than the Christian Church with her
responsibility for the cure of souls.

V

Still another point of contact exists between the Christian purpose and
social reform: the inevitable demand of religious ideals for social
application. The ideal of human equality, for example, came into our
civilization from two main sources--the Stoic philosophy and the
Christian religion--and in both cases it was first of all a spiritual
insight, not a social program. The Stoics and the early Christians
both believed it as a sentiment, but they had no idea of changing the
world to conform with it. Paul repeatedly insisted upon the equality
of all men before God. In his early ministry he wrote it to the
Galatians: "There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither
bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man
in Christ Jesus." Later he wrote it to the Corinthians: "For in one
Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks,
whether bond or free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit." In
his last imprisonment he wrote it to the Colossians: "There cannot be
Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian,
bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all." Yet it never would
have occurred to Paul to disturb the social custom of slavery or to
question the divine institution of imperial government.

Nevertheless, while this idea of human equality did not at first
involve a social program, it meant something real. If we are to
understand what the New Testament means by the equality of men before
God, we must look at men from the New Testament point of view. Those
of us who have been up in an aeroplane know that the higher we fly the
less difference we see in the elevation of things upon the earth. This
man's house is plainly higher than that man's when we are on the ground
but, two thousand feet up, small difference can we observe. Now, the
New Testament flies high. It frankly looks from a great altitude at
the distinctions that seem so important on the earth. We say that
racial differences are very important--a great gulf between Jew and
Gentile. We insist that cultural traditions make an immense
distinction--that to be a Scythian or to be barbarian is widely
separated from being Greek. We are sure that the economic distinction
between bondman and freeman is enormous. But all the while these
superiorities and inferiorities, which we magnify, seem from P