Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/476

 462 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

II.

It is at this point that we see the social office of the Chris- tian church as an embodiment of religion. It is concerned in awakening in men instincts which are common to the race, and in inducing them to grow into the likeness of its founder, Jesus. If it fulfills this office, it is as essential to social unity as is the school or the legislature. But its method must be its own. Unlike government, it furnishes not the external force for social unity, but must stimulate and educate the social instincts in the individual life by appealing to the moral and religious nature. If it neglects this office, it fails of performing its proper functions and will be outgrown — a danger which, if not imminent, is at least, to judge from certain phases of modern sociological litera- ture, not unexpected by some serious thinkers.

Thus the nature of its social office determines the ends by which the church must work. It is not to take the place of the school, or of government, or of institutions of popular amusement. Its work, to say the very least, must be coordinate with that of these others, but, if it would be a source of union rather than of disin- tegration, it must deal with those elements of human nature that find expression in religion.

I. It must appeal to and stand for life, not philosophy.

Christianity has always been marked by the two tendencies so indispensable for every evolutionary process. On the one hand, it has been a cause of disintegration in that it has stimulated men to originality and therefore difference in thought. On the other hand, it has tended toward unity within the region of com- mon religious life. The most casual knowledge of the evolution of the Christian centuries corroborates these statements. On the one hand are the wars of the theologians, and on the other that beautiful unity of Christian spirit which makes it possible for Christians of all shades of belief to use the hymns and litanies of those with whose teachings they differ. Sometimes the Chris- tian church has attempted to make the disintegrating tendency integrate, to bring unity into thought by the appeal to authority. Practically the earliest reference to the rise of an autocratic bishop