(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God in Jesus Christ.

A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value to faith than any of those named, is the Social Movement.  In the closing years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on as voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals, which had not existed in the original “state of nature” where all men were supposed to have been free and equal.  The closing years of the Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism, and talking of “social evolution.”  This conception of society altered men’s theories of economics, of history, of government.  Nor did these newer theories remain in the classrooms of universities or the meetings of scientists; they became the platforms of great political parties, like the Socialists in Germany and France, and the Labor Party in Britain.  Men are thinking, and what is more feeling, today, in social terms; they are revising legislation, producing plays and novels, and organizing countless associations in the interest of social advance.  We are still too much in the thick of the movement to estimate its results, and we can but tentatively appraise its contributions to our Christian thought.

(1) It has given men a new interest in religion.  The intricacies of social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, “nine-points of belief.”  The social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts have been touched with a passion for social righteousness.  A recent historian of the thought of the last century, after reviewing its scientific and philosophic tendencies, makes the remark that “an increasing number of thinkers of our age expect the next step in the solution of the great problems of life to be taken by practical religion.”

(2) It has made us realize that religion is essentially social.  Men’s souls are born of the social religious consciousness; are nourished by contact with the society of believers, in fellowship with whom they grow “a larger soul,” and find their destiny in a social religious purpose—­the Kingdom of God.