CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNITY 465
Besides such assistance rendered by Christian people, each individual church has a definite social task to perform. It is an institution of its neighborhood, and as the world with Christ in it is a different thing from the world with Christ out of it, so a community, a ward, a neighborhood possessing a genuine church is better than it could possibly be without such a church. Social environment and public opinion are only other names for men and women. As men and women grow purer and more generous, and their virtues get socialized in some institution, social environment and public opinion must improve. It is here that the local church becomes of social importance. I not only is producing Christian people, but, if it is properly per forming its duty, it is coordinating, socializing their influence.
But it must work out from life. It cannot socialize theolo- gical opinion. That is an affair of each individual soul. And if the church has to do with life, then it must be ready to coordi- nate all the aspects of life. There is a Christianity outside the church ; there are customs and institutions made necessary by the course of social development ; there are other virtues than the ecclesiastical. All these must be preserved, not destroyed. Jesus gave much of his teaching at dinners. Shall the ideal of the church be asceticism, which is but another word for social disintegration ? Paul preached as he worked at his trade. Shall the Christian be taught that life can be split into religion and business ? Jesus had pity upon the hungry. Shall a church neglect the poor in its region — or in any region ? This does not make it necessary or desirable for a church to identify itself with any special political reform. That is not the function of a church, but of a state. Let the church cease to be a theological lectureship, and, without puzzling men with strange theologies and stranger class sympathies, train them in the experience of Chris- tian living, and under the guidance of God they will be able as individual citizens to devise wise means by which social institu- tions and economic conditions and political machinery shall so embody the Christian spirit as shall make a Christian society less a matter of rhetoric, and Christian living easier for all classes.
