Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/374

 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ors argue that even in this way to make society a partner to each individual's success or failure most decidedly is to destroy individual responsibility. Again I say it is not, and most decidedly not. Responsibility depends on consciousness, not on independence or isolation. Is a man less sensitive or more sensitive, less conscientious or more conscientious, when he is working with another? That depends, you say. So it does. It depends on his consciousness, on his understanding of what is doing. A clear understanding always makes a zealous worker. No one, then, can ever waive responsibility because we tell him that society has worked or is working with him, for no man can escape the consciousness that his acts induce, and indeed the very fact of society sharing the responsibility with him is likely to intensify rather than to weaken his consciousness. Society may share his disgrace, but he also shares her honors, living and con- scious as he is in and with her ; and just in this double partner- ship of honor and disgrace lie his remorse and the source of his real responsibility. Could even the grace of God perhaps only another name for the same thing be more effective?

Of course, the professional theologians may have even more specific objections than any that have been directly touched upon so far. At least as a class their corporate theology being much more conservative and perhaps much more assertive than their individual convictions they are sure to detect here unwel- come hints of the divine will as immanent, not merely in nature, but also even in the personal and social life of mankind, in its failures as well as in its successes ; and hints, or possibly more than mere hints, of man as a responsible partner in the creative life of God, as if creation were quite independent of the date which some over-zealous exegetists have dreamt of some day determining ; and hints, finally, of a Christology not exactly in accord with their own, Christ appearing as a living force now, not merely a person then; a force involved in the peculiar dynamic unity of society, not merely the Jew of nineteen cen- turies ago ; a natural life today, not a memory or foresight, or even a presence that is near us or around us or in us without being really of us ; but special theological controversy, however