Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/42

 28 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

composition of the Congress made it impossible to take up specific measures.

Even more plainly it was made clear by the discussions that the New Testament expressly excludes the direct derivation of specific social demands from its teachings. The problems of social and economic organization, before which we now stand, have nothing in common with the relations of trade and property with which Jesus or Paul had to do. Profound study of the views of early Christians showed that they cannot be used for comparison with those formed in the presence of our duties and difficulties. The primitive mode of thinking has been set aside by better historical knowledge of the past and better economic understanding of the present. In close con- nection with addresses before the Congress other developments may be noted. For example, a lecture of the jurist, Professor Sohm, in the general assembly of the Society for Inner Mis- sions, in 1895; the foundation of the National Social Society, in 1896, which, after warm discussion of two days, declined to call itself "Christian Social;" and the book of Pastor Frederick Naumann which he wrote after his Palestinian travels (Asia, 1899). Naumann had been formerly one of the most earnest representatives of a socialism which was derived directly from the teachings of Jesus. His book Jesus as Man of the People is the classic of this view in Germany. But as early as 1896 Naumann openly revealed his change of attitude at the founding of the National Social Society. In the volume Asia, and in some places in his political work Democracy and Emperor, published a year later, he has given reasons for this change. In viewing the oriental countries, which recall Jesus to mind, these doubts occur to him:

Many of his words would not fit the present population. "Give to him who asks, and turn not away from him who will borrow from thee," sounds out of place when one has to do with these beggars of Olivet. The sentence, " Behold the fowls of the air, etc.," makes a strong impression when read in modern Palestine. Could Jesus talk in that way to a people to whom it must be preached: Go to the colonies of German Templars and see how they work! Your Heavenly Father feeds them; since they work with sweat upon their brows; they plow deep, make drains, build roads, provide wholesome