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social life depend upon goodness this is the fundamental posi- tion of Jesus. One does not need to be reminded that in this he stands by no means in the same class with many other would- be reformers. To give large wages, to make the home more comfortable and happy, to see that the sanitary arrangements of the city and community are perfect, to provide a fair income, healthful food, good amusements, and all the other requirements of respectable life today ; to do this and let evolution do the rest this is the position of more than one social teacher.
But the imperfection that must needs be corrected, in the estimation of Jesus, was no chance of birth or occupation in life. The Pharisee was quite as ill as the harlot and the publican. 1 The cause of all inequality and lack of fraternity is moral ; it is sin. Men cannot reach that divine sonship in which fraternal love becomes natural so long as the spirit of selfishness rules them. A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. 2 The world can become the kingdom only by a repentance and a moral change on the part of its members that replaces the spirit of revolt against goodness and a loving God with the spirit of sonship. 3
And Jesus saw aright. A perfect society cannot be created from imperfect people. That which stands in the way of the realiza- tion of many a man's ideal for society has not been its own logical inconsistency, but its failure to find or to produce the right sort of men upon which to work. The plan of the house called for marble and the only material at hand was mud. Jesus proposes to furnish good material as well as a noble plan.
4. Such a moral transformation of humanity's sinful but poten- tially noble nature must of necessity be gradual. It cannot be accomplished in a generation. An impatient man with a passion for hastening his benefactions would have failed to see this neces- sity. At the outset of his public life Jesus had wrestled with the temptation to hurry the conquest of the world, 4 but as he stood at the end of his ministry and saw the months of earnest effort that lay behind him, and judged of the future, the prog-
1 Matt. 21:31. 3 John 3 13.
3 Matt. 7:17. < Matt. 4:8-10; Luke 4 : 5-8.
