declares that professed disciples of Christ must revise their working creeds after the following fashion:[1]
"It is the object of this book to point out some of the changes in men's thinking which the present conditions of Christian society most clearly indicate. There must be clearer ideas of the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man; there must be reconstruction of ideas concerning the independence of the individual as related to the solidarity of society; there must be revision of our ideas of the sacred and the secular; there must be reconstruction of our ideas of property; we must clarify our views of the relations of religion and politics; we need to reconsider the relation of individual to public opinion; we need to detect modern Pharisaism; we need to overcome irrational partisanship."
If our practical principles are assailable at all these points, Dr. Gladden is surely justified in his summary: "Needed social reconstruction depends upon a new conception of life and duty."
Let us consider the anarchistic and the Christian diagnoses together as signs of present psychic facts, and let us consider what they connote. These divergent estimates of society are themselves symptoms of the unique condition of the thinking parts of society. Men are more generally conscious than ever before of a discrepancy between the demands made upon life by the various principles of human desire, and the possible output of satisfaction from the operation of traditional social doctrines and institutions. All our kicking against the social pricks means that men are agreed that something is wrong, though they cannot agree what is wrong.
Scholars ought to be able to see that the fault lies deeper than the popular reformers suspect. All our contemporary discontent with social institutions and conditions runs back to the fact that the present generation is trying to make dead trunks of social ideas bear living fruit of social force. We are trying to feed the humanity of today from the desiccated stalks of yesterday's conceptions. All the familiar denunciations of social evils, and of the individuals or classes that are said to cause or
- ↑ Dr. Washington Gladden, Ruling Ideas of the Present Age.
