Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/11

Rh a general election is run—revivalist meetings are held throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results?

Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel—or without making the application very direct and personal. There is no institution in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools, prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies—all those things on which we most pride ourselves—are just as liable, perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God's word and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right over conscience—that if it has established order it has established virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary—not virtue but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our hearts into a State-regulation, there we have