Practical Christian sociology

Front matter

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Contents

[For analytical syllabus of each lecture, seepages following ; for alphabetical and Biblical indexes and sociological literature, see closing pages of the book.]

General Subject : Practical Christian Sociology : PAG e

I. From the Standpoint of the Church, ... 23

Introduction

Much of what the author says in this book is of the nature of expert testimony, the value of which is enhanced by the history of the witness. He is wont to say that he was born a twin of the Maine law, in the same State, in the same year, and almost of the same father. Mr. Crafts' father, a preacher, was the writer of one of the rallying songs of Neal Dow's first campaign, and also a fearless opponent of slavery, notwithstanding the withdrawal of support by proslavery parishioners. Our author was, therefore, a reformer born, rich in an inheritance of moral heroism received through heredity and early training and the environment of a State in which, in all his childhood, he saw neither saloon nor drunkard.

When politics first came into our author's life as an influence, in the days of Fremont and John Brown, national issues were not questions of commerce but of conscience. The conquering elements of politics then boldly avowed allegiance to the Decalogue and the Golden Rule. It was felt by the most efficient reformers to be a momentous truth that man can neither make nor break law — though it may break him. He can only translate the one supreme law into its applications to current affairs.

Our author's first temperance lecture was delivered at fifteen, when he was a sophomore in college and already an active member of temperance societies. At seventeen, he preached his first sermon from a text that has proved to be the key-note of his practical ministry, " Faith without works is dead." In his earlier pastorates, Mr. Crafts' unusual success in his own Sunday-school led to his being often called to write and speak as a specialist on Sunday-school work, in connection with Dr. (now Bishop) J. H. Vincent and others. It was thus, in writing Through the Eye to the Heart, his first book, as joint author with Miss Sara J. Timanus, that he came to form with her a " Sunday-school Union" for life. By both voice and pen, Mrs. Crafts has herself done a remarkable work for

REV. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, PH. D.

8 INTRODUCTION.

Sunday-schools, temperance, and other reforms, besides being a priceless inspiration to her husband and wide circles of friends.

Mr. Crafts' activity in reform as a pastor, down to 1883, was chiefly as a temperance writer and speaker. When pastor of one of the strongest churches of Chicago, in 1877-79, ne was active in the Citizens' League, whose success in its special work of preventing the sale of liquor to minors he proved by a night inspection of one hundred saloons, in all of which only three minors were found. Four hundred had been counted in a single saloon at one time before the league began its work. During that pastorate the red ribbon of the Reynolds Reform Clubs was sewed permanently to the buttonhole of his pulpit coat, a significant signal to all who saw it. During that same pastorate he wrote for the National Temperance Society a temperance compend, since rewritten as The Te?nperance Century. A year in Europe and Bible Lands (1879-80), deepened our author's temperance convictions.

Brooklyn and New York City were Mr. Crafts' next fields of work. In these cities he made for himself denominational changes, from Methodist to Congregational and then to Presbyterian, connections. These changes were due not to any alteration of doctrinal belief, but to providential calls, and were made easy by years of work as a Sunday-school specialist in union conventions which emphasized the essentials of evangelical agreement and not the divisive non-essentials. Our author has been changeless from first to last on the great doctrines of religion and reform. Such plausible heterodoxes as high license and the Gothenburg plan have never drawn him aside.

While a pastor in Brooklyn, he preached and published a series of sermons on Successful Men of To-day, which has attained a circulation of nearly forty thousand. In this book he began a study of modern business methods which has since been more fully developed in his lectures on sociology.

On becoming pastor of a Presbyterian Church in New York City in 1883, our author planned a series of sermons on the Sabbath. Finding little literature in defense of the perpetual and universal authority of the Fourth Commandment — no book later than Gilfillan's, written twenty-two years before, when Sunday trains and Sunday papers were nearly or quite unknown — he undertook to gather fresh material for his people by sending a circular of inquiries to all parts of the world. That series of sermons, preached and reported in New York, again preached and reported in Chicago, grew into the author's best known book, The Sabbath for Man.

