Article October 20, 1906 Issue

THE LARGER FRATERNALISM

Frank N. Riale

The Chicago Sun

A larger fraternalism is the spirit of the hour. Among those who direct, this is acknowledged as heaven's handwriting on the wall. As Dr. Lyman Abbott has lately said, "We are rapidly passing out of the reign of the monopolist, that has held as a tyrant those that toil; out of the age of the many who struggle for the mastery, with 'the devil take the hindmost' as their creed, into the age of fraternalism, where the government is to come to the loving sense of its great fatherhood of the people, who are brothers all. New Zealand has shown us already how this is in many ways so practically possible. The spirit there born is rapidly sweeping the world. From the heart of those directed, as well as those that direct, the same spirit is being most rapidly born. Socialism, with all its many faults in the past and many more to overcome, has this clear message that we must all acknowledge is born of heaven—the message of comradeship, the message of a great common brotherhood, with a government which insures the paternal adjustment of the rights of all."

So from both sides of the great barrier between us we are tunneling to the common center, and already back and forth from one side to the other, the directors and the directed, are we passing along to the coming heart conviction of the real great comradeship—the thought of the great fraterhood. The purpose of the Church is to get into the hearts of all the one common spirit of Jesus, the great mediator of all our difficulties.

Jesus showed this spirit of brotherhood even to the meanest. He wanted to break bread with the publican, the meanest monopolist of the hour. When he did this the stone heart of the man was broken; it melted like wax in the presence of such a warmth of love. To-day followers in his footsteps on both sides of the barrier are doing likewise, and every such willingness to be a brother to those most unbrotherlike has brought a new light to the dark social problem we have to solve.

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