6o6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
present, as Professor Nash has recently said, "the deeper social- ism of England and America is looking toward, if it has not already entered into, a religious phase," but at the best it has not yet undone its early work. The social movement (of course excepting the social work of Christian organizations) is irreli- gious. The faith of the church to it is other-worldliness, and of the existence of another world it has serious doubts. In the universe of matter it sees only impersonal forces and evolution, and, insisting with a recent writer in the Westminster Review that religion is loyalty to truth and goodness, it eliminates a personal God from the universe of morals, and the Jesus whom it honors is but a companion of Socrates and Lassalle.
And here one meets a phenomenon hard for the man reared in the atmosphere of traditional evangelicalism to credit.
Anti-ecclesiastical and even unreligious as the movement among the masses may be, its Messianic hope in the future is the creature of Christianity. Discontent is the child of idealism, and the demand for human betterment springs from a belief in the worth of the individual that is the gift, not of the primitive German, but of the Christian. Human brotherhood already is something more than a rhetorical flourish. And has not organized Christianity, through all its devious and too often unholy ways, held up that ideal ? What period in which aristocracy has lifted its head without or within the church but has had also its St. Francis ready to cast home and parents and very garments away in devotion of Christian fraternity ? In this light, the hostil- ity of the social movement to the church is an Indian mutiny, in which men trained by imperial masters, in the name of love and justice, are turning their newly acquired discipline against their teachers ; and the church of today must do something more than complacently praise its past and optimistically dream of its future, if it would not see too late that its influ- ence and power have passed into other hands, less intelligent perhaps, but quicker to come to the aid of a discontented race.
This is no rhetorical crisis, painted black that presently the certain victory of the church may be the more brilliantly set forth. There are, happily, many churches and clergymen