Mr. Crafts continued in his New York pastorate for five years, giving to reform only such aid as a busy pastor might. His studies of the Sabbath led him to appreciate keenly the wickedness of the effort made by liquor dealers all over the country, in the winter of 1887-88, to unite their forces in one vast system of " Liberty Leagues" to capture the Sabbath for the saloon. The American Sabbath Union, as stated in its first official document and in more recent official sketches of its origin, grew out of a petition circulated by our author among the leaders of Sabbath reform, by which, in the spring of 1888, the various ecclesiastical bodies were induced to combine in an official union organization to defend the Sabbath against its foes. Our author, preferring above all other pursuits the work of a pastor, hoped such an organization would take off his heart the burden he felt for the imperiled Sabbath. In con-

INTRODUCTION. 9

nection with the development of this organization, he visited the Methodist General Conference and three Presbyterian Assemblies, all of which appointed their quota of charter members for the Union, as did fourteen evangelical denominations in all. Most of these also petitioned, at his suggestion, for the enactment by Congress of a law against Sunday mails and Sunday trains. This movement our author was then promoting, in cooperation with Mrs. J. C. Bateham of the W. C. T. U. In behalf of it he conducted a hearing in the spring of 1888, before the Committee of Education and Labor of the United States Senate. Senator Blair, Chairman of the Committee, called attention privately to the fact that the petitions did not include labor unions, and suggested that they should be enlisted in this effort.

Thus our author, who had been led by the study of temperance into Sabbath reform, was led through Sabbath reform into labor reform. He asked the privilege of speaking on Sunday work to the Central Labor Union of New York City. There was some fear that " the parson" would inflict a sermon upon the meeting, but wiser expectations prevailed. He was welcomed, and the petition against Sunday mails and Sunday trains was unanimously indorsed. This first address to a labor union having passed off successfully, the doors to all other such bodies were thereafter open to him. During that year he spoke with like welcome and indorsement at the national meetings of the Knights of Labor and Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, besides many local labor unions.

Mr. Crafts' advocacy of a six-day law became a help to the eight-hour law for letter-carriers. When he spoke to the Senate's committee, that eight-hour bill, just .passed by the House, was before the committee. The postmaster-general had said to our author that it would probably not pass the Senate. But the committee, while not ready to stop Sunday trains, were led to favor the eight-hour law by the facts our author cited as to the excessive hours of work required of carriers. The law being secured, our author uncovered plots to punish the New York carriers who had led the movement by dismission on other pretexts, and plots to nullify the law in that city by scheduling carriers to do in eight hours as much as they had formerly done in ten or more. In response to written complaints which our author carried to Washington from four hundred New York carriers, an investigation was ordered which led to a strict compliance with the law. On account of the part our author had played in securing the enactment of the eight-hour law, he was one of the speakers, with Father McGlynn and " Sunset " Cox, in the " Carriers' Eight-hour Jubilee." Later, an address at the People's Church in St. Paul on the Sabbath question, which included references to the dangerous current combinations of capital, led to his being invited by the labor unions of St. Paul to speak to their Labor Day parade. For seven years, as associate editor with the undersigned on Our Day, Mr. Crafts further discussed in many trenchant papers not only temperance and the Sabbath but also the labor problem.

On January 1, 1889, our author was elected Field Secretary of the American Sabbath Union, and a year later was reelected to a secretaryship devoted chiefly to office duties, and which he resigned in the spring of 1890, in order to be free to write and speak in all parts of the land.

Sabbath reform, having led Mr. Crafts to discuss labor reform, led him next into the anti-lottery crusade. He introduced his first speech in New Orleans by saying : " Louisiana once had two blots on her fair

IO INTRODUCTION.

fame — the absence of a Sabbath law, and the presence of a lottery law. The first blot has been removed, and in three years there will be opportunity to remove the other." That was all that was said of the lottery, but after a half-hour address on the Sabbath, the preachers, instead of discussing that subject, began to explain why they had or had not preached on the lottery. The law of that time was seen to be ineffective, and our author exposed its weakness by writing to Postmaster-general Wanamaker, who turned the letter over to Attorney-general Miller, who at once wrote that he would see that a better law was drawn, and so began the National Anti-lottery Crusade. Mr. Crafts sent twenty-five thousand copies of a Lottery Broadside to Louisiana and North Dakota, when their anti-lottery crusades were on, and for aid in this and other ways received a vote of thanks from the Woman's Anti-lottery League of Louisiana.

Our author's election in the fall of 1891 to the editorship of The Christian Statesman, a paper devoted to the whole circle of Christian reforms, led him to study, besides the reforms already named, questions pertaining to ballot reform, civil service, Roman Catholicism, Church and State, Christian politics, divorce, impurity and Mormonism, immigration, municipal reform, law and order, woman's suffrage, peace and arbitration.

