Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/202

190 those blessings promised God's sons. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Christianity as a system is but an unfolding of the conception of the Godward social capacities of mankind. From this point of view the cardinal doctrines of the incarnation, faith, atonement, justification, and immortality, cease to be abstract, and appear rather the formulation of actual religious experience and the description of psychical possibilities and phenomena.

In a very true sense Jesus identifies the powers of the soul that make union with God an essential of the normal man, with those that force a normal man into union with other human beings. If a man be imperfect who is apart from the divine, so is he who is apart from his fellows. Wherever Jesus holds up a picture of man's ideal, he makes this second element of the twofold extension of personality not only essential but fundamental.

(1) To begin with his conception of the kingdom. If it were allowable to anticipate somewhat the later discussion of this term, it would appear that man is to become righteous—that is, normal—through life in a normal and righteous social order. This new