CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY 423
ress of his kingdom appeared not as a thing to be accomplished by social cataclysms, 1 but rather as the steady growth of a tiny seed into a great tree. 3
It is in the course of this gradual development of a fraternity that attempts to assimilate an unregenerate society that we must especially look to find Jesus conception of the process by which his kingdom was to reach its completion.
III.
Is this process to be institutional and national, or is it to be individualistic ? Is society or are men first to be regenerate ? It is a thought that finds frequent expression that Christianity intro- duced individualism. So indeed did Christianity, if by individu- alism is not meant an atomism. For the Christian doctrine of society is not that of an aggregation of individuals made repel- lant through uncompromising demands for rights. The only sense in which Christianity can claim to be individualistic is in its elevation of the worth of each human life. But the real worth of every life consists not in separate existence, but rather in the identification of its interests with the interests of others in the exercise of that fraternal love which was both the ideal and the practice of Jesus himself.
Yet a society must be composed of individuals, and therefore it was that Jesus devoted himself so largely to the individual. Reformations do not proceed en masse. There must be the succes- sive winning of one man after another until there be developed something like a nucleus of a more perfect social life. The method, therefore, of Jesus in the founding of the kingdom was not the wholesale righting of political or economic or religious wrongs, although when this was necessary he did not hesitate to give vent to his righteous indignation against men who per- sisted in perpetuating them.
Rather was his method the successive winning of separate souls, now a Philip and now a Peter, until at last he had dis-
'John 18:30.
C/. Matt. 13:31-33 two of the best authenticated of Jesus' sayings.
