Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/142

 130 shall stand for progress and meliorism and exert its influence in this direction, indicated by the upward course of humanity reaching out after the fuller realization of a brotherhood sealed by justice and covenanted in righteousness. Shall not the overstrained appeal to the letters of laws in the interest of selfishness as well as the total contempt for law find its correction by a clearer apprehension through university instruction of the social function and value of the law?

That the university trained financier in these days of stupidity is a supreme need of this land, who will deny? The Shibboleths in the camps prove how pressing this urgency. But also in the pulpit the university must inspire and preach a better appreciation of religion and the Bible than now among us either conservatism or radicalism seem to possess. Evolution is the bugbear of the one and the idol of the other. "It dethrones God!" both contend. Is this conclusion warranted? University thought accepts evolution, but by no means does it admit the conclusions which conservatives by their half-truths and radicals by theirs would urge as inevitable. Evolution is not only mechanical; it is dynamic; it is spiritual. It robs man neither of his dignity nor absolves him of his responsibility. Not how man grew but that he grew, and into what, is the fundamental consideration. The university is in this as in all other things constructive.

The researches in the department of our university with which I have the honor of being associated, bear directly upon questions which have agitated the conservative and aroused the radical. Our finds have not and could not have satisfied either. Truth we search for; half-truths we could not stop by the way to entertain.

False conservatism would take religion and its literature out of the reach of scientific investigation. Radicalism shouts from the housetops the premature paean that religion afraid of science is dead. The Bible is beyond all criticism, is the anxious insistence of pseudo-conservatism; the Bible is not worth criticizing, is the retort of religion's unthinking foe. The dogmatism of the