Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/85

 Rh and Christian teaching should view it with suspicion and question the worth of an attempt to discover any such phantasmagoria in the words of the Teacher of Nazareth.

II. There is but one way to the apprehension of the teachings of Jesus, whether religious or social, and that is the patient study of the gospels with the aid of all modern critical and exegetical methods. The only thoroughly safe method is the inductive gathering of teachings from the gospel sources, and their subsequent classification into a system. Here, as in all scientific processes, the aim of the investigator must be the discovery of what is, not the substantiation of some notion as to what ought to be. It is even unsafe, as a first step, to gather only such passages as may serve as the basis of a particular doctrine. The first question is not what sociology did Jesus teach, but whether he taught anything that may properly be called sociological. Classification must logically, and generally chronologically, succeed discovery and interpretation. Let all the materials for a social teaching first be gathered. Then, whether they be few or many, let them be shaped into a system.

Such a method is not peculiar to the study of the New Testament. It is that by which one may gain the system of any writer who has himself not arranged his thoughts in a logical system. To such a method the words of Jesus are as the words of Plato. The greatest reverence that may be shown them is to treat them as if they needed no exegetical odds, but were both intelligible and capable of enduring rigid scrutiny.

But in such a method the words of Christ have more than an archaeological or devotional import. No man's teaching has equaled his in the magnitude of its social results, and there are messages in his words yet to be heard. The sociologist who disregards the teachings of Christ is as unscientific as he who in the history of philosophy should neglect Plato and Kant, or in the history of the United States of America should disregard the Constitution. But quotation is not exegesis, and rhetoric is not