of their parents had forced as children into a novice's
cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed
they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led
into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and
suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel
the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by
perpetual vows.

All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the
Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or
non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the
Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is
the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"
each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And
this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of
Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually
became the founder of a Church.

There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To
which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the
post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?
Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude,
undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find
ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for
another.

This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most
deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the
others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is
perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the
products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of
the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to
ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly
indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is
not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At
certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at
other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later
times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely