The social influence of Christianity

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I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

The Social Influence

Preface

This volume consists of eight lectures delivered before the Newton Theological Institution, in May, 1887, at the invitation of the president and faculty, and through the liberality of the Hon. J. W. Merrill. The lectures are now published at the request of the president, faculty, and students, and constitute the second published volume of "Newton Lectures," the first being "The Hebrew Feasts," by Professor William Henry Green, d.d., ll.d., of Princeton Theological Seminary.

The lecturer was permitted to supplement his general preparation as a teacher of political economy and sociology during the past ten years, by six months of travel and observation in the principal countries of central and southern Europe with these lectures constantly in view, and by six months of special reading in the literature collected before and during his journey.

He desires to make public acknowledgment of the sustained interest shown by all who attended the course of lectures, and especially of the personal courtesy and hospitality of President Hovey and the members of the faculty during his pleasant visit at Newton.

Contents

I. What is Human Society?

II. What has Christianity done for Society?

III. Christianity and the Problems of Labor . .

I. What Is Human Society?

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY?

i. Preliminary Questions.

2. The twofold View of the Sophists.

I. THE NATURALISTIC CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY.

i. Plato's Theory.

2. Aristotle's Theory.

3. Naturalistic Doctrines in Modern Times.

(1) Montesquieu; (2) Condorcet ; (3) Kant; (4) Quetelet; (5) Buckle.

4. Biological Sociology.

(1) Spencer; (2) Schaeffle ; (3) Espinas ; (4) Mulford.

5. Inadequacy of the Naturalistic Conception.

II. THE IDEALISTIC CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY.

1. Rousseau's Social Contract. 2.

The Theocratic Conception.

The Kingdom of God.

Christian Society.

The Ideal in the Formation of Society.

III. THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NATURAL AND THE IDEAL IN SOCIETY.

1. Society founded in Human Wants.

2. Society modified by Human Wills.

3. Society perfected through Ideals.

4. Answer to the question, What is human society?

THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY?

I. An accurate conception of the nature of society is an essential prerequisite to any valuable discussion of its problems. This conception may be obtained by resolving society into its elementary constituents and discovering the forces and laws by which these elements are united. Human society is composed of individual human beings, who may be considered as its atomic units. The process of analysis is very simple, but the forces of social synthesis and the laws of their action present materials of great complexity. Does the cause of association lie in the human individual, or does it pertain to the environment in which individuals are placed ? Does it originate from conscious volition, or does it proceed from organic constitution ? Does it admit of voluntary counteraction and resistance, or does it produce its results by necessity ? These are questions which must be answered before we can solve any social problem whatever ; for, if the will of man is not in

IO SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

any sense the cause of society, it is difficult to imagine how it can transform, or even slightly modify, the social structure.

These preliminary questions reduce themselves to one, which may be formulated thus : What is the relation of individuals to the social whole ; is it that of living parts united by natural laws into a greater organism, or is it that of voluntary members freely choosing their form of association ? More briefly still, Is society a natural organism, or is it a voluntary group formed by contract ?

2. We may trace from a great antiquity two distinct and opposing conceptions created in answer to this question. The Greek Sophists, who raised nearly all the questions which men have since been trying to answer, divided the world into two parts : one ruled by the inflexible laws of nature, the other governed by the freewill of man. 1 They considered a part of our human laws as arbitrary or conventional ; others, as derived from the constitution of man, and hence the projection of inanimate nature, independent of volition and wholly unalterable. Upon this fundamental distinction have been erected two different theories of society, which we may designate as the Naturalistic Theory and the Idealistic Theory.

I.

i. Although Plato is best known as an idealist, his social theory belongs to the naturalistic type. For

1 For this doctrine of the Sophists, see Plato's Laws, 889. The best translation is Jowett's.

him society is a product of nature, a creature of instinct and environment. Organic need is the determining cause of social, as it is of animal, organization. 2 The division of labor in the sphere of industrial production was fully understood by Plato, and its origin was referred to the diversity of natural powers and aptitudes. A state, he taught, is a living body, similar to an individual organism. Its different classes are like the various faculties of an individual being, and it is endowed with a soul — an emanation of the universal reason. Its growth and decay, its diseases and its conflicts of function, are similar to those of a living man. But as nature is the creation of God, so also is society. As there is an ideal for the individual man, whose highest attainment is perfect virtue, so there is an ideal for the State, the perfect republic. This ideal Plato attempted to picture. It is a community in which the wise govern, in which virtue, as he conceived it, is universally cultivated by the union of the best and the elimination of the base, and yet involving the destruction of the family and its affections, the perpetuation of the militant spirit, and the laudation of a narrow nationalism. This most visionary of idealists is still the most radical of realists. The members of the social body are wholly devoid of spontaneity. The realization of the ideal must come from God alone, whose agent is the wise man clothed with power. Little did Plato dream that this "wise man "

2 For Plato's ideas on the nature of society, see his Republic, translated by Jowett.

was hoped for and expected by the Hebrew people, the Deliverer and Messiah, who should bring to earth, not the narrow national supremacy desired by both Plato and the Hebrews, but the perfect kingdom for which the world was waiting.

