This is the first step toward social redemption.  The reenthronement of justice is the primary obligation.  John the Baptist must speak first.  The conviction of social sin is the beginning of social righteousness.  The church has a great work to do in awakening the public conscience to forms of injustice which are so involved and concealed that our attention is not fixed upon them.  Professor Ross has just announced a volume with the title “Sin and Society.”  It is an illuminating word.  The deadliest of the evils which are oppressing the community to-day come under this category.  They are hidden from the public view.  They assail you from ambush and you are helpless.  The deadly missiles smite you on every side, but there is no revealing flash by which you can locate your foe.  The social order is so complex that wrongs of this nature are easily perpetrated.  Many of the transactions by which we are wont to profit are veiled injustices.  They are of a nature so subtle and indirect that the law has not yet defined and forbidden them.  Those who suffer these injustices are at a distance from us, and there is a network of legal and commercial relations between ourselves and them; we know that they will never confront us and call us to account; it is safe for us to do wrong, and we keep on doing it until our consciences are dulled, and we are not able to see that any wrong has been done.

The fact is, that such a complex social system as ours needs for its safe administration a kind of conscientiousness far higher and finer than that which men needed for honest living fifty years ago.  Unless our minds are trained to see the right and wrong of very intricate transactions; unless our ethical imagination is sensitive enough to discern the nature of far-reaching and wide-spreading social relations, we shall constantly be profiting by the injury of our neighbors.

It is the business of the church to train the consciences of men for the moral problems that confront them, and this work has been but indifferently done.  The first step in the redemption of the social order is the education of the Christian conscience to discern the smokeless sins.  It is with evils of this character that the nation is now in a life and death grapple; the church ought to be able, by its testimony, to lend effective aid in this conflict.

The nature of the testimony needed may be indicated by a typical instance.

Not many years ago a very prosperous manufacturing company was doing business in a thriving American village, giving employment to fifteen hundred men and women, many of whom had purchased homes, in the expectation of having permanent occupation and livelihood.  It was known to be a well-paying business; its stock, which was in few hands, was not in the market.