divine holiness of Christ conquers, purifies, redeems all things unto itself.

Closest of all things is the interpenetration of love. The tasks of this age are to be accomplished in the compassionate love of Christ. And as we look closer into the secularities of our time, compassionate love is the significance of them. To increase wealth and to learn the just distribution that is essential to its largest increase, to eliminate by science every unnecessary and repressive ill, to limit to the utmost of possibility sickness and pain and drudgery; in a word to make conditions most favorable to life worth the living by all men everywhere, just this is what our time has to do. And to do this, compassionate love has to rise into appreciative love; the appreciation of the divine possibilities of every man and of the value of a social consciousness in which all weep with them that weep that all may rejoice together. For lack of love the attainments of the age are perverted into misery and luxury, which is worse, into the cries of the oppressed and the insensibility of those that exploit them, into new and fiercer hatreds. Against all oppression, especially against the less obvious forms of it, there must be compassionate love's indignations caught from the rages of the Christ. And the compassion, the indignation, the devoted sacrifice comes down from the heart of the Father through Christ's life of ministry and the cross of the world's redemption.

The gospel of the kingdom which Jesus announced and incarnated has many forms for its one principle, which is the subduing of all things by the spiritual. Christ's kingdom of Heaven for our age is to accomplish its great secular constructive tasks in the eternal faith, the unearthly purity, the compassionate and indignant love of the Son of God.

Must it be the church that fulfils the secular by the manifestation of the spiritual? It is the doing of this which makes the church. The kingdom of God in its contemporary tasks is advanced by united prayer, by searching together the mind and heart of Christ, so that whatever each receives may become the common possession, by the divine love formed in a common devotion to the Master. Though this kingdom may become conterminous with the church, it can never become identical with her, on earth or in heaven. When

the church embraces all beings that can become rational, it will still be humanity, for lack of a larger word, as receiving from its Lord the eternal potencies, transforming and fulfilling by them every evolution of thought and life through which God unfolds the latencies of his worlds. For this, humanity's highest task, upon which every other task depends, there is necessary the inevitable organization, for which the church is the best name known to our earthly language. The social consciousness of our day discloses more than ever before the necessary union of men in these, their highest functions.

Questions of method and application can be answered by a new branch of sociology, for which the thoughts written here are only prolegomena. Two considerations may lead us across the threshhold.

The first is the necessity of a deepened consciousness of the church as a distinct institution of peculiar character. This selfconsciousness of the church has been adequately stated in the final instructions and prayer attributed to Christ in the Fourth Gospelcorrectly attributed to him in that these are the expression of his heart's desire: "That ye love one another, even as I have loved you;" and, "As Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me." That believers in Christ should be united in the loving fellowship of the life which Christ lived in God and God in Christ, this is the urgent need of the world, especially in these days. The development of God's kingdom in the world must be in the guidance, rebuke, and inspiration of a fellowship in which the principles and spirit of the kingdom are the light which lighteneth all that are in the house. The church where every member lives for the welfare of all, imparts himself and his possessions to his brethren in equally inspired wisdom and self-sacrifice, where in the intimate and divine relation that makes it possible the joy of one is the joy of all, the sorrow of any the calling forth of the compassion of all, where all social relations are fulfilled in the spirit of the Master for divine aims and unto an eternal hope; this is the indispensable beginning of the church's ministry to our age; this is the hearth of that kingdom which enspheres all that men have to do. This church consciousness can break down sectarian divisions while retaining and uniting the attainments of

each one of them. It can produce in the leaders of the church, and in those whom they lead, a churchly loyalty that overwhelms all self-regards and makes practical all the higher loyalites. Here meet at their summits all sorts and conditions of men, and barriers of class and race and divergent civilization are in effective principle broken down.

