Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/475

 CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNITY 46 1

of degradation, of peculiarly good or peculiarly bad environment. All of them alike are the expression of elemental religious impulses shared by all men and obtaining reinforcement and energy from a God who dwells with all men. This is another of the legacies of Jesus : a selfish man cannot be religious. As John asks : How dare one say he loves God, whom he has not seen, when he fails to love his brother, whom he has seen ? He must first violate his Christian nature who seeks his own things rather than the things of others. The real impulse, the greater inclination of Christian life, is outward. The better Christian a man is, the less aristocratic and the more fraternal he is.

And so it is inevitable that as a community is composed of men whose lives are filled with the spirit of Jesus it will be bound close together. If one may paraphrase the noble saying of the church father, society, like man, is by nature Christian ; in so far as it is un-Christian it is unnatural and dangerous. An irreligious aristocracy gave France the miseries of the old regime; an irreligious proletariat gave France the reign of terror ; an irreligious middle class gave France the massacre of the com- munists; an irreligious press is giving her travesties of justice in the name of honor.

But religion primarily is not an affair of a community, but of the individuals of a community. And if it be, as one can say without cant, that many of society's ills today spring from irre- ligion, to cure them one must work upon the individual life as well as the social environment. Regenerate men are the only material out of which to construct a regenerate society. Panaceas may look more fascinating, are almost sure to be more dramatic, than the unheralded production of Christian character. It is always easy to leave a Christ bound for Calvary for the untested but magnificent promises of a Christ in the wilderness. But there is no surer way toward the New Jerusalem than the road of serv- ice to one's fellows made possible and heroic by an overpower- ing belief, as instinctive as it is magnificent, in the presence of right motives in human hearts, and a consequent unborn but developing providential order in human society. To make men Christians is to make society unified.