Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/481

Rh find satisfaction in his God. To attempt to satisfy a religious longing by a phrase or by a philosophy or by high-class amusements is to give men a stone when they have asked for bread. The church is something more than one among many social institutions. It is society's priest—that which mediates God to a race that can but does not worship. If religion is to play any part in the accomplishment of social unity, God must be treated seriously, and men must be bound together by being bound to him.

Religious thought has lately been marked by an insistence upon the immanence of God in nature; whereas he was once thought of as transcendent, and to be brought over into nature only through some bold anthropomorphism, we are now getting glimpses of a God who is always with us, whose will does not push the planets in their courses, but who is in some true sense force itself. It is hard to believe that such a philosophy any more than any other exhausts reality, and it is not yet demonstrable that God and matter are the same substance. But this new thought of God satisfies the religious wants, and the unimaginable stretch of space seems less fearful as one thinks that God is present wherever his will acts.

But for some of us, men and women are more important than the stars. Dare we think that God is as much in humanity as in heavenly space? If the thunder is still his voice, can that voice also be heard in the succession of empires, the rise of social classes, the whole sweep of social evolution? Or is God only a convenient name for the social mind, and is the materialism which in physical science is passing from atheism to agnosticism to be intrenched in sociology?

All the logic of the schools cannot prevent a theist from believing that if God be in nature he must also be in humanity; that whatever he be in one part of his universe, that he must be in another; that he who keeps the universe from tumbling into chaos is also watching over every Zion and keeping every Israel.

Nor can such a God care only for politics and war. Shall he be a God of armies and not a God of labor unions and corporations? Shall he be a God of battle and not a God of strikes?