The other consideration is this obvious one, that the practical work of the church addresses social conditions as they exist, or as they may arise. To shape these, she takes whatever of her principles are applicable in each case, or to state it more accurately, whatever manifestation of her spirit meets the crisis. In what several ways she shall make the application is a matter of experiment. Sometimes the church may work upon social conditions as an institution, sometimes through agencies which she has generated, or regenerated, sometimes only through the lives which she has touched and through her fiery message which is the word of God spoken through his prophets. In all these she is present in her love, indignation, and compassion. These detailed problems of the church are among the most insistent of the practical concerns of our day. Lack of devotion to this arduous task leaves the correctest principles barren; yet, for lack of fundamental principles, much of this work of hers as at present prosecuted is futile meddlesomeness. Elimination of interference with the secular order makes for the profoundest influence upon it.

Whether any of the few occurrences of the word church, attributed to Christ in the gospels, be authentic or not, makes no difference. From Christ the church unfolds inevitably, and the advancement of the kingdom of Heaven on earth, committed to all normal human functions, depends upon her for its true conception, derives through her its unwasting power.

THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION: A PRACTICABLE

PROGRAMME

PROFESSOR GREGORY D. WALCOTT, PH.D.
Hamline University, St. Paul, Minn.

In his little work on The History of Religion, Mr. Menzies asserts that "religion and civilization advance together." This correlation he makes very evident in connection with many primitive and national religions. His position seems to be well substantiated by the facts adduced by other students of religion and of social evolution. There is contained in it, also, a suggestion for solving the theological problem of today, as it presses upon the minds of thinking men. For it is but a step from the correlation of the religion of any nation with the civilization which that nation enjoys, to the correlation of Christianity with the civilization of our western world.

There are few thoughts more often emphasized, within distinctively Christian circles, than Christianity for the whole world. The universalism, which is a pronounced characteristic of Christianity, often expresses itself in this rather vaguely ideal way. One may well think that something of the sort will ultimately be attained. The work of Christian missions, carried on in so many quarters of the world at the present time, points in this direction. But already a qualifying thought has put in its appearance. What form will Christianity assume in the Orient? In the first outburst of missionary zeal a century ago, there was no question but that Chinese and Japanese, Indians and Malayans, Fiji Islanders and South African Hottentots would all appropriate without modification the outlook upon life and conception of the world cherished by the respective missionaries. And this was practically the same as that which took shape in the early days of the Christian church. Such a thought, however, is being gradually abandoned for the saner view which counsels taking the gospel to foreign lands and then letting it work out its own salvation by incorporating itself, as best it may, into the thoughts, the feeling, and the total life of the several peoples among

whom it is introduced. But if this be done in the fullest, freest way possible, there will ultimately be a pronounced similarity, since there are other causes at work.

It is not hard to look forward through the centuries and to conceive of practically one type of culture prevailing everywhere in the world. Students of society in its early forms point out many similarities not to be accounted for upon the ground of imitation and borrowing. The human mind works according to very definite laws. If conditions are similar, results will be strikingly alike in spite of minor local differences. When, therefore, in addition to such a natural tendency there shall be a more pronounced similarity in data, that is, when men in every part of the world shall have about the same knowledge of the earth and its geological history, of the heavenly bodies and their laws, and of life and its history in both its lower and higher formswhen, in a word, the different cultures become merged into onewe may well think that men everywhere will have about the same conception of the world as a whole, as we in the western hemisphere for the most part have today.

No little advance in this direction has already been made. One need but contrast the Weltanschauung of the German tribes at the dawn of the Christian era with that entertained by a Marcus Aurelius, and then think of the unity of view, in its broad outlines, entertained by men practically everywhere in Europe and in America at the present day, to appreciate the possibilities which the centuries hold in solution. And if there should be such a uniform culture extended throughout the world and a religion correlated with it, that religion would be practically the same whether one should come into contact with it in America, in Asia, or in Africa. Still further, if Christianity be allowed to develop freely, correlated in every mission field with the type of culture which there prevails, but changing as that culture changes, when the culture becomes uniform throughout the world, Christianity will be the religion so universally correlated, and its present ideal universalism will be real.

Such a desideratum, if it be one, is not upon the horizon of present possibilities. But although this be true, it does not follow that no effort should be put forth in that direction. In fact, the argument in favor of the free development of Christianity on distant mission