THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 307
great apostle as Peter Krapotkine, nor be marshaling men in all Christendom who are capable of suffering martyrdom for acts of despair to bring about the one far-off event of individual liberty. The Christian communion would have been recognized at sight as the only place in all the world where one man counts one. If, on the other hand, the spiritual equality of the kingdom of God and the absolute democracy of its all-leveling and all-lift- ing doctrines had been fearlessly applied as the ideal of industrial and political relationships, the great race movement for actual brotherhood might not now so largely take the form of material- istic socialism. If the churches had heeded the summons of Joseph Mazzini, that greatest prophet and martyr of modern democracy, they might have anticipated by their leadership the fateful and fearful defection from their ranks and their spirit of so large a part of the modern democratic movement. In account- ing for this defection, however, and in placing the responsibility for it, one fact, almost always overlooked, should be far more strongly in evidence to extenuate the motives on both sides of that breach of apathy or alienation between the churches and the manufacturing classes. It is the fact that, when at the close of the fateful eighteenth century the factory system — that great- est unarmed revolution — had swept a peasant population, as by a cyclone, from their farms and farmhouse manufactories into the slavery of machinery and the squalid demoralization of the early factory towns, the churches were in the darkest eclipse of their faith, the suspended animation of their life, and the paralysis of their work for the world. Just when the industrial classes most needed the comforts, protection, and leadership of the common faith, they actually seemed to be most ignored and abandoned by the churches. Only here and there a lonely voice was lifted in protest or sympathy in behalf of the multitude helplessly lost in a wilderness "great and terrible." The decadence of the churches of that period must have been nigh unto death, measured by their delay in waking to the moral and social aspects of the industrial situation and in arousing thereto the conscience of the nations, much more of their own membership. For, remember, it was more than fifty years from the time the first
