THE CHURCH OF GOD AND SOCIAL WORK.

R. RELTON1 has left off exactly where the real question at

Jesus Christ, our Lord, set Himself to frame a kingdom, "not of this world:" "a kingdom of God," a kingdom of the Spirit. His appeal lay solely to the innermost will. Entry to the kingdom. involves spiritual regeneration by grace. This kingdom lay behind and beyond all the temporal conditions of human society. It secured a spiritual retreat to which external circumstances become wholly accidental. Even the deepest distinctions of national character lay outside it, and were independent of it. It mattered not "in Christ" whether a man were Jew or Gentile, Greek or Barbarian, bond or free, male or female. Here are the root-elements and factors of human existence of the social environment: yet, in Christ, they have ceased. He has taken His stand at a point wholly beyond even them. He is not" of this world" in any sense; neither are they who hold by Him. Out from this vantage-ground of spiritual security His followers can look with indifference on the incidents and the accidents of this life. These are immaterial to the main and primary fact, that whatever they are, and whatever their lot, they are loved of the Father and redeemed in Christ. This is the kingdom; and, for the founding of it, Jesus Christ left severely alone the work of social reorganization. He would not judge between man and man. He left the economic fabric as He found it. He denounced, indeed, wrong and robbery. He spoke, with alarming strength, of the spiritual peril of riches; and, with as startling emphasis, of the spiritual simplicity, which is characteristic of the poor. He brought the poor out into the light of a peculiar sanctity, as the special charge of God. 1 Economic Review, Oct., 1894, pp. 499-518.

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He made their lot His own. He spent Himself for them. But though in all this He revealed, with incomparable force and beauty, the pity and the tenderness of God the Father for all who travail and are heavy-laden; and though He pronounced the state of poverty and of loss and of sorrow to carry with it opportunities of special blessing: still, however much His conduct and language imperatively compelled attention to the poor, and established their condition as one on which, for ever, His Church must concentrate its mind and heart, He did not Himself engage, in the very least, in the task of changing or correcting the social order which permitted poverty to exist. He did not hint at the economic methods by which such a change or correction could be brought about. His own manner of living attested His profound sympathy with them; but it did no more. In its form and spirit it was not so much social as monastic or ascetic. And this limitation of its scope will apply to the communism of the early Jerusalem Church, which was no attempt to reorganize society, but only aimed at imitating the ascetic features of our Lord's own life on earth, as the Lord lived before He had, through His resurrection, won His right to inherit the earth. That mode of life was part of His separation from the world; of His cutting Himself off; of His priestly santification; by which He passed out beyond the limits of the temporal and the material and the historical, and prepared Himself to become the "Chief Corner-Stone of a temple not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." suffered without the gate." And as the Master, so the servants. His Church, in which He embodied His kingdom, takes its stand where He stood. It is "born of the Spirit." It has all its springs of grace out and away beyond the earth. It holds in it the redemptive succours with which He ever feeds it from the right hand of God. These, lodged within it from Him, it disperses and distributes, conveying them into the innermost recesses of the will, moving always from spirit to spirit. Herein lies its essential vitality, its cardinal function. For it, too, in its Catholic integrity, all distinctions between man and man, all temporal and historical and national accidents have ceased;

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there is neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Barbarian, bond nor free. As a Church, i.e. as a spiritual organization to secure the continuity of redemptive grace for all mankind indifferently, it has no prerogative over the social and economic development of society. It cannot identify itself with civil or national types. It has no political or municipal programme. Its officers, the clergy, have no more insight into economic science than they can gain by the use of their normal wits; and their wits may easily be small, and their use of them in this direction as limited, partial, or foolish as anybody else's.

