By EDWARD T. DEVINE

CONSTRUCTIVE RELIGION

Greed, selfishness, privilege, injustice, exploitation, ignorance, and neglect are the seven deadly sins of modern civilization. These evils are alike in this, that they all have their roots in defective or abnormally developed character. Weakness and pathological strength are their opposite but closely related and interdependent poles.

Revolution will not exterminate them, except that revolution within the soul of man which transforms weakness and moral disease into health and normal vigor; which eats away the abnormal excrescence of harmful qualities and transforms the monster into a sane and self-controlled individual.

Laws will not of themselves exterminate the least of the social evils, save as they correspond to a previous clear recognition of their wisdom and justice in the free minds of citizens. If graft and privilege express the habitual manner of doing business, the natural mental reaction of the average man of the community, then it will be true, as an investigating committee has said, that there is no virtue in the legislative printing press.

Philanthropy is no cure for the evils which cause crime, poverty, squalor, and degeneracy. It is a necessary means of dealing with certain definite conditions, but those conditions are symptoms of ulterior maladies which the charitable relation does not reach. Neither alms-giving nor preventive measures touch the real sources of regeneration and health.

Education, in the specific sense of preparation for efficient work and the development of the mental powers, such education as by mutual consent we expect from our public schools, does not begin early enough, or last long enough, or go far enough into the fields of personal habits, ideals, and motives to guard even against ignorance, at least that kind of wilful and appalling ignorance which prevents half the world from knowing how the other half lives, even when the facts are spread abroad equally in official reports and in popular literature; that kind of ignorance which blinds the eyes of the more favored of fortune and blasts the tender shoots of altruism which their hearts here and there put forth. If education cannot prevent even ignorance of this kind how much less can it be regarded as a remedy for deliberate exploitation and conscienceless greed.

If neither revolution nor laws nor yet formal education can cure these root evils, is there no cure? There is one potent, wholly efficacious cure, and that is such teaching and such an experience as will supplant selfishness and greed by generosity and compassion, the desire for privilege by the desire for equal opportunity, the instinct of injustice by the passion for justice, the tendency to exploit by the tendency to nobly serve, ignorance and neglect by a clear-eyed and persistent determination to know and understand and to act on that knowledge and understanding. This teaching, wherever it is carried on and in whatever name, is essentially religious teaching, and this experience, seizing upon the individual, is nothing else than a religious conversion. This is not to distort words from their established and usual meaning but only to apply them as they must be applied.

No rich and educated Jew can justly claim a share in the glorious traditions of his religious faith if he oppresses the poor and crushes the needy; if, lying upon beds of ivory, inventing instruments of music, drinking wine in bowls, and anointing himself with the chief ointments, he is not grieved for the afflictions of Joseph, if he afflicts the just, or takes a bribe, or turns aside the poor in the gate from their right. The afflictions of Joseph are different in these days, the form of bribery has changed, the rights of the poor from which they are turned aside are not precisely those which the prophet Amos had in mind; but the teachings remain, and the curse upon those who "rejoice in a thing of nought" may not unprofitably ring in the ears of Jews and Christians with all the old time authority and effect.

But how about the position of the prosperous and influential Christians professing a law of love, the son-ship of all men to a common Father, a gospel of good will embracing justice and implying obligations stretching in all directions infinitely beyond justice, but never denying it in the least iota? If this profession is not arrant hypocrisy or pure self-delusion, the faith which he holds will instantly expel the very evils from which we suffer, and nothing else except such faith will expel them. Religion goes to the very roots of character, cleansing the evil nature, revealing new motives, illuminating the mind, trans-valuing values, strengthening the will, lessening the power of temptations, setting the feet on safe paths, giving a new meaning to common experiences and a new zest to life.

The question remains whether this kind of constructive religion, this vital, living and vibrant faith, is to be found today in the churches and synagogues, or whether it has departed from its ancient altars, perhaps to reappear in strange disguises in the labor movement, in art or poetry or philosophy, or among humble people who do not have the means as yet of expressing the new impulses.

It is a grave question—for the churches. One interesting indication that it is to be answered in favor of the continued claim of the existing religious bodies to represent the main current of flowing religious faith, work, and thought is to be found in a new journal which appeared on the news-stands in March with the captivating title The Constructive Quarterly. Silas McBee, former editor of the Churchman, is its editor, but it is to have no "editorial pronouncements."

What is distinctive about this new periodical is that it is to work for a better understanding among the various communions of Christendom, building on what the churches are actually believing, doing, and thinking. It is not seeking neutral territory where courtesy and diplomacy would tend to avoid issues and round off the sharp edges of truth and conviction, but rather common ground where loyalty to conviction will be secure from the tendency to mere compromise and to superficial and artificial comprehension. In the first number there is a striking array of able articles from Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Evangelical Protestants, from Europeans and Americans, clergymen and laymen. It will be difficult to maintain so high a standard; but the idea is an inspiring one and deserves to succeed.

The tragