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Page 36
But we have to be on our guard lest we overemphasize the force of
circumstances either to foster or hamper a man's fellowship with God.
The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord's song may
be sung in a strange land. It is always possible to be a Christian
under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not
shirk the inevitable cross. But the social order under which men live
shapes their characters. Ibsen calls it "the moral water supply," and
religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their
ideals.
A glance over a few typical forms of social order will illustrate its
influence on character:
Perhaps the noblest society of antiquity was the Greek city state. It
expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen,
legislators, judges. It set a premium upon the virtues of courage,
self-control, justice and public spirit. It delivered its citizens from
that "greasy domesticity" which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman
of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded. But its ideal was
within the attainment of but a fraction of the population. The slaves
had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in
the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens.
The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in
order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty
ideals. And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind
were classed as "barbarians," to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying
his ideals.
Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal
System a different type of society. A vast hierarchy in Church and
State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many
gradations to the serf at the bottom. It was an improvement on the
little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and
bound them together with common faith and standards. It prized not the
civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience,
honor, chivalry. Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good
knight without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is
manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to
the soil, and the trader--often the despised Jew confined to the
Ghetto--had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the
Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than
converted.
Under the revival of classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new
emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the
rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of
kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the
Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed,
and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are
initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. As its _beau ideal_ it
substitutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man. It
sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable
circumstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were
accessible to practically every white inhabitant. The Comte de S�gur,
one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of
Independence, wrote: "An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and
the airs of our young men of fashion--who has compared the luxury of our
upper classes with the coarse dress of our peasants and the rags of our
innumerable poor,--is surprised on reaching the United States, by the
entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery. All
Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material. Their free and
frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and
from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own
rights and respected those of others." But under other conditions its
ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks
capital, or to the man with so large an assured income that he desires
no more. It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society--those
so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and
those so lightened that they do not feel them. It looks upon the
so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials
needed for its factories--its rubber, ivory, jute,--or engage cheap
labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products. It
has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its
missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been
almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government
agents, and the exported vices of civilization.
Christianity has a social order of its own--the Kingdom of God. It is
not an economic system, nor a plan of government, but a religious
ideal--society organized under the love of God revealed in Christ. This
ideal it holds up in contrast with the existing social order in any age
as a protest, a program and a promise.
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