“Jesus Christ and the Social Question “—­was published in 1903, the year before my ordination.  I was not unprepared for what was coming.  My deep-rooted reverence for Theodore Parker, the supreme prophet of applied Christianity in our time, and my enthusiastic study of his life, had revealed to me the meaning of socialized religion.  But I had caught only the pure essence of its spirit; I had not thought to apply it to the social problems of today.  Indeed, I was not aware of the existence of such problems.  My whole approach to the question of truth and experience up to that time, had been along the lines of speculation in the field of theological, as contrasted with political or social, thought.  In the second year of my ministry, however, I read Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty”; then followed the writings of Henry D. Lloyd and Prof.  Walter Rauschenbusch; then came the deep and prolonged plunge into the waters of socialism.  For several years after I came to this church, I was in a state of intellectual and emotional upheaval impossible for me to describe.  At last came a conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas.  I was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light.  Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change.  Of course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more directly practical interests.  You know how the character of my preaching has changed since I first entered the Messiah pulpit.  You know with what [8] waxing intensity of expression I have moved to the left of our various divisions on the social question.  You do not know, hence I must tell you, how this intensity of radical conviction is destined to continue in the years that are now before us.  For the war has accelerated the social crisis beyond all forecasting.  In two years has transpired what fifty years could not have consummated under more normal conditions.  Three great empires—­Russia, Germany, Austria—­and several newborn countries, like that of the Czecho-Slovaks, have been captured by the Socialists; and the British Empire seems promised to the British Labor Party in not more than another decade or two.  The social revolution long prophesied, long hoped for, long feared, is here; and this means in countries like our own, still untouched by change, such a “sturm and drang periode,” as makes even the Great War pale into insignificance.  Now in these years which are before us, I propose to speak and serve for the speediest and most thoroughgoing social reconstruction.  I am committed both by conviction and temperament to the program of the British Labor Party and its policy of indirect or political action for the advancement of that program.  This is my predominant interest at this moment, and through what is destined I suppose to be the whole period of my life.  This is as much the cause of our day as abolition was the cause of the days before the Civil War.  To this I have given all I have—­from this I intend to withdraw nothing that I have given.  Not in any sense of bitterness or violence in method, but in every sense of utter change as the end desired, I am committed to the ideal of the complete democratization of society.