310 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
scholarly enough to admit how strongly the appearances seem to justify such a partial judgment by those who look on critically from without and are suffering from the system while they look. We know how many productive toilers there are in the ranks of our membership, and how many of their sons are in our ministry, but yet we should be candid enough to confess with shame the frequent servility to wealth, as well as our indiscriminate abuse of its holders, the unjust discrimination shown to social caste, and the unintentioned, but none the less painful, disproportion of manual toilers in the trusteeship of our institutions and the boards of our church control. The churches can afford now, as at the beginning, and as whenever "sitting under the cross," to preach the ideal righteousness and equality of the everlasting kingdom and the eternal justice of the ever-living Lord with- out, on the one hand, having respect to persons or classes, and without, on the other hand, identifying their organization with schemes of social reconstruction or with economic agencies of production or distribution. That is the function of the industrial organization of the body politic, the function, though not the form, of which is to be respected as an agency equally divine within its sphere as the church is within its own.
The social ideals of the gospel have borne their best fruits in society when the churches have given the initiative toward higher conceptions of civic and national life ; have supplied towns, cities, state, and nation with citizens inspired by these ideals of Christian social relationship, and with the willingness to sacrifice to realize them ; and have given no suspicion of making any attempt, either formal or virtual, to usurp the functions of gov- ernment. The churches should be the last to tolerate, much less to claim or secure, class legislation for their own or others' benefit, for they stand for all, if for any. Not in their corporate capacity should the churches assume the function of reformatory agencies for the enactment or enforcement of law. For, on the one hand, neither in their constituency nor in their form of organization are they adapted to or effective in such service, and, on the other hand, if they were, theirs is the higher func- tion, and even the harder work of maintaining the standards and
