The Modern Man's Religion: A Social Question

Extract

The religious question of an earlier day was, “Are you saved, my brother?” Matters have changed since then. Religion at this moment is but slightly a matter for individual concern or query, while it is very decidedly of serious importance to social thinkers and sociological conferences. As matter of fact, a consideration of the “state of religion” in our present day is no longer a mere courtesy to constituted religion but is a necessary logical preliminary to sociological reconstruction as such. For consider the significance of religion from the social idealist's point of view. One may calculate to the nicest exactitude every needed remedy for our glaring maladjustments, yet that result all by itself will be of no worth until the crucial question is answered whether, after all this information and wisdom has been gained, people of the average sort are going to pay any attention to it, let alone act accordingly. It is or should be plain that in social betterment as in life in general, though men by the grace of science know all mysteries and all knowledge, yet if they have not love, all social panaceas are condemned to be but effervescent dreams and much-whipped syllabub. The perception of values is nothing, except there be a fundamental and innate recognition of values as absolutely and beyond argument binding. The many imposing models of desirable social machinery being prepared by skilled draughtsmen within and without our universities and social settlements and the like, can never be made to go, despite all their glistening cogs and cams and innumerable clever devices, without a certain minimum of that spontaneous energy which we call religion. You may prove never so clearly how wages might be raised and taxes be more equalized and how at last, far off, poverty may be abolished. For those in the saddle there is easy reply, “Why give up our advantage? Why not ‘let us alone’? What are our servants and tribute-givers to us? Why are we our brothers' keepers?” To such blustering self-regarding inertia as this, there could be no answer save the appeal to deep realities, which because they are cannot by any “why” be shouldered aside.