abused as the enemies of progress and the race who insist upon facing the underlyimg facts of personal life. In these men the hope of society really rests. The edifice erected by social science need not be destroyed if the foundations be strengthened in time. And the strengthening is provided by the Christian faith.
IN the third place, historic Christianity is thought to be inimical to social progress because it is individual rather than social. The older evangelism, it is said, seeks to win individuals; it invites men to come forward to the mourners' bench, receive salvation, and so escape from this wicked world. The newer and better evangelism, on the other hand—thus the claim runs—instead of rescuing individuals and leaving the world to its fate, seeks so to improve the physical conditions of life and the relations between man and man as to set up what may be called the "Kingdom of God" here upon this earth.
This objection depends partly upon a caricature of the Christian religion. It is not true that the Christian gospel offers individual men a selfish escape from the world and leaves society to its fate. On the contrary, Christianity is social as well as individual. Even the relation of the individual to his God is not individual but social, if God exists; certainly it is not regarded by anyone who experiences it as a selfish thing. But the Christian also sustains relationships to his fellow men, and his religion is far from discouraging those relationships. When a man is rescued inwardly from the world, he is not, according to Christian teaching, allowed to escape from the world into a place of mystic contemplation, but is sent forth again into the world to battle for the right.
Nevertheless, despite one-sidedness, the assertion of modern social workers to the effect that historic Christianity is individual rather than social has in it a large element of truth. It is true that Christianity as over against certain social tendencies of the present day insists upon the rights of the individual soul. We do not deny the fact; on the contrary we glory in it. Christianity, if it be true Christianity, must place itself squarely in opposition to the soul-killing collectivism which is threatening to dominate our social life; it must provide the individual soul with a secret place of refuge from the tyranny of psychological experts; it must fight the great battle for the liberty of the children of God.
The rapidly progressing loss of liberty is one of the most striking phenomena of recent years. At times it makes itself felt in blatant ways, as in the notorious Lusk laws for the licensing of teachers in the State of New York, or in the Oregon school law now being tested in the United States courts. Liberty still has some bulwarks; but even those bulwarks are threatened. In Nebraska, for example, where the study of languages other than English was forbidden and thus literary education was made a crime, all outer defenses were broken through and the enemy was checked only by that last bulwark of liberty, the United States Supreme Court. But unless the temper of the people changes, that bulwark also will fall. If liberty is to be preserved against the materialistic paternalism of the modern state, there must be something more than courts and legal guarantees; freedom must be written not merely in the constitution but in the people's heart. And it can be written in the heart, we believe, only as a result of the redeeming work of Christ. Other means in the long run will fail. Sometimes, it is true, self-interest will accomplish beneficent results. The Lusk laws, for example, which attacked liberty of speech in the State of New York, were opposed partly by the socialists against whom the laws were originally aimed. But the trouble is that socialism, if it were ever put into effect, would mean a physical, intellectual and spiritual slavery more appalling than that which prevailed under the worst despotisms that the world so far has ever known. The real defenders of liberty are those who are devoted to it for its own sake, who believe that freedom of speech means not only freedom for those with whom they are agreed but also freedom for those to whom they are opposed. It is such a defense of liberty which is favored by the true followers of Christ.
But at this point an objection may arise. "Fundamentalism," it is said, "is a synonym of intolerance; and the writer of the present article desires to cast out of the ministry of his church those who hold views different from his own. How can such a person pretend to be a lover of liberty?"
The objection ignores the distinction between voluntary and involuntary organizations. The state is an involuntary organization, an organization to which a man is forced to belong whether he will or no. For such an organization to prescribe any one type of education for its members is an intolerable interference with liberty. But the Church is a purely voluntary organization, and no one is forced to enter its ministry. For such an organization to prescribe terms of admission and to insist that its authorized teachers shall be in agreement with the creed or message for the propagation of which the Church exists involves not the slightest interference with liberty, but is a matter of plain common honesty and common sense. Insistence on fundamental agreement within a voluntary organization is therefore not at all inconsistent with insistence upon the widest tolerance in the state. Indeed the two things are not merely consistent, but are connected logically in the closest possible way. One of the essential elements in civil and religious liberty is the right of voluntary association—the right of individuals to associate themselves closely for the propagation of anything that they may desire, no matter how foolish it may seem to others to be. This right is being maintained by "Fundamentalists," and it is being combated subtly but none the less dangerously by some of their opponents. The most serious danger to liberty in America today is found in the widespread tendency towards a centralized state monopoly in education—the tendency which has manifested itself crassly and brutally in the Oregon school law, and which manifests itself more subtly in the proposed development of a Federal department of education, which will make another great addition to the vast Washington bureaucracy, the bureaucracy which with its discouragement of spiritual initiative is doing so much to drain the life-blood of the people. The same tendency manifests itself also in the advocacy of anti-theological and anti-evangelical
