Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/40

 26 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

him out. If this is inevitable, ministers -must e'en get nervous prostration and creep away to a hole to die. " Dulce et decorum TO patria mori." But if it is a needless sacrifice, ministers have a riu r ht to object against being made the scapegoats of others. By the great primal law of self-preservation they have a right to object against the way human wreckage is being dumped down on them to cure and set up again. When I was a boy o.f fifteen I was once set all alone to stack the straw turned out by an eight-horse threshing machine. My frantic efforts under that inexorable stream of straw were a foretaste of later experiences. If an active city pastor will compute the time he has spent during the last three years in turning himself into an employment bureau and dealing with out-of-works, he will realize how much his work and welfare are affected by social conditions.

In one way this philanthropic work has given a wholesome bent to modern church life. But there is always danger that the distinctively spiritual work will be crowded to one side. Those who object to the institutional church as a perversion of the church are not altogether wrong. It was an early experience of the apostles that they could not " continue steadfastly in prayer and in the ministry of the word" if they had to "serve tables." Nor is the moral effect on the people purely good. Wherever something is to be had for nothing, cupidity is aroused, and the spiritual work of the churches will have to be done through a clinging and blinding vapor of self-seeking and hypocrisy.

The institutional church is a necessary evil. The people ought to be able to provide for themselves what the churches are trying to provide for them. If the people had comfortable homes, steady work, and a margin of income for the pleasures of life, they could look out for themselves and the churches could prune off their institutional attachments. While social conditions were simple and wholesome there were no institu- tional churches ; the family and neighborhood could attend to the isolated cases of sickness and need. Make social life healthy and you can simplify church work. Let poverty and