THE
new social purpose, which has laid its masterful grasp on modern life and
thought, is enlarging and transforming our whole conception of the meaning of
Christianity. The Bible and all past history speak a new and living language.
The life of men about us stands out with an open-air color and vividness which
it never had in the dusky solemnity of the older theological views about
humanity. All the older tasks of church life have taken on a new significance,
and vastly larger tasks are emerging as from the mists of a new morning.
Many ideas that
used to seem fundamental and satisfying seem strangely narrow and trivial in
this greater world of God. Some of the old religious appeals have utterly lost
their power over us. But there are others, unknown to our fathers, which kindle
religious passions of wonderful intensity and purity. The wrongs and sufferings
of the people and the vision of a righteous and brotherly social life awaken an
almost painful compassion and longing, and these feelings are more essentially
Christian than most of the fears and desires of religion in the past. Social
Christianity is adding to the variety of religious experience, and is creating
a new type of Christian man who bears striking a family likeness to Jesus of
Galilee.
These new
religious emotions ought to find conscious and social expression. But the
Church, which has brought down so rich an equipment from the past for the
culture of individual religion, is poverty-stricken in face of this new need.
The ordinary church hymnal rarely contains more than two or three hymns in
which the triumphant chords of the social hope are struck. Our liturgies and
devotional manuals offer very little that is fit to enrich and purify the
social thoughts and feelings.
