6l2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
difficult as the genius of the Arabian Nights to control — if indeed they once miss the broad way leading to the limbo of impracti- cability. What is worse is that the conservative is not mis- taken when he sees in their champions not merely earnest men and women striving for the good of mankind, but possible social firebrands. Agitators are indispensable, but an agitator mad with altruism is as dangerous as any other madman.
Perhaps an acquaintance with such facts should have made surprise impossible, but non'e the less it is surprising that leaders in the social movement should not have seen how extravagance injures their cause. An admirable evidence of this fact, as well as the efficiency of sane efforts at reform, is to be seen in the history of woman's suffrage. Perhaps a better illustration is to be seen in the history of social democracy in Germany. But the socialist himself can learn lessons in the methodology of social reform from the church. With all its demands, socialism today proposes nothing like the radical change in society as did Jesus when he swept away Mosaism and pointed the way to an ideal social order in which men should be sons of God and brothers of each other; nor does any declaration of the rights of man contain more than a shadow of the equality that bursts out in the words of the apostolic radical of the first century who con- fronted an age steeped in slavery and inequality with the Magna Charta of a new age : in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free. Yet in Jesus and in Paul radicalism in teaching was tempered by sanity in method. Jesus dared to lay down his life and — what must have been harder — the life of his followers while preventing a revolutionary and unintelligent effort to realize his new social order. Paul sent the converted slave Onesimus back to his Christian master, and counseled women not to let their equality deprive them of veils. The spirit of the church was equally sane, and its sanity quite as much as its love carried its regenerating influence from the upper room in Jerusalem to every corner of the empire. As a social institution, while as earnest as any group of men in the world, the church still can show men that, if individualism is not anarchy, reform is not that virtue of madmen, iconoclasm.
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