2. Aristotle approaches the question of the nature of society with all of Plato's realism, but without his ideal tendencies. For Aristotle the State is the product of nature, and he proceeds to study it from a natural point of view. 3 He points out an important fact, that the individual cannot exist in isolation. He finds the social unit not in the individual, but in the pair, the family. But this unit is not an atom ; it is composite ; it is already an organism, a living molecule whose parts could not subsist alone. This is a fertile conception. It draws society within the boundaries of biology. Society is no longer a dead thing, but a living being. Since it is a living organism, it is subjected to the laws of birth and death, of growth and dissolution, which rule all life. Change is its essential condition. Every attempt, then, to impose upon it an immutable constitution must prove chimerical. Societies differ according to their times and according to their environments. No constitution can be adapted to all peoples. Again, no living being is composed of wholly similar parts. Society ought to be composed of parts which are separated from one another by differences. This is why the family, Aristotle's social element, is

3 For Aristotle's philosophy of society, see his Politics, translated by Jowett.

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? I 3

formed of heterogeneous constituents : man, woman, and children. That difference is the condition of their union. Here is not only diversity, but subordination, gradation of power, a scale of authority ; the woman obeying the man, and the child the woman. In this rudimentary society is the beginning of government. The father becomes the patriarch, the patriarch the king. Thus is developed the social organism. Nature ordains these differences, from them grows the equilibrium of the whole people; and so society exists, not by convention and choice, but by inherent constitution and necessity. Each individual finds himself at birth a part of a social whole which neither he nor any other man has created. Without this preexisting environment he would not be what he is. He is, then, himself the creature of society rather than its creator. Its language, its traditions, its customs, its laws, combine to shape him and to determine his individuality. How fully this idea was accepted by the Greeks is evident from the value they put upon culture as essential to the making of a man, and also from their word ldi6rrj<s, which first meant a " private man," then a "clumsy fellow," and at last a "fool," an "idiot."

We may summarize the whole doctrine of pagan antiquity as being in its final conclusions a naturalistic and organic theory of society. Without arriving at the definite biological conception that prevails in modern sociology, Greek thought distinctly grasped the idea that society is created by forces outside of man

H

SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

himself, yet operating through him as their necessaryorgan, thus producing not merely an aggregate but a living organism.

3. To follow in detail the history of social theories would certainly prove wearisome, and probably would efface the memory of the most important outlines by filling the mind with insignificant refinements. And yet we cannot do justice to the naturalistic school without a passing notice of the progress it has made.

(1) In Montesquieu's epoch-making " Spirit of the Laws" we find the naturalistic conception prevailing. 4 He regards the organization of society as reposing less on human ideas than on instinctive impulsions — such as the sense of dependence on others, the need of aliments, the sexual attachment, and the sympathetic inclinations. Though the State is for the great French jurist the work of mind, its roots reach down into physical conditions out of which it is developed. The laws express this origin and are but the reflex of the natural environment.

(2) Condorcet emphasized this tendency of thought by proposing that the methods of the physical sciences be applied also to moral and social phenomena. 5 He taught that human progress is subject to physical laws and capable of even mathematical treatment. To measure social phenomena in order to discover their laws ; to draw from the knowledge of their laws the foreknowledge of future phenomena ; to found

4 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, livre i, chapitre ii.

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? I 5

upon that foreknowledge combinations and preventions which would secure the amelioration of the human race, — such was Condorcet's doctrine of the task and the power of social science.

(3) Although Immanuel Kant made absolute freedom the masterpiece of his metaphysics, he regarded the world of phenomena as ruled by invariable laws. In the marvelous harmonies of nature he discerned a secret conspiracy of forces which is, indeed, mechanical, but at the same time the expression of a superior will. Human actions were for him determined in great part by general laws of nature. He thought that, as " the laws of the variation of the atmosphere are constant, though no particular can be foreseen at a given point, and in the mass they occasion in a uniform manner and without interruption the growth of plants, the course of streams, and all the other occurrences of the natural economy," so the social phenomena — births and deaths, marriages and divorces — are subject to natural laws. 6 We may trace similar ideas in the writings of Fichte and Hegel, who gave them abundant illustration mingled with the vagaries of a fanciful subjectivism, and especially in those of Herder, who first applied the principle of natural evolution to history and claimed for it the character of an exact science.

