The writer from whom I quoted devotes a very interesting chapter to the reasons why the church has never attempted the work of social reconstruction.  He shows that it would have been almost impossible in the early Christian centuries for the Christians to have undertaken any work of social reform; if, under the rigors of the Roman despotism, they had meddled with politics, they would have lost their heads.  Then they began to look for a miraculous return of Jesus to set up his kingdom in the world, and they waited for him to reconstruct the social order.  That expectation held them for a thousand years.  When it failed, they turned their thoughts to heaven, and “as the eternal life came to the front in Christian hope the kingdom of God receded to the background, and with it went much of the social potency of Christianity.  The kingdom of God was a social and collective hope, and it was for this earth.  The eternal life was an individualistic hope, and it was not for this earth.  The kingdom of God involved the social transformation of humanity.  The hope of eternal life, as it was then held, was the desire to escape from this world and be done with it.”  And this led to the ascetic tendency, which made men think this world not worth mending.  Then came in the paganizing influences of the Middle Ages, which made ritual the supreme thing and paralyzed the ethical motive; and then followed the controversies about dogma, which deadened the life of the church, until finally the great ecclesiasticism was developed, and the church, instead of being the instrument for the Christianization of the world, became an empire in itself, separate from the world, arrogating to itself all the honors and powers of the kingdom of God.  “By that substitution,” says Professor Rauschenbusch, “the church could claim all service and absorb all social energies.  It has often been said that the church interposed between man and God.  It also interposed between man and humanity.  It magnified what he did for the church and belittled what he did for humanity.  It made its own organization the chief object of social service[18].”

This is only a hint of the process by which the church has been deflected from its course, and hindered from undertaking, with conscious purpose and consecrated power, her own proper work.  She has done many other things, some beautiful and excellent things, but the one thing she was sent to do she has not done.

It is only in our own time that she has begun to get hold of the true conception of her business in the world.  That the church is here to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, to concentrate her energies upon realizing the kingdom of God in the world, now begins to be evident to men of insight; and there is a loud call upon her to bestir herself and take up this work so long neglected, and give to it all her energies.  That is the meaning of the cry, “Back to Christ,” which we are hearing in this generation.  It means that the church needs to get into sympathy with its Leader and Lord, to try to understand his social aims, and to understand what he meant when he bade us seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.