350 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
in they should exercise a double influence over human thought. In some respects undoubtedly they were repressive. This is the side of them that is now commonly emphasized. But in another respect they were expansive and in the strictest sense educative. To understand them called for an effort in the believer too great an effort as we now think, considering the amount of truth that they contained, yet an effort which had its reward in a dignified and comprehensive view of human nature. 1 Similarly the catechisms professed to expound the whole duty of man and present us with an ideal of character which we must admit was conceived with extraordinary breadth and insight.
What is true of moral and religious formulae is true also of the older forms of social, industrial, and political organization. They did not, of course, leave room for wants that are of recent development, but so far as they went they represented in broad outline the organic requirements of human life. In the times when they are generally accepted there was not much danger that essential elements in human nature should fail to have jus- tice done them.
But they are no longer accepted. We have outgrown the forms that have hitherto served us. New needs have devel- oped. New classes claim to share the provision that was made for the old ones. The younger generation is knocking at the door. Here and there it is ready to pull down the house if admission be refused it. All this lays a new obligation upon those whose special duty it is as leaders of opinion to recognize those new demands and to point out how they are to be satis- fied consistently with the maintenance of the conditions of order and progress in human society. Such persons are called to a new task which can only be adequately performed on the basis of a comprehensive review of the elements of the prob- lem, involving nothing short of the attempt to reconstruct in thought the whole scheme of social life, and to justify to the
'This was what led F. D. Maurice into his paradoxical defence of the Thirty-nine Articles as "guiding the student of humanity and divinity into a pathway of truth, and pointing out to him the different forms of truth "Life, Vol. I, p. 524.
