Article September 14, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from R. J. Campbell, William P. Merrill

[Churchman.]

Apart from the machinery of a national election, and leaving aside the opportunity it gives for promoting the career of the professionalized politician, the movement en masse of a people preparing to exercise their vote is an altruistic movement. At such a time, when the ideal foundations of society are laid bare, is the Christian church called upon to take its share in promoting social right thinking and right living, or is it bound to stand aside, fearful lest the objection to the intermixture of ecclesiastical and political life damage the cause for which it stands?

The easiest way out of this dilemma is to accept a self-denying ordinance; that is, to follow the line of least resistance, which may also be the line of least efficiency. If the political life of the country is to be divorced from the teaching of religion, things can go on smoothly very much in the way that was accepted in the eighteenth century in Georgian England, when people of virtuous character and strong convictions were perfectly content to lead what, from the individualistic point of view, were ideal Christian lives, even though the affairs of their country were administered by statesmen who violated almost every principle of social morality. A tremendous reawakening has come since that time. The meaning of the religious life has been extended far beyond the bounds of individual perfection. Yet there are still vigorously persistent many sophisms of the past. Men and women, whose loyalty to the church cannot be suspected, are apt to be offended at the mere suggestion that the formal profession of Christian has anything to do with their present duties as citizens. They have divided their moral convictions into water-tight compartments, and at the slightest prospect of the breaking down of these partition walls they begin to speak of change as catastrophic and revolutionary. How often in history have the forces of unintelligent conservatism and reaction centered about organized Christianity to such a degree that the church has been identified with a definite policy of obstruction to all social advance.

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