All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the Christian—­whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not—­is the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, “I am a Roman citizen!” each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim “I am a Christian!” And this demands the civilizing, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of Christianity, which was Luther’s task, although he himself eventually became the founder of a Church.

There is a common English phrase, “the right man in the right place.”  To which we might rejoin, “Cobbler, to thy last!” Who knows what is the post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted?  Does a man himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?  Who can measure capacities and aptitudes?  The religious attitude, undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for another.

This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the others.  That which is known par excellence as the social question is perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of the modes of production.  It is not aptitude—­a thing impossible to ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is not born but made—­it is not special aptitude, but rather social, political, and customary reasons that determine a man’s occupation.  At certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later times machinery—­in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.  And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his children will be murdered.  This, and not the question of wages, is the gravest problem.

I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town.  A workman was hammering at something in a shipwright’s yard, working without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman’s voice was heard crying, “Help! help!” A child had fallen into the river.  Instantly the man was transformed.  With an admirable energy, promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into the water to rescue the drowning infant.