r
life, and leave to their children to finish. What contributions, in your
opinion, could the spirit of the Christian religion make to such a
program, if it were realized intelligently and pressed home through the
agencies of the Christian Church? In what ways has American religion shown
its efficiency since the war broke out?

Christianity has been a great power in our country to cleanse and
fraternalize the social life of simple communities. Can it meet the
complex needs of modern industrialism in the same way? It can not
truthfully be claimed that it has done so in any industrial country. Its
immense spiritual forces might be the decisive element, but they have been
effectively organized against a few only of the great modern evils. On the
fundamental ethical questions of capitalism the Church has not yet made up
its own mind--not to speak of enforcing the mind of Christ. Nor have the
specialists in the universities and colleges supplied the leaders of the
Church with clear information and guidance on these questions. We can not
make much permanent progress toward a just social order as long as the
masses of the working people in the industrial nations continue in
economic poverty and political helplessness, and as long as a minority
controls the land, the tools, and the political power. We shall linger on
the borders of the Inferno until a new accession of moral insight and
spiritual power comes to the nations. How will it come?

III

What could the churches in an average village community accomplish if they
intelligently directed the power of religion to foster the sense of
fraternal unity and to promote the institutions which make for unity? How
could they draw the new, the strange, and the irregular families into the
circle of neighborly feeling? In what way could they help to assimilate
immigrants and to prevent the formation of several communities in the same
section, overlapping, alien, and perhaps hostile? How would it affect the
recreational situation if the churches took a constructive rather than a
prohibitive attitude toward amusements, and if they promoted the
sociability of the community rather than that of church groups?

With the rise of land prices and the control of transportation and
markets, the rural population is moving toward a social crisis like that
which transformed the urban population in the industrial revolution.
Agriculture will become capitalistic, and the weaker families will dr