distinctive mission has gone. It is
strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is
at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero,
degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled
hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! But
for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries,
up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by
discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Social
service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome
fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the
servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sin
is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need is
to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of
that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee
on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money,
and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!

Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse and
its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the
relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social
order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant
Christianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative
and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since they
endeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, its
remotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness as
concerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation of
organized society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, not
a selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the Divine
Sacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen or
captains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died.
There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves or
more important than the men which created and served them. The Holy
Catholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; all
others, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of the
preservation and expression of human personality. Hence, the interest
of the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence,
the axiom of the church's control of, the believers' responsibility
for, the economic relations of society. An unjust distribu