Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/80

 68 upon the moral and social requirements of human life than has been the case with other forms of socialism, though as with the latter the fundamental importance of the material condition—health and material possessions—is emphasized. Sometimes too much emphasis and again too little has been placed upon physical goods. The errors of the Christian socialists' ideals are therefore those of proportion rather than of omission.

The relation between the individual and society as an organism has not been harmonized by the Christian socialists, though their perception is nearer the truth of this mutual relation than either individualism or other socialism. The various schools and individual reformers have been biased to the one extreme or the other, usually the individualistic. The common belief—tacit if not avowed—that Christ's teachings are wholly formal or even figurative has been repudiated, and the belief has been insisted upon that they are impossible of literal application in the present form of society, with the corollary that the present order should be changed until such application is practicable.

After all, the greatest merit of the Christian socialists, though it may have appeared a defect, is that with them socialism is a means not an end: that the end is the full development of the inherent capabilities of the individual, and that society is a means to this development. They have derived this perception from Christianity, and though the idea has been but vaguely conceived, it is taking shape as the highest ethical perception of the race. Because of the Christian socialists' failure to enunciate this distinctly their ideal of status has remained indefinite. Though this is sometimes opposed as a too materialistic view of Christianity, it is steadily gaining ground. Christian socialism is nevertheless only one form among many through which this development is going forward. As yet it is hardly truer of others than of the Christian socialists that the content of the epoch-making perception to which we refer is incomplete, somewhat ill-proportioned, and usually very indefinite.