But a man’s religious experience is vitally affected by social conditions.  Moses’ protest against the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt sprang from his feeling that it hindered their fellowship with God.  “Let My people go,” he felt God saying, “that they may serve Me.”  Mencius, the Chinese sage, wrote:  “If the people have not a certain livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart.  And if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of self-abandonment.  An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that, above, they have sufficient wherewith to serve their parents, and, below, sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the danger of perishing.  After this he may urge them, and they will proceed to what is good.”  Christian workers, today, know well how all but impossible it is to get a man to live as a Christian, until he is given at least the chance to earn a decent living.

But we have to be on our guard lest we overemphasize the force of circumstances either to foster or hamper a man’s fellowship with God.  The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord’s song may be sung in a strange land.  It is always possible to be a Christian under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not shirk the inevitable cross.  But the social order under which men live shapes their characters.  Ibsen calls it “the moral water supply,” and religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their ideals.

A glance over a few typical forms of social order will illustrate its influence on character: 

Perhaps the noblest society of antiquity was the Greek city state.  It expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen, legislators, judges.  It set a premium upon the virtues of courage, self-control, justice and public spirit.  It delivered its citizens from that “greasy domesticity” which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded.  But its ideal was within the attainment of but a fraction of the population.  The slaves had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens.  The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty ideals.  And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind were classed as “barbarians,” to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying his ideals.