For God and the People

THE

new social purpose, which has laid its masterful grasp on modern life and

thought, is enlarging and transforming our whole conception of the meaning of

Christianity. The Bible and all past history speak a new and living language.

The life of men about us stands out with an open-air color and vividness which

it never had in the dusky solemnity of the older theological views about

humanity. All the older tasks of church life have taken on a new significance,

and vastly larger tasks are emerging as from the mists of a new morning.

Many ideas that

used to seem fundamental and satisfying seem strangely narrow and trivial in

this greater world of God. Some of the old religious appeals have utterly lost

their power over us. But there are others, unknown to our fathers, which kindle

religious passions of wonderful intensity and purity. The wrongs and sufferings

of the people and the vision of a righteous and brotherly social life awaken an

almost painful compassion and longing, and these feelings are more essentially

Christian than most of the fears and desires of religion in the past. Social

Christianity is adding to the variety of religious experience, and is creating

a new type of Christian man who bears striking a family likeness to Jesus of

Galilee.

These new

religious emotions ought to find conscious and social expression. But the

Church, which has brought down so rich an equipment from the past for the

culture of individual religion, is poverty-stricken in face of this new need.

The ordinary church hymnal rarely contains more than two or three hymns in

which the triumphant chords of the social hope are struck. Our liturgies and

devotional manuals offer very little that is fit to enrich and purify the

social thoughts and feelings.