Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/438

 424 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

covered and won to himself a few men and women who were so far imbued with his own spirit of fraternity as to be ready to inaugurate and evangel a higher and more perfect social life. Loyola never followed more persistently or more successfully a Xavier, John, a fugitive robber, than did Jesus the humble fisher- men with whom his lot was cast. Once let the spirit of such brotherliness become regnant, and all the horrid brood of vices that spring from its opposite will vanish. Men may need to incorporate this spirit in special laws, but this must be done by each age and community for itself. Jesus gives a constitution ; men can frame statutes.

And yet it can be objected, and with truth, that, as the term is commonly used, good men will not of necessity make a good society. It is possible to develop virtue in such a fashion as to make its possessors unattractive, and, if not self-centered, at least incapable of aggressive work for the helping of surrounding lives. If this were the legitimate result of Christian teaching, one could well despair of a Christian society. But it is sufficient answer to the objection to point to the life of Jesus. In him we see a perfect incarnation of his* teachings, and no man can study his life without feeling that a society composed of Christs would be a perfect fraternity. No man feels the same in regard to Socrates. A thousand men of his ilk would constitute a very uncomfortable community within which to live. The same is true of societies composed of ascetic or semi-ascetic reformers. But so normal was Jesus' life, so judiciously devoted to the welfare of others, so regardful of the conventionalities which experience begets as regulators of social life, that he stands as a representa- tive of an individual who has found his completest mission in the identification of his life with that of other men. Indeed, pre- cisely in the same proportion that a man reaches Jesus' concep- tion of the individual does he help establish Jesus' fraternal society.

IV.

The expanding Christian society, therefore, will consist of groups of individuals each possessed of the same spirit and