Now, all this I steadfastly believe; and, so believing, I would repudiate with all Mr. Relton's fervour any attempt to revive the mediæval fallacy that the Church can understand and direct the social affairs of the State. We have learned by sharp experience how totally unfit she is to anticipate, or to control the movements of knowledge. Her unfitness has proved that any such attempt was in excess of the intention which created her. And it would be no less stupid than it would be fatal, to re-enact this blunder in the department of Economic Science, just at the very moment when she had discovered her mistake in all other regions of knowledge. The human movement is, for her, a mystery on which she waits. God is behind it-the same God Whose Name she worships, and Who has made her His House; and, therefore, it is her part to look for ever out in faith for the tokens of His Presence, for the motions of His Will: but she can but learn, through the slow patience of experience, what these will be, and where they will be found. For her it is enough that, at every time and in every place, whatever the human movement bring, she should be ready with the store of undying grace, without which that movement will never succeed in purging itself of its intermingled evil, and in achieving the end which God has set before it.

Let all this stand. Let us have said our " Vade retro" both to the older Papalism, which still assumes that it could undertake to put industrial society straight by the authority of St. Peter; or to the new Pope, who can lay out for us, in an infallible encyclical, what Christ would certainly do if He came to Chicago.

But all our difficulties and all our differences have yet to begin. For this separation of Christ from the world—this rigid exclusion of earthly factors-this retreat behind and beyond all outward human conditions in to the deep inner work of the spirit: all this had but one aim-the redemption of human nature. It was no flight from the world, no discarding of the lower conditions, no indifference to earthly matters. Wholly the contrary. It was all done because "God so loved the world" that He was bent on recovering it. It was a retreat, in order to spring forward. The withdrawal was essential, in order that the redeeming force should be utterly pure, utterly free from the corrupting tradition of that which it was to save. But, with this withdrawal once secured, the pure spiritual forces were lodged in the Church, only that they might fling themselves abroad, penetrate within the fibres of human society, infuse new vigour, recover the body, win over for man a new earth. The earth, humanity, flesh and blood,-these were all claimed for God in their original texture, and were all now to be brought back, under the victorious pressure of grace, to become the kingdom of God and of His Christ.

men.

How is this to be done? By the continuous action of redeemed These men are taken "out of the world" to be made clean by Baptism but then they are sent back into the world, with all their humanity complete, in all its powers; and that humanity they now exercise, under the direct responsibility of the Lord, in Whom they have been begotten again.

The one thing absolutely forbidden them, by the strongest terms that our Lord could use, is any attempt to live a divided life, half for heaven and half for earth; with part under one set of principles, and part under another. Such an attempt our Lord pronounced to be impossible; it simply cannot be done. No man can serve two masters." If they are God's own men in the spirit, they must be God's own men equally in the body, and in the affairs of the body. If they are Christ's within, they are Christ's without. Every nook and corner of their earthly existence is bound to come under the sanction of grace. In the world, they are men of business; and, therefore, business is

included in the scope of Christ. In the world, they find themselves involved in the endless ramifications of law, of property, of householding, of recreation: and, for all these, therefore, Christ has a meaning; and they are directly responsible to Him for discovering, interpreting, realizing that meaning before men. That is the high use to which they are to put their redemption. Into the very thick of this vast human movement they are thrown; and, there, they are to give proof, through their own actions, of Christ's power to rescue and possess it entirely, in its full bulk, for God.

This is why Christian men and women, believing absolutely in the inmost and spiritual character of the forces at their disposal, yet find themselves with their faces anxiously set towards these outward conditions, the social environment, which it is their special charge to justify for Christ. There is the field in which they are to labour. Christ has told them nothing of how to do it. Exactly. To do so would have been both to confine His special significance, and to anticipate their probation. He foretold them nothing of what they should do; for His sole and supreme office was to endow them with the power to do whatever had to be done. He told them nothing; but He left them everything to do in His Name. He told them nothing: that is why they are so terribly occupied in discovering what it is that He means them to do. These dealings, these relationships, this intercourse between man and man, so immense, so complicated, so increasing, so close,-all this which goes to make our human civilization is the scene of their service, in which they are to put out the gifts that are in them. Is it any wonder, then, that they come together, to speak often one with another, in Christian Social Unions, on matters so serious, so difficult, so essential to their faith? The Church is not to provide a Social Programme. No! But those whom the Christ has redeemed are bound to carry their heavenly citizenship with them wherever they go; they are bound, therefore, to be continually creating, in their practical lives, a Social Programme. And, if their heavenly citizenship is one and the same in all, then it must be that there should be some uniformity of principle and method in its