to preach human brotherhood in

Christ, and then we see that the one chief enemy of brotherhood between

men and nations is economic strife, the root of class consciousness and

war. You send some of us as your representatives to the ends of the

earth to proclaim the Saviour, and then these missionaries send back

word that the non-Christian world knows all too well how far from

dominant in our business life our Christian ideals are and that the

non-Christian world delays accepting our Christ until we have better

proved that his principles will work. Everywhere that the Christian

minister turns, he finds his dearest ideals and hopes entangled in the

economic life. Do you ask us then under these conditions to keep our

hands off? In God's name, you ask too much!

In the sixteenth century the great conflict in the world's life

centered in the Church. The Reformation was on. All the vital

questions of the day had there their spring. In the eighteenth century

the great conflict of the world's life lay in politics. The American

and French revolutions were afoot. Democracy had struck its tents and

was on the march. All the vital questions of that day had their origin

there. In the twentieth century the great conflict in the world's life

is centered in economics. The most vital questions with which we deal

are entangled with economic motives and institutions. As in the

sixteenth and eighteenth centuries great changes were inevitable, so

now the economic world cannot possibly remain static. The question is

not whether changes will occur, but how they will occur, under whose

aegis and superintendence, by whose guidance and direction, and how

much better the world will be when they are here. Among all the

interests that are vitally concerned with the nature of these changes

none has more at stake than the Christian Church with her

responsibility for the cure of souls.

V

Still another point of contact exists between the Christian purpose and

social reform: the inevitable demand of religious ideals for social

application. The ideal of human equality, for example, came into our

civilization from two main sources--the Stoic philosophy and the

Christian religion--and in both cases it was first of all a spiritual

insight, not a social program. The Stoics and the early Christians

both believed it as a sentiment, but they had no idea of changing the

world to conform with it. Paul repeatedly insisted upon the equality

of all men before God. In his early ministry he wrote it to the

Galatians: "There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither

bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man

in Christ Jesus." Later he wrote it to the Corinthians: "For in one

Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks,

whether bond or free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit." In

his last imprisonment he wrote it to the Colossians: "There cannot be

Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian,

bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all." Yet it never would

have occurred to Paul to disturb the social custom of slavery or to

question the divine institution of imperial government.

Nevertheless, while this idea of human equality did not at first

involve a social program, it meant something real. If we are to

understand what the New Testament means by the equality of men before

God, we must look at men from the New Testament point of view. Those

of us who have been up in an aeroplane know that the higher we fly the

less difference we see in the elevation of things upon the earth. This

man's house is plainly higher than that man's when we are on the ground

but, two thousand feet up, small difference can we observe. Now, the

New Testament flies high. It frankly looks from a great altitude at

the distinctions that seem so important on the earth. We say that

racial differences are very important--a great gulf between Jew and

Gentile. We insist that cultural traditions make an immense

distinction--that to be a Scythian or to be barbarian is widely

separated from being Greek. We are sure that the economic distinction

between bondman and freeman is enormous. But all the while these

superiorities and inferiorities, which we magnify, seem from Paul's

vantage point not nearly so important or so real as we think they are.

He is sure about this central truth, that God asks no questions about

caste or colour or race or wealth or social station. All men stand

alike in his presence and in the Christian fellowship must be regarded

from his point of view.

It was utterly impossible, however, to keep this spiritual insight from

getting ultimately into a social program. It appealed to motives too

deep and powerful to make possible its segregation as a religious

sentiment. For however impractical an ideal this thought of human

equality may seem in general, and however hard it may be to grant to

others in particular, it is never hard for us to claim for ourselves.

If ever we are condescended to, does any assertion rise more quickly in

our thought than the old cry of our boyhood, "I am as good as you are"?

The lad in school in ragged clothes, who sees himself outclassed by

richer boys, feels it hotly rising in his boyish heart: "I am as good

as you are." The poor man who, with an anxiety he cannot subdue and

yet dares not disclose, is desperately trying to make both ends meet,

feels it as he sees more fortunate men in luxury: "I am as good as you

are." The negro who has tried himself out with his white brethren, who

wears, it may be, an honour key from a great university, who is a

scholar and a gentleman, and yet who is continually denied the most

common courtesies of human intercourse--he says in his heart, although

the words may not pass his lips, "I am as good as you are." Now, the

New Testament took that old cry of the human heart for equality and

turned it upside down. It became no longer for the Christian a bitter

demand for one's rights, but a glad acknowledgment of one's duty. It

did not clamour, "I am as good as you are"; it said, "You are as good

as I am." The early Christians at their best went out into the world

with that cry upon their lips. The Jewish Christians said it to the

Gentiles and the Gentiles to the Jews; the Scythians and barbarians

said it to the Greeks and the Greeks said it in return; the bond said

it to the free and the free said it to the bond. The New Testament

Church in this regard was one of the most extraordinary upheavals in

history, and to-day the best hopes of the world depend upon that spirit

which still says to all men over all the differences of race and colour

and station, "You are as good as I am."

To be sure, before this equalitarian ideal could be embodied in a

social program it had to await the coming of the modern age with its

open doors, its freer movements of thought and life, its belief in

progress, its machinery of change. But even in the stagnation of the

intervening centuries the old Stoic-Christian ideal never was utterly

forgotten. Lactantius, a Christian writer of the fourth century, said

that God, who creates and inspires men, "willed that all should be

equal." [3] Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century, said

that "By nature we are all equal." [4] For ages this spiritual insight

remained dissociated from any social program, but now the inevitable

connection has been made. Old caste systems and chattel slavery have

gone down before this ideal. Aristotle argued that slavery ethically

was right because men were essentially and unchangeably masters or

slaves by nature. Somehow that would not sound plausible to us, even

though the greatest mind of all antiquity did say it. Whatever may be

the differences between men and races, they are not sufficient to

justify the ownership of one man by another. The ideal of equality has

wrecked old aristocracies that seemed to have firm hold on permanence.

If one would feel again the thrill which men felt when first the old

distinctions lost their power, one should read once more the songs of

Robert Burns. They often seem commonplaces to us now, but they were

not commonplaces then:

"For a' that and a' that,

Their dignities, and a' that;

The pith o' sense and pride o' worth

Are higher rank than a' that!"

This ideal has made equality before the law one of the maxims of our

civilized governments, failure in which wakens our apprehension and our

fear; it has made equal suffrage a fact, although practical people only

yesterday laughed at it as a dream; it has made equality in opportunity

for an education the underlying postulate of our public school systems,

although in New York State seventy-five years ago the debate was still

acute as to whether such a dream ever could come true; it is to-day

lifting races, long accounted inferior, to an eminence where

increasingly their equality is acknowledged. One with difficulty

restrains his scorn for the intellectual impotence of so-called wise

men who think all idealists mere dreamers. Who is the dreamer--the

despiser or the upholder of an ideal whose upheavals already have burst

through old caste systems, upset old slave systems, wrecked old

aristocracies, pushed obscure and forgotten masses of mankind up to

rough equality in court and election booth and school, and now are

rocking the foundations of old racial and international and economic

ideas? The practical applications of this ideal, as, for example, to

the coloured problem in America, are so full of difficulty that no one

need be ashamed to confess that he does not see in detail how the

principle can be made to work. Nevertheless, so deep in the essential

nature of things is the fact of mankind's fundamental unity, that only

God can foresee to what end the application of it yet may come. At any

rate, it is clear that the Christian ideal of human equality before God

can no longer be kept out of a social program.