Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/631

 THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 6ll

discretionary power as to what laws should be obeyed and what may be disobeyed. Authority always is an element in religion. In part it is because of the deep reverence felt by the church for law as the earthly analogue of the will of God that reformers oppose it, slandering it as committed to reaction, because it refuses to join in an orgy of iconoclasm. But who will dare say that in its reverence for law the church is wrong ? Better a law-abiding spirit and bad laws than anarchy, however disguised or procrastinating. If there is one lesson above all others that social enthusiasts need to learn, it is that born of the church's experience : a regard for law, even though it be unjust law, is the first guarantee of progress, of legal reform, and of the per- manence of the good law that may replace the bad. Besides the church, so far as I can see, there is no institution, state or school, court or prison, capable by history, nature, ideals, and martyrs of enforcing this unpalatable but indispensable truth.

2. The church, better than any other popular institution, can guarantee sanity in reform. To respect law is not to champion passive obedience, but the greatest danger that threatens today's life is not unemployed laborers, but unemployed reformers. From all sides they come. Young women on fire to prevent the abuse of children by cruel and tyrannical parents ; college men and women who long to win the submerged tenth to sweet- ness and light and the appreciation of art by residence in a university settlement during three weeks in the winter after graduation ; men with all sorts of social panaceas, from a new method of reading music at sight to tin dinner pails ; temperance reformers who tremble for the nation if a war vessel is christened with champagne ; diet, drink, clothes, house, school, church, Bible, street-cleaning reformers — all promising millennia, and all taking themselves seriously. Far be it from anyone to disparage the motives of such enthusiasts, but, with the remembrance of the similar altruistic hysteria that preceded the French Revolution of 1789, one cannot help seeing the danger that lies in unregu- lated and visionary amateur philanthropy. Far more worthy of serious study is the danger attending the fanaticism of profes- sional reformers. Millennial programs are easy to print, but as