CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY. VI.
SOCIAL LIFE.
IT is not difficult to see that the principle of fraternity must especially apply to those forms of social life outside the family circle which are neither political nor economic. In nothing do the better instincts of modern life more strenuously exert themselves than in the attempt so to adjust social relations that the chasms caused by differences in wealth and culture may be, if not abolished, at least bridged. Almost in the same propor- tion as one comes under the control of altruistic motives do these motives result in revolt against conventional distinctions, and an attempt at brotherliness, or at least neighborliness. This is at least one interpretation to be put upon not only social- ism, but upon our new charitable movements and organizations and especially upon social settlements. Confessedly these new motives are Christian ; nothing could be more so ; but it may not be without results to follow the application of his general principle to social matters by Jesus himself.
I.
It may seem gratuitous to assert that Jesus was no ascetic or even semi-ascetic puritan. So far has the pendulum swung away from the mediaeval conception of holiness that it often seems as if the chief need of today is a new Savonarola who shall fascinate the nineteenth century into new burnings of novels and gewgaws. But none the less, so ineradicable is the suspi- cion that religion is in some way a sort of prophylactic against the joys of life, that it is often forgotten that the founder of Christianity came eating and drinking, in the envious eyes of contemporary religious teachers a winebibber and a glutton. 1
'Matt. II : 19.
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