Such studies have reached their unique culmination in the establishment by our author of the National Bureau of Reforms at Washington, which aims to be a clearing-house for all the Christian reform movements of the country, and seeks to cooperate, as the only Christian reform organization of national scope in the national Capital, with all living Christian movements for the social betterment of society. During the sessions of Congress, our author may justly be called the speaker of " the third house," a Christian lobbyist — " may his tribe increase ! "

Hardly second in importance to this work is Mr. Crafts' mission as a lecturer on practical Christian sociology before our colleges and seminaries.

In the civic municipal revival of 1895, he spoke almost as frequently on municipal reform as on Sabbath reform movements, which are so closely related through the Sunday saloon that one continually leads to the other.

One chief value of this book is in the fact that it has been written after detailed study at all the leading American cities and of every prominent phase of our current industrial and social life. More than eighty thousand miles of travel in our own country within the last six years, besides two extensive trips abroad, have enabled our author to make these lectures an authoritative and strategic discussion of ' ' Practical Christian Sociology."

Joseph Cook.

Chicago, En Route to Australia, May 25, 1895.

Letters on the Lectures, from the Princeton Seminary Faculty.

Princeton, February 15, 1895.

My Dear Mr. Crafts :

The Faculty of the Seminary have wished me to express to you their appreciation of the lectures on Social Problems which you delivered to the students last week, and their thanks to yoi* for the course. We recognize the wide study which you have given to these subjects, and the large number of valuable facts which you have collected. We recognize also in your treatment of the facts the caution and the desire to be fair and thorough which are necessary for a proper discussion of such practical and important topics. You seem to us bent on apprehending the whole truth and in doing justice to all sides of each case. We are especially gratified by your presentation of the idea that religion as well as economic science has a part to do in the solution of social problems, and we believe that our students will be better prepared by your lectures to exert the proper influence in social and civil relations which is possible to ministers of the Gospel. We congratulate you heartily on the ability you showed in the preparation of your lectures, and feel sure that you have done a most useful work in delivering them before the Seminary. Please accept our thanks.

Very sincerely yours,

George T. Purves.

Princeton, February 18, 1895.

Rev. Mr. Crafts :

Dear Sir : I wish to say to you how highly I, in common with my colleagues and your auditors generally, appreciated the brief course of lectures which you have delivered at the Seminary on sociology. The practical acquaintance which you manifested with the numerous and complicated questions arising under this theme surprised and delighted me. The wise reserve shown in avoiding hasty and inconsiderate judgments upon matters that require further investigation, and the impartial attitude taken in regard to matters which have led to serious strife and agitation, cannot be too highly commended. And the high-toned Christian principle which marked the entire discussion, without running off into extravagance and excess, inspired confidence in the solution which must thus be ultimately reached. There is but one feeling among us, that of high gratification that we have been permitted to hear these instructive and valuable lectures, and we are greatly obliged to you for consenting to deliver them to our students.

Very truly yours,

W. Henry Green.

L. F. Ward, American Journal of Sociology, July, 1895 : The word sociology first appeared in print in its French form, sociologies in the fourth volume of Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy, the first edition of which was published in 1839. . . The world is certainly greatly indebted to Comte for this word, as it is also for that other useful word of his, altruism. Although the word sociology is derived from both Latin and Greek, still it is fully justified by the absence in the Greek language of the most essential component. While it need not altogether replace the virtually synonymous expression, social science, it can be used in many cases where that could not. . . We all know what an improvement physics has been upon natural philosophy, and biology upon natural history. Sociology stands in about the same relation to the old philosophy of history. . . Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value, but of successively decreasing positivity [while of ever-increasing rank]. To these he gave the names, astronomy [his term for mathematics], physics, chemistry, biology [Spencer and Ward add here psychology], sociology [to which the author would add, as highest of all, theology]. . . Comte's conception [of sociology] . . . makes it . . . embrace everything that pertains to man as a social being. . . Economics . . ethnology, ethnography, and demography, with other attendant branches of anthropology . . . each of these has its specialized phenomena to be set aside and cultivated as separate departments . . . and the field is cleared for the calm contemplation of the central problem of determining the facts, the law, and the principles of human association. — Pp. 16, 17, 19, 22, 25.

Shailer Matthews, The American Journal of Sociology, July, 1895 :

Just as the philosophies bearing these names [Hegelian, Aristotelian,

Baconian] are respectively the gifts of Hegel and Aristotle and Bacon,

so Christian sociology should mean the sociology of Christ ; that is, the

social philosophy and teachings of Christ. — P. 70.