It is to be feared that these very simple truths are not always so well understood as they should be.  There is a notion that salvation is something metaphysical, or legal, or sentimental; that it consists in the belief of certain propositions or the experience of certain emotions.  But all this is delusive and puerile.  If it is with the heart that man believeth, he “believeth unto righteousness;” that is the destination of his faith; and unless his faith goes that way and reaches that goal, there is no salvation in it.  Righteousness is the result of saving faith; and “he that doeth righteousness is righteous”—­none else.  Righteousness is right relations—­first with God, and then with men.  And no man can have any evidence that he is in right relations with God except as he finds himself in right relations with men.

The message of Christianity, we often hear it said, is to the individual.  Yes, it is; and what is the message of Christianity to the individual?  The first thing that it tells him is that he is not, in strictness, an individual, any more than a hand or a foot or an eye or an ear is an individual; that he is a member of a body; that he derives all that is highest and most essential in his life from the life of humanity, to which he is vitally and organically related; that no man liveth to himself; that his good is not, and can never be, an exclusive personal good,—­that it is in what he shares with all the rest.  The doom from which Christianity seeks to save the individual is the doom of moral individualism; the blessedness into which it seeks to lead him is the blessedness of love.

Thus it appears that even these cant phrases by which the church sometimes tries to fence itself off from the world into a pietistic religiousness that has little or nothing to do with life, all point, when you get their real significance, to a relation between the church and the social order so close and vital that any attempt to sever the bond must be fatal to the life of both.  The church is in the world to save the world; that is its business; and it can never know whether it is succeeding in its business unless it keeps a vigilant eye on all that is going on in the world, and shapes its activities to secure in the world right social relations among men.

In what manner the church is to carry forward this work of Christianizing society is a practical question calling for great wisdom.  It may not be needful that the church should undertake to organize the industrial or political or domestic or philanthropic machinery of society.  Its business is not, ordinarily, to construct social machinery; its business is to furnish social motive power.  It is the dynamic of society for which it is responsible.  But the dynamic which it furnishes must be a dynamic which will create the machinery.  Life makes its own forms.  And the church must fill society with a kind of life which will produce such forms of cooeperation