Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/601

 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 587

are sapping the foundations, not only of mediaeval and Greek Christianity, but also of Mohammedanism and Buddhism. The high-church or ritualistic movement is therefore a rally in the battle which has been going on for five hundred years between mediaeval Christianity and the improved mores.

In the fifteenth century the great inventions, the geograph- ical discoveries, the extension of commerce, the growth of capital, the rise of the middle class, the revival of learning, the growth of great dynastic states, destroyed the ideals of poverty, obedience, and chastity. The idea of Catholicity died just as the idea of the Crusades did; it was recognized as a chimaera. The church was not doing the work it stood for in the world. These were fatal facts and courage was found to face them. It was the mores which shifted — ^moreover all the bad as well as the good of the mores entered into the change.

The mores are a vast and complex mass of acts and thoughts — not some good and some bad, but all mixed in quality. All the elements are there always. The sects deride and denounce each other and they always select material for their jibes from what they allege to be the facts about each other's influence on the mores.

The Christian church disapproved of luxury and ornament and repressed them in the mores of Christendom until the fourteenth century. The Renaissance brought in pagan ideas of beauty, art, ornament, pleasure, and joy in life, from which luxury arose. In the present mores of all civilized peoples the love of luxury is strong. It is increasing and is spreading to all classes ; those who cannot enjoy it think themselves wronged by the social order. This sentiment is one of the very strongest in the masses. It characterizes the age and is one of those forces which change the face of institutions and produce social war.

The change of interest, in the sixteenth century, to the phi- losophy and the paganism of the classics included a great reduction in the other- worldliness of the Middle Ages. The point of interest was in this world and this life, without denial of the truth of a future life; terror of the future world and anxiety to know how to provide for it, with eager seizure of