(3) It has taught us that religious susceptibility is intimately connected with social status.  Spiritual movements have always found some relatively unimpressionable classes.  In primitive Christian times “not many well-educated, not many influential, not many nobly born were called”; and in our own age the two least responsive strata in society are the topmost and the bottom-most—­those so well off that they often feel no pressure of social obligation, and those without the sense of social responsibility because they have nothing.  It is the interest of spiritual religion to do away with both these strata, placing social burdens on the former and imposing social privileges on the latter, for responsibility proves to be the chief sacrament of religion.

(4) It has brought the Church to a new place of prominence in Christian thought.  Men realize their indebtedness for their own spiritual life to the collective religious experience of the past, represented in the Church; their need of its fellowship for their growth in faith and usefulness; and the necessity of organized religious effort, if society is to be leavened with the Spirit of Christ.  Church membership becomes a duty for every socially minded Christian.  And the social purpose renders Church unity a pressing task for the existing Christian communions.  John Bunyan’s pilgrim could make his progress from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem with a few like-minded companions; but a Christian whose aim is the transformation of the City of Destruction into the City of God needs the cooeperation of every fellow believer.  Denominational exclusiveness becomes intolerable to the Christian who finds a whole world’s redemption laid on his conscience.

(5) It demands a social reinterpretation of many of the Church’s doctrines, a reinterpretation which gives them richer meaning.  The vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, for example, becomes intelligible and kindling to those who have a social conscience and know something of bearing the guilt of others; and the New Testament teaching of the Holy Spirit is much more real and clear to those who have felt the social spirit of our day lifting them out of themselves into the life of the community, quickening their consciences and sympathies, and giving them a sense of brotherhood with men and women very unlike themselves.  Vinet wrote a generation ago, “L’Esprit Saint c’est Dieu social.”

We have by no means exhausted the list of quarries from which stones, and stones already prepared for our purpose, can be and are taken for the edifice of our Christian convictions.  The life of men with Christ in God preserves its continuity through the ages; it has to interpret itself to every generation in new forms of thought.  Under old monarchies it was the custom on the accession of a sovereign to call in the coins of his predecessor and remint them with the new king’s effigy.  The silver and the gold remain, but the impress on them is different.