Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/52

 38 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

human or social meaning, while in the Latin and Greek churches the volume of purely religious obligation has remained larger. The Lutheran churches, although they broke away from Rome, played no such glorious part in the struggle for human freedom as the Reformed churches because they fell under hierarchies of their own with some German princelet at the apex, instead of the pope. This meeting of the civil and ecclesiastical hier- archies in the same person delayed the advent of liberty in Germany.

It is in relation to just this point that the question of church government assumes importance. In this age of many freedoms we have so far overlooked this point that the bitter struggles over church government in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies mean scarcely more to us than the wars of the kites and the cranes. The fact that the old fight of Presbytery against Episcopacy and Congregationalism against both is strange and unmeaning to us now, bespeaks our ignorance of sociological principles.

We may look upon hierarchy, then, as the formation an elite will adopt in order to uphold and assert a superior social ethos against a low folk ethos. But that very selection and isolation by which it guards itself against debasement is liable to conduct it to ruin. For these foster a caste spirit which leads the hierarchy to use its ascendency for its own interest or to sell it to those who will give the most for it. The overthrow of a hierarchy may likewise have either of two results. It may mean the triumph of low and vulgar ideals ; or it may mean that a self-seeking minority is thrust aside and the genuine elite come forward to maintain superior standards and ideals of conduct.

The maintenance of a social ethos higher than the folk ethos has certain very interesting side-consequences.

Among peoples still close to nature one is struck by the can- dor and realism of their songs and tales. All their output is naive and smells of the soil. If it is sword-play, horse-racing, drinking, and dancing that they love, it is of these they will sing quite unabashed. If it is the hard hitter they admire, he is the one they will put in their Walhalla or Happy Hunting Ground.