(4) Very important additions were made to social science by the Belgian mathematician, Quetelet, who by measurements and statistics sought to demonstrate the uniformity of social phenomena. His

6 Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte.

methods are too technical for popular exposition, but he may be accorded the distinction of having raised statistics to the dignity of a science. His " Social Physics " is a memorable contribution to the science of man and of society. His tables show that acts of the most personal and apparently spontaneous nature are measurable by general rules. For example, the number of murders committed in France in six successive years, from 1826 to 1831 inclusive, shows a very slight variation ; and the proportion of the instruments of destruction employed is about the same from year to year. Thus, for five successive years the number of murders committed with a gun or pistol does not vary more than eight, the absolute numbers being 56, 64, 60, 61, and 57. Such observations led Quctelet to maintain that "society encloses in itself the germ of the crimes that are committed. It is society itself, in a certain sense, that prepares them, and the criminal is only the instrument who executes them. The social state, then, supposes a certain order of crimes, which result as a necessary consequence from its organization." 7 I do not pause to criticize either the logic or the ethics of this reasoning, but note it as a stage in the development of sociology.

(5) Buckle has attempted the construction of a history of civilization on the assumption " that the moral actions of men are the product, not of their volition, but of their antecedents." Social progress,

7 Quetelet, Physique Sociale ; ou, Essai sur le Developpement des Facultes de l'Homme, he says, is "the result of large and general causes which, working upon the aggregate of society, produce certain consequences without regard to the volition of those particular men of whom the society is composed." 8 These "large and general causes" are "climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of nature." Here volition is absolutely excluded as a factor of progress. Quetelet explains social phenomena as produced through human volition, but Buckle takes the higher ground that human volition is wholly excluded from effecting social changes. He was clearly a more loyal determinist than he was a faithful observer.

4. It has been reserved for our age to erect a complete sociology upon a purely naturalistic basis, treating society as a natural growth, a veritable organism in the strictest sense of the word, as little dependent upon human volition as any example in the animal series.

(1) For Herbert Spencer, sociology is simply an extension of biology. 9 He has come upon societies long before arriving at man in the order of evolution. Every individual animal, he affirms, is a society, composed of living constituents. The individuality of an animal, far from excluding that of its component elements, supposes and requires it. Organic composition is simply a union of living parts into more extended living wholes. Man is an individual only in

8 Buckle's History of Civilization in England.

9 Spencer's Illustrations of Universal Progress, essay on The Social Organism ; and Principles of Sociology.

a relative sense. He is really a society of smaller individuals. His unity is the result of their organization. He is thus either identical with them or a result of their combination. When dissolution takes place he is no more. These constituents have been differentiated and specialized so that each class has its own function. Human society is to individual men what a single man is to the living cells of his body. It is more than an aggregate, it is a veritable organism. It is not formed by voluntary association any more than an animal body is, but by the unconscious grouping of individual men acting according to the laws of their nature. Human society is, therefore, simply an "episode of universal evolution," as necessary as a crystal and as little the work of will. (2) Spencer's principal difficulty in completing the analogy between society and an animal organism is thus expressed by himself : " The parts of an animal form a concrete whole ; but the parts of a society form a whole that is discrete. While the living units composing the whole are bound together in close contact in the animal, the living units composing society are free, not in contact, and more or less widely dispersed." Spencer's attempts to explain away this disparity are not so successful as those of the German sociologist, Schaeffle, in his " Structure and Life of the Social Body." In that exhaustive work, the learned author shows that in every animal organism there is an intercellular substance, which is not composed of the living cells, but acts as a means of separation and communication between them.

The discontinuity of the parts of the social body is not, therefore, a fatal objection to its being considered as an organism, since this is quite in analogy with the structure of animal bodies. The roads, railways, and telegraphic lines of human society serve to bring its constituents into practical coherence, as the nerves of sensation do in the animal body. That these were a late development is quite in analogy with biological history, in which the formation of a nervous system marks an advanced stage of animal evolution.

