before me. A religious newspaper of good standing gets a professor of sociology (in a theological seminary, it is true, rather than from a university) and an able doctor of divinity to write articles on 'the present sociological movement.' They assume, and rightly in all probability, that they are desired to discuss the present social movement, and not the progress in the science of sociology, which alone is the sociological movement. Yet the reader finds in both these writers only an occasional approach in all their articles to any appreciation of the fact that 'social' and 'sociological' are words having very distinct meanings, and he will quickly see that their articles would be helpful just in proportion to their careful observance of the difference between them."
CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY.
On the other topic Dr. Dike says, with equal precision:[1]
"Christian Sociology is a term that may have a certain but limited scientific value. For the Bible, Christianity, and the church have a great deal to do with social problems or with 'the social problem,' as the rather vague popular generalization puts it. But their relation to social problems or subjects is one thing, and their relation to the problems of sociology as a science is quite another. The one is chiefly within the field of practical religion; the other comes mainly within the realm of science, where the Bible is silent so far as any positive teaching goes.
"Christianity is found in the very warp and woof of human social life. Its institutions are part of the material of human society. Christianity is a tremendous social force, and its sacred books are a mine of rich sociological material, which has been hardly opened by the sociologist as it should be. These resources are therefore indispensable to the sociologist. They are so great and important that he may well treat them under the appropriately scientific title of Christian Sociology. But when he does this he will mean by the phrase something like that which is meant when the scientific men speak of Australian Botany, or the Botany of the United States or of Massachusetts. Yet this does not imply that we are to have a Christian science of society, but rather that our science has taken Christianity into its field, and as one great section of it, as it should do. To go to work determining the title, principles and methods of the science by the dis-
- ↑ Idem., p. 176.
