Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/809



the city is centering a larger and larger measure of the necessities and opportunities of social service, because the city continues to be what it has always been, qualitatively, in influence upon the ideals of the state, and because an enlarging proportion of the state’s subjects are domiciling themselves in attached houses.

In the city, therefore—the magnetic, overcrowded, increasing city—social service finds its fields white for harvest, and anyone who knows his time must confess that goodness is showing great genius in the multiplicity of channels which it is digging for the flow of streams of service. Settlements, tax propagandas, labor bureaus, colonization movements, institutes, a host of helpfulnesses crowd the horizon as one tries to recount the new forms of altruism’s applications.

It is an encouraging sign of the times that the church is not holding herself aloof from this generous humanitarianism. Genetically, of course, she is the mother of it. The genesis of the social conscience, as Professor Nash has so magnificently proven, has been at her altars. It cannot, therefore, but rejoice one who loves the Master of Nazareth, and who loves his kind, to see the new efflorescence of service to the hungry and naked, the sick, the criminal, and the forlorn.

But it must be confessed that primacy in altruistic movements is no longer conceded to the church as it used to be, and perhaps the fault lies, in a measure, at her own door. It is charged against her that the service she most enjoys is her ministry to those who support her, and that all her extraparochial work is due to a desire to make a “statistical showing” rather than to enthusiasm for humanity. This the writer does not concede, for he knows that much of the altruistic work of the