The Christian Society (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Christian Society

The church was not sent to be an institu tional dominion, but a sacrificial and redemp tive life in the world. Yet the church is not engaged in sacrifice and redemption, so much as in artificial organization; not engaged in discerning and teaching right from wrong, so much as in definition of doctrines. The anal ogy between Protestant Christendom in rela tion to its mission of social redemption, and the relation of the Jewish church to the first appearance of the Son of God, is true. I am haunted continually with the vision of the liv ing Jesus weeping over our majestic temples of worship, our halls of theology, our conven tions of religion, as though he were again in the sacred sorrow of that weeping over Jerusa lem, his heart again broken because' only the remnant may receive the mission which the institution rejects.but, whatever be the form in which they are destined to be shaped, the work which the Christian societies, as socie ties, have to do, in the days that are to come, is not inferior to any work which has lain before them at any epoch of their history. For the air is charged with thunder, and the times that are coming may be times of storm. There are phe nomena beneath the surface of society of which it would be hardly possible to overrate the significance. There is a widen ing separation of class from class: there is a growing social strain: there is a disturbance of the political equilibrium there is the rise of an educated proletariat. To the problems which these phenomena suggest Christianity has the key. Its unaccomplished mission is to reconstruct society on the basis of brotherhood. To you and me and men like ourselves is committed, in these anxious days, that which is at once an awful responsibility and a splendid destiny - to transform this modern world into a Christian society, to change the socialism which is based on the assumption of clashing interests into the socialism which is based on the sense of spiritual union, and to gather together the scattered forces of a divided Christendom into a confederation in which organization will be of less account than fellowship with one Spirit and faith in one Lord - into a communion wide as human life and deep as human need - into a Church which shall outshine even the golden glory of its dawn by the splendor of its eternal noon.

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