sh-speaking peoples.

One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be
dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt.
It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense.
An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of
individualism in incredible degree. The unity of society which the
feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been
destroyed. The individualism and democracy which were essential to
Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the
centrifugal forces were too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but
cohesion is lacking. Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil
liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640
to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments
undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would
have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a
factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind.
If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain.
That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils
which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the
idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away
with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as
heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world.
No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to
remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion.
The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social
questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all,
the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily
with the inner life and the transcendent world. That it has dealt with
the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as
to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man's life
is indeed a grave indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the
outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves,
that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that
it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have
given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and
happiness such as men never have enjoye