brings men together.  Communion, fellowship, these are the first words they learn.  It has been so from the beginning.  One of the great Christians of the apostolic age admonished his converts against “forsaking the assembling of themselves together,” and that admonition has always been heeded.  No other religion has brought people together so constantly and in so many ways as Christianity has done.  Christian people are always getting together, to pray together, to sing together, to partake together of the sacraments, to listen together to the teaching of the pulpit, to study the Bible together, to take counsel together about their work, to unite their efforts, in manifold cooeperations, for the upbuilding of the Kingdom.  They have even come to believe—­and they are profoundly right about it—­that it is a good thing for people to come together just for the sake of being together, even when no distinctly religious business assembles them.  To establish and promote pleasant and amicable social relations between human beings is a Christian thing to do.  It is a sign of the progress of the Kingdom, and a preparation for it, when men and women enjoy meeting one another for no other reason than that they like to be together.  It is a condition of the manifestation of the love which is the fulfilling of all law.  The stranger, as many languages testify, is apt to be the enemy.  The chief reason why he is dreaded and hated is that he is not known.  Acquaintance allays suspicion and promotes sympathy and kindness.

Not the least of the services which Christianity has rendered to the world may be seen in what it has accomplished in bringing human beings together socially.  Setting aside its purely religious function, it has done, in Europe and America, more than all other agencies put together to promote acquaintances and neighborly relations among men.  It has done, as we shall see by and by, far less than it ought to have done in this direction; its failures in this department of its work have been manifold and grievous; but after all this is admitted, it must still be affirmed that it has done most of what has been done to socialize mankind, and no other institution or agency is entitled to throw stones at it because of its deficiencies.

When, therefore, those who read these chapters hear the criticisms and cavils to which I referred at the beginning, they will know how to reply to them.

When they hear an argument which assumes that the church is worse than useless because all social institutions are worse than useless, they may answer that the reasoning is unsound, because it repudiates the deepest facts of human nature; that social institutions, the church among them, are natural growths as truly as the cornfields and the forests.