Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/289

 CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY 275

kingdom was not of this world. 1 As has already appeared, the new social order was to be spiritual, not material. But it is less to be anticipated that Jesus should have so passed over those claims for justice which today are urged with an ever increasing passion. It would not do to say that Jesus is oblivious to the rightful claims of those who have not shared sufficiently in the good things of life. No man's teaching has been more potent in forcing the strong to yield to the weak, the rich to the poor, the noble to the lowly. But none the less is it true that Jesus is far less interested in the rights than in the obligations of men. It matters little that logically the two conceptions are complemen- tary. Practically there is a vast difference between the bald demand of one man or class for things due it, and the extension of privilege which sympathy and a sense of obligation may induce a favored man or class to effect. Of the two, it is easier to inculcate justice, but no one who knows the crimes that have been committed in the name of liberty, and the hereditary hatreds that have been the outgrowth of struggles after rights, need be told that the victories of justice leave scars as inerad- icable as its demands are righteous. It was from some apprecia- tion of this that Jesus made duty paramount to rights. The Jew was ready enough to grant the rights of a neighbor when once neighborship had been defined and proved. In the estimation of Jesus to be a neighbor was not to have rights that put others under obligation to oneself, but to be conscious of duties. Not the wounded traveler, but the Levite and the priest and the Samaritan needed to show the spirit of the neighbor. 2 He was the neighbor who fulfilled duties, not he who enforced dues. Indeed, to one who has been assailed loudly with the evils of today's economic inequalities, it is at first sight surprising to find Jesus so indifferent to much that today's reformers emphasize so strenuously. The ordinary appeal which we hear addressed to the wage-earner nowadays is a paraphrase upon Proudhon's " property is robbery." The poor m;in is urged to get a larger share in the wealth he helps produce ; to cease to be a horse that

1 John 1 8 : 36. I ,uke I o : 25-37.