(3) The finishing touch to the naturalistic theory seems to have been given by the French zoologist, Espinas, who, in his " Animal Societies," discovers the necessity and the fact of association in the lowest orders of the animal creation, and supplies many data in tracing the evolution of human society from the rudimentary social life of the inferior animals. " No living being," says Espinas, " is alone. The animals in particular sustain numerous relations with the existences which surround them ; and, without speaking of those which live in permanent commerce with their kind, almost all are constrained by biological necessities to contract, though it be for a brief period, an intimate union with some other individual of their species." 10

(4) Thus the lowest forms of life and human society are connected as products of natural forces operating under a law of evolution. Society is, then, the greatest of animals. But we are led a step

10 Espinas, Des Societes Animates.

beyond this. In his book on " The Nation," the late Dr. Mulford says : " The physical organism is determined in itself by a law of necessity, as the tree which cannot be other than it is ; the ethical organism is determined in a law of freedom, which is the condition of moral action. . . . The conditions of history presume the being of the nation as a moral organism. History is not a succession of separate events and actions, but a development in a moral order, and in the unity and continuity of a life which moves on unceasingly, as some river in its unbroken current. It is only as the nation is an organism that this unity and continuity is manifest in it, and as a moral organism that this moral order is confirmed in it." n Dr. Mulford then adds : "The nation is a moral personality." So it seems that a society is not simply a great animal, but a great person. All this may be very true, but I cannot resist the feeling that in some way we have passed out of the sphere of science into a cloudland of mythology, when the nation is endowed with personality. If we have shrunk from Auguste Comte's apotheosis of Humanity as the Supreme Being, how shall we treat this " moral person " to whom Dr. Mulford' s speculative mind has introduced us ? How august and majestic this "moral person " must be, to whom we all stand in the relation of microscopic cells to a human body ! Has biology, then, a new religion ? But the moment I try to regain my own sense of personality, which seems swallowed up in this " moral

11 E. Mulford's The Nation, chap, i, person," I find myself in trouble. I do not see how a person can be composed of other persons. He would be a congress, not a person. If a person cannot be composed of other persons, then this " moral person," which society is said to be, is either not a person at all, or else is a person apart from its constituents, individual men. In the latter case we have a new divinity who is a separate personal being, the soul of the nation. This brings us back to Plato. But if a person cannot be composed solely of other organisms, then I, as a person, am something apart from the constituent cells that form my body. I am a society plus personality. Now, admitting that society is an organism, that is, made up of other organisms, there is something in society that is not organism, the individual personalities that inhabit the constituent organisms themselves. Here we come upon a great truth. It is that the organic theory of society leaves out of account this element of personality that belongs to every human individual. As for Dr. Mulford's " moral person," that is but the creature of the power of abstraction. It is the personification, merely, of the social bond — the mythologizing tendency that peopled the Pantheon with creatures of the fancy, alive in the nineteenth century and creating a national divinity. This " moral person" can nowhere be found, except in the individual men of the nation. But each of these men consciously knows in himself a personality that is neither the sum nor the product of his component parts. He is an organism plus a person. More precisely, he is a person in an organism.

(5) Admitting the truth of the naturalistic theory of society, as far as it goes, except the completeness of it, we seem to have missed some important factor. That factor is personality. However we may doubt the personality of Dr. Mulford's " moral person," we cannot doubt that we ourselves are persons. The question, then, is : What have persons contributed to the constitution of society, beyond what natural forces have contributed ? The naturalistic sociology is merely one of observation and induction. It can observe and report social facts. It cannot do more. It cannot explain progress, which is the one preeminently important social phenomenon. It cannot determine, by its purely physical methods, what ougJit to be, or that anything " ought to be. " It is utterly powerless to solve any social problem, because its fundamental postulate is that the will and intellect of man have no initiative power, either to create or transform society. As for social responsibility, there can be none for the naturalistic theory. All is determined by natural necessity, and, upon this assumption, " Whatever is, is right."

II

1. The missing factor in the naturalistic conception of society is human personality. Man is a force other than physical nature, conscious of himself and of his power, reacting upon and transforming his environment, partly its master and not wholly its creature. This is the assumption of Rousseau, who,

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY?

though not without predecessors in proclaiming this truth, is its most celebrated modern advocate among social theorists. Modern republicanism is a political movement, based on the dignity and essential freedom of human nature, on the fact and the potency of personality. It is incompatible with pure and absolute naturalism, which teaches the doctrine that " might makes right " under the milder formula of the " struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest." Rousseau is the philosopher of republicanism. He assumes certain inherent and inalienable rights in man ; that is, his possession of personality, without which he could not have rights, and his ethical nature, without which he could not know them. Rousseau conceives society as having been instituted by a " social contract," a compact voluntarily formed by free agents, in order to secure the protection of their rights by union and reciprocity. Their primary equality, their personal freedom, and their pursuit of an ideal are all involved in this theory. 12 But Rousseau embarrassed the truth with cumbrous impedimenta of error. The "state of nature " is for him an atomistic condition of existence, in which men are imagined as wandering in isolation, without interrelations, without institutions, and without laws. It has been easy for the naturalistic school to show that such a condition of human life is impossible, and such historical critics as Sir Henry Maine and such political theorists as Bluntschli have rejected it as not only unhistoric but utterly fanciful. To refute

