hase of my subject which thousands of my
countrymen are stating so clearly and forcibly as to compel attention;
but what I want to show is that the present unideal condition of the
civilised world is an indictment of the churches and their conventional
doctrines. We seem to have forgotten our origin. I have long felt, as
I suppose every Christian minister must feel, the antagonism between
the Christian standard of conduct and that required in ordinary
business life. There is no blinking the fact that the standard of
Christ and the standard of the commercial world are not the same. Our
work is to make them the same, and to that end we must destroy the
social system which makes selfishness the rule and compels a man to act
upon his lower motives, and we must put a better in its place. We must
establish a social order wherein a man can be free to be his best, and
to give his best to the community without crushing or destroying anyone
else. In a word we want Collectivism in the place of competition; we
want the kingdom of God. Charity is no remedy for our social ills and
their moral outcome; the only remedy is a new social organisation on a
Christian basis. I do not believe that any form of Collectivism, as a
mere system superposed from without, can ever really make the world
happy; it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood working
from within. Neither do I feel much faith in any sudden and
cataclysmic reformation of society. The history of Christendom proves
that no institution can be much in advance of human nature and survive.
Covenanters and Puritans found that out when they tried to make men
godly by Act of Parliament; Savonarola found it out when the wild
passions of the Florentines, restrained for a brief hour, broke their
chains and destroyed him; the Christians of New Testament times found
it out when their beautiful experiment of social brotherhood came to an
end in the horror and darkness of the break-up of Jewish national life.
But at least we can recognise the presence of the guiding Spirit of God
in all our social concerns and work along with it for the realisation
of the ideal of universal brotherhood. We can show men what Jesus
really came to do, and, as His servants, we can help Him to do it. We
can definitely recognise that the movement toward social regeneration
is really and truly a spiritual movement, and that it must never be
captured by materialism. I deplore the fact that, for