Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/42

 28 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of human equality in a morbid form which prompts men to seize so eagerly on the sins and inconsistencies of church members and to argue from single cases that they are no better than other people and probably worse. But in spite of all that, the church still has a reputation, and that reputation is its stock in trade, its good will, its source of authority. To weaken it is to weaken the efficacy of the church and frustrate its work.

The harder it is under our social environment to do the plain righteousness demanded by the standards of everyday life the less likely is it that Christians generally will live up to the more exacting demands of the peculiar morality of Jesus, which is theoretically the standard of the church. Jesus demands that

hall not lay up treasures on earth, but shall live like the birds, without care for the morrow. It is comparatively easy to ven- ture on a life of obedience to this command if one is sure of an opportunity to earn a living through every coming year. But when a man's trade regularly has five months of work and seven months of idleness, and when men are crowded out by younger men and turned adrift as soon as the signs of age set in, it becomes pretty hard not to scrape together treasure while there is anything to scrape. Christ demands that we shall love our neighbor as ourselves. That is comparatively easy when it is clear that my neighbor is my coworker and that his prosperity involves my own. But if there is only one job for the two of us and it is a question between us who will snatch it, or if I can make my business pay only by drawing my neighbor's customers, it becomes difficult to love him as well as myself. I do not say that it becomes impossible ; there are heroic souls that trample on impossibilities. But for the mass of Christian people obedience to the ethics of Jesus becomes more remote as the social conditions in which they live make the practice of the ordinary virtues harder. A socialist in Germany said to me that if ever the commune was established that would be the first fair chance for those who desired it to live according to the precepts of Jesus.

But the farther the church lags behind its own acknowledged