as shall secure the prevalence of justice and friendship, of peace and good-will among men.  It may not be required to look after details, but it must make sure of the results.  If the results are secured, if society is Christianized, if the social order is producing a better breed of men, if the business of the world goes on more and more smoothly, and all things are working together to increase the sum of human welfare, then the church may be sure that the life which she is contributing to the vitalization of society is the life that is life indeed.  But if the social tendencies are all in the other direction, then she should awaken to the fact that the light that is in her must be darkness, and that the responsibility for this failure lies at her doors.

It is the recognition and acceptance of this responsibility for which we are pleading.  That the church, in all the ages, has very imperfectly comprehended this responsibility is a lamentable fact.  What the social aims of Jesus himself were, most of us can fairly understand.  The Sermon on the Mount indicates to us the kind of society which he expected to see established on the earth.  He never defined the kingdom of heaven, which he bade us seek first, but he described it in so many ways that we know very well what manner of society it would be.  But the church which has called itself by his name has but feebly grasped the truth he taught.  As a late writer has said:  “As soon as the thoughts of a great spiritual leader pass to others and form the animating principle of a party, or school, or sect, there is an inevitable drop.  The disciples cannot keep pace with the sweep of the Master.  They flutter where he soared.  They coarsen and materialize his dreams....  This is the tragedy of all who lead.  The farther they are in advance of their times, the more they will be misunderstood and misrepresented by the very men who swear by their name and strive to enforce their ideas and aims.  If the followers of Jesus had preserved his thought and spirit without leakage, evaporation, or adulteration, it would be a fact unique in history."[17]

That his disciples held fast so many of the ideas and impulses he imparted to them, and that they have been turned to so large account in the reconstruction of the social order, is matter for profound thankfulness.  But much of this has been indirectly wrought; the Christian elements which appear in the industrial order of to-day are largely of the nature of by-products.  It can hardly be said that the church of Jesus Christ has ever, in any age, consciously and clearly set before herself the business which he committed to her hands.  She has always been putting the emphasis somewhere else than where he put it; she has always been doing something else instead of the great task which he began and left her to finish.  It is the great failure of history—­the turning aside of the Christian church from the work of Christianizing the social order, and the expenditure of her energies, for nineteen centuries, on other pursuits.