Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/478

 464 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

significance goes, the church that does not make this appeal is dead while it lives.

And what is true of religious philosophy is just as true of any other. Church members may hold different opinions as to socialism, monarchy, trusts, prohibition, evolution, and a thousand other things, but a church as a social institution is concerned with none of them. It must educate its members in the principles governing Christian conduct ; it must teach them to do right at any cost ; it must bring them into vital relationship with God, that their lives may get something of the divine expansion ; and then it must trust them to act freely as their own intelligence and judgment dictate. As matters are today, with moral and religious teaching barred from the schools, with the state rightly but unfortunately held to be unconcerned with religion, with colleges and universities increasingly emphasizing learning and method rather than moral discipline, this educative, coordinating work of the Christian church is imperative. It alone can devote itself to that side of the elemental humanity which religion represents. If it fails in its duty here, not only will individual lives grow poorer because imperfectly developed, but the whole struc- ture of society will suffer. The most skeptical and most irre- ligious of statesmen have recognized the truth of this statement, and however much they may have judged their own lives supe- rior to the need of the religious motive, they have been anxious to maintain the church as an institution for the masses.

But the church is something more than z deus ex machina, and preaching is something more than a terrifying of the masses into social order and decency by an appeal to their fear of bogies. Religion, I venture to repeat, is a constituent element in human life, and, if developed along the lines indicated by a real Christianity, produces men who will constitute the better environment for which all sociologists plead. I do not mean merely that these persons will be active in seeing that reforms come to pass. Christian people are thus active despite the apathy of certain of their number and the laments of cer- tain men whose zeal has made them as unfair as pessimistic.