THE CHURCH IN THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 27
helplessness increase, and the work of the churches will increase too. The more Christlike they are, the more unbearable will their burdens become. Certainly the churches have a stake in the social movement.
A still subtler detriment suffered by the church through social deterioration is that the morale of its members is impaired and its reputation in the community weakened. It is a common- place of the statistics of crime that periods of financial depression are accompanied and followed by an increase in all forms of crime against property. Men are pushed hard and cross the lines of legality. But statistics take no account of those who are pushed across the line drawn by their own conscience or the conscience of their moral community. Any attentive observer must have noticed the havoc wrought by the last three years. I have seen church members take positions in the liquor trade against the protest of their conscience and their social pride. Christian men remain in business situations where they have to lie habitually on behalf of their employers ; they are afraid they will find no other position. The distress of this last winter has reached even the women who have hitherto found work by washing, scrubbing, etc., and widows who have heretofore maintained their self-respect are now living with men to whom they are not married in order to have bread and shelter for themselves and their children. This snapping of moral restraints is most injurious where there has been sincere striving to live a right life. There it is a sin against the light. Church members in such cases lose their self-respect ; they get out of view of their church; they enter the class of publicans and sinners. The last three years have come like the devastating floods of the Mississippi and have swept away what the church has erected with infinite labor. What if the downward move- ment of these years should become in a measure permanent? Has the church no stake in these questions?
Anything that impairs the morale of the church also impairs its reputation for moral superiority. It is perhaps the instinct
