The church which represents him in the world will need, for its social service, the same inspiration.  Unless its life is fed from this fountain, its stream will soon run dry.  There are those who seem to think that sociology can solve all the problems of our modern life.  If sociology be sufficiently expanded, this may be true; for a truly scientific sociology would have to explain how men came to be social beings, and what is the bond that unites them.  If it finds that their relation to a common Father is the fundamental fact of their existence, then it would know that religion is at the heart of it, and that right relations with God are the spring and source of right relations with men.  But a sociology which ignores this primary fact has in it no redemptive power.

The more earnestly, therefore, we contend that the business of the church is the Christianization of the social order, the more strenuously we must maintain that she is powerless to do this work except as her life is fed by faith and prayer.  The redemption of the social order is the greatest task she has undertaken, and she needs for it a strength that can only come from conscious fellowship with God.  If she ever needed inspiration, she needs it now.  If there ever was a time when she could dispense with the divine guidance and grace, that time is not now.  The churches which desert the places of prayer, and think to substitute the wisdom of men for the power of God, are not going to give much aid in this struggle.

“It must be claimed,” says one, “on behalf of the passion for God, that where it exists it will—­automatically, as has been said—­set charity, love, all sweet graces of philanthropic activity, into quick and ceaseless play....  If the emphasis of religious thought be made to fall upon the idea of life, this cannot fail to be; for to have the divine life is to be possessed of and to give out the divine love....  The regeneration of human society is found to come from the dominance of spiritual passion, even though it be not the first thing on which spiritual passion is set; the saint will be—­just because he is a saint—­a philanthropist too, since a true sainthood must number love among the graces of character it brings.  It is a fact—­one has to make the sad admission—­that religious people, professedly spiritual men and women, have been and still are in some cases eaten through and through by selfishness; these are those who, so that they can declare heaven to be their own, have no care for the present hell in which so many of their fellows spend their days and years.  But that is not because they are too deeply immersed in the passion for God,—­it is because they have not really immersed themselves in its flood.  And in claiming for a Godward passion the regulative and supreme place among the elements of life, we do but secure a fuller tenancy among those elements of a manward love; for the nature which sets itself to receive the whole of God will, ere it knows it, and as an automatic effect of the new life it wins, give itself to its brethren in their need.  For God is love, and he must dwell in love who dwells in God."[27]