12 Rousseau, Contrat Social, livre i, chapitre iv.

Rousseau's doctrine of the origin of society, however, is by no means to show that voluntary contract has not been a transforming element in social progress. Society is not the creation of a day, but the growth of centuries. History shows that men have acted in the formation of new societies and in the reconstruction of old ones under the guidance of an ideal whose abstract formula is voluntary contract. I believe that Rousseau is correct in maintaining that men have made society what it is by following a pattern that was an idea before it was a reality.

2. If we care to retrace the idealistic conception of society to its source, we shall find its origin among the ancient Hebrews. The theocracy instituted by Moses, a kingdom without a human king, a commonwealth built on worship, was held together by the allegiance of the people ; and, while its constitution was divinely ordained, membership in it was a voluntary adherence. Moses erected a moral ideal, established a ceremonial to give it vitality, and appealed to men to realize it by submitting to theocratic laws. Apostasy was always possible, and sometimes chosen. The Hebrew commonwealth, in its beginning, was essentially a form of association based on voluntary recognition of a moral ideal. It never lost this character. The Judges served to give personality and form to the moral and religious union of the people, but they could not unify and concentrate the Hebrew nation. After the loss of nationality, the political feebleness of the commonwealth in the midst of powerful monarchies was keenly felt. Samuel be-

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY?

came virtual king of Israel, a king who ruled the conscience and swayed the whole moral nature of his people. " He seems to have entertained the magnificent but impracticable conception," says Dr. J. H. Allen, " that the real and acknowledged sovereign of Israel should be the invisible Divinity and Protector, whose arm had guarded the nation in so many perils, whose Spirit had from the first commissioned and inspired its faithful men ; and that the actual ruler should be only, as it were, a regent, or viceroy, of this unseen sovereign." 13 Accordingly, he erected into the permanence and power of an institution the prophetic function, by the establishment of the " Schools of the Prophets." Out of this institution of prophecy came those predictions and expectations of the Prince of Peace, the spiritual sovereign, who should be at once king and deliverer, the realized hope of Israel. No doubt it was with heavy heart, made heavier by the disappointments that followed, that Samuel saw the necessity of choosing a human king. The king was appointed and Samuel's fears were realized. Thus the theocracy that had been a fact with Moses and a reminiscence with Samuel, became for the prophets a splendid dream of the future. The throne never ceased to feel the power of the school. Exposure and denunciation of wrong, exposition and proclamation of justice, even interference with the royal counsels and the authoritative dictation of policy, became the functions of the prophets, who continually voiced forth and empha-

13 J. H. Allen's Hebrew Men and Times, chap. iii.

sized the ideals of the theocracy. " Both in their own and in the popular belief, they were in the strictest sense ambassadors and representatives, to speak before the nation messages from the invisible and dread majesty of its King."

3. Out of that "goodly fellowship of the prophets" came the Messianic predictions which rendered possible the mission of Christ's forerunner. " The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " cried John in the wilderness. He came not from books and circles of scholars, as if his message were a discovery of learning ; not from courts and councils, as if it were an induction gathered from political policies, but from the solitudes of the desert, as if to announce a proclamation from God himself. Christ appeared, to fulfill his words and interpret their meaning. " My kingdom is not of this world," he said, yet " the kingdom of God is within you." It is a kingdom for this world, though not of it. He taught his disciples to pray : " Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven." That prayer and its answer have gradually transformed and are transforming human society. The old order which PJato and Aristotle saw about them was not a wholly necessary or permanent order. Through the teachings of Christ the theocratic idea of society which Moses taught the ancient Hebrews, which Samuel loved but could not perpetuate in its purity, which the prophets steadily held before the world for centuries, and which the Christian ministry has diffused throughout the globe, has become the confessed

WHAT IS HUMAN SOCIETY? 2 J

faith of all civilized nations, who accept it because they are civilized, and are civilized because they accept it. For these millions, higher and more potent than any human king is the " King Invisible." His will is the ideal of society, and must be discovered and obeyed. Henceforth men conceive that society is to be shaped by the conformity of individual wills to a divine will. It is the organized assent of persons to the plan of a Person. It is no longer the product of nature alone, the creature of cosmic forces acting in accordance with necessary laws. Its climax is not in the realization of a " moral person " whose substance is the nation, but in conformity to an infinite righteousness whose substance is the living God.