more gladly and firmly because he has just been on the mount of transfiguration. It is the same with many a devoted and overburdened modern life as it turns to heal the social distresses of the time. The patience and courage which administer wise relief come of the antecedent transfiguration of life through communion with God. Many a

modern life, if asked to define the significance and usefulness of its religious experience, would have little more to say than this: "My faith in God makes me able to do my work. It rescues me from narrowness and hopelessness, and gives me persistence and courage from day to day. It preserves for me the large view of my duty, and sustains me when my immediate results are bitterly meagre and small.

In short, it is what stands between me and overwhelming weariness or social despair." The just still live by their faith. The view of life from above gives a rational courage for the service of life below.

The second aspect of the teaching of Jesus is equally applicable to modern life. Next to narrowness of view, what is the special peril of the present social movement? It is, beyond doubt, its externalism. Wherever one looks, he sees progress defined in terms of organizations, schemes, majorities, social machinery. Industrial life has reached a degree of complexity in which the individual worker is little more than one cog in a vast machine. Political methods have magnified 1 Matt. xvii. 15-18.

enormously the function of government. Officialism supplants more and more the demand for individual initiative; until, as has been said of German militarism, every effort seems

devoted to the making of a man into a machine. The creed of scientific socialism is frankly and aggressively external. Its programme has rarely a word to say of any change of character; it makes no appeal to the working-man to cultivate prudence, self-restraint or patience. On the contrary, these qualities, which have been generally recognized as virtues, often seem to stand in the way of the working-man's aim. Let him demand more pay, it is urged; more comfort, better external conditions; and then these changes in the outward industrial order will of themselves develop the inward capacity to use it. Even religion itself runs grave risk of being institutionalized and externalized out of all self-recognition. Organization and ritual, ecclesiastical machinery, leagues and associations,all these external methods have attained such terrific dimensions and importance that it has come to appear an elementary Christian duty for persons to become, as Stevenson remarked," joiners "; and it is even announced as one conspicuous mark of Christian progress that on a certain day, under one organized arrangement, some millions of associated believers will, in sixteen different languages, beseech the throne of grace.

What has Jesus Christ to say to this marvellous development of social machinery? He has no

It

direction to give and no criticism to offer. may well be an admirable, as it is certainly an inevitable, phase in the evolution of society. The methods of the "great industry" are transforming the habits of the Church, as they have already transformed the habits of the business world. All these subjects lie outside of the sphere of the teaching of Jesus. He is not a social mechanic or a social organizer. The complexity of the modern world presents a problem of external arrangement which was never before his mind, and with which, even if it had been set before his mind, he would probably not have felt himself deeply concerned. Jesus, however, turns to the other factor of social life, whose significance the tendency to externalism gravely obscures. It is quite true, as modern teachers are urging upon us, that environment ! modifies personality, that social and economic conditions now exist which make a healthy human life very hard to live, that the reorganization of society is a pressing task, and that such improvement in organization may fortify the individual life, as a single soldier's courage is stronger when he is conscious of an organized army at his back. The teaching of Jesus, however, is of the person who can modify his environment, of the man who transforms conditions, of the courage which is nurtured in solitude and is not alone, because the Father is with it. In short, Jesus approaches the social question from within; he deals with individuals; he makes men. It is for

others to serve the world by organization; he serves it through inspiration. It is for others to offer what the theologians once called a scheme of salvation; the only salvation Jesus offers is through saviours, and saviours are those who have sanctified themselves for others' sakes.

Does this mean that the teaching of Jesus is indifferent to external methods of reform, and is absorbed, as many of his followers have been, in mystical communion with God, and in the saving of one's own soul? Was Jesus unaware that there may be circumstances in life in which it is almost impossible to save one's soul? Would he, if he could survey the life of the modern world, take no interest in such bettering of external conditions? Would he expect to communicate spiritual inspiration where people are living, male and female, ten in a room, or where a family of four are subsisting on the casual earnings of one? Is he so feeble a sentimentalist as to think that good will come from within if the way is not prepared for it from without? We shall soon see how far from such indifference to external conditions is the teaching of Jesus, and how radical are his instructions concerning the environment of life. If the primary aim of Jesus is to set forth the principle of personality, to awaken the higher life of persons, to make a man "come to himself," then no social conditions have, under his teaching, any right to exist which can obstruct or which even fail to encourage this end of individual growth, oppor

tunity, initiative and character. All this we shall observe as each successive aspect of the social order claims our attention. Yet within this problem of the better social order lies always the problem of the better man. "There is no political alchemy," said Mr. Spencer, "by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts." 1 It is vain to imagine that a change of external conditions will of itself bring about a change of the human heart. The fact is that conditions which seem extraordinarily favorable may become the very cause of the wreck of character and of the weakening of the will, and that conditions which seem severe and meagre have in them often the making of men. Many a phase of civilization in which prosperity has been most freely lavished on a people has turned out to be an epoch of political or moral decline; and many of the fairest blooms of strenuous and fragrant living have sprung from a bare rock like that of Athens, or from an obscure province like that of Galilee. The method of externalism, in short, deals at most with but one half of the social question. It is a great and honorable task which seems offered to the present generation, the task of perfecting social organization, the levelling and broadening of the way by which the better life of the future may have its entrance into the world; but if there is no better life to enter; if after crying, "Prepare ye, prepare ye

1 Essay on "The Coming Slavery," Popular Scientific Monthly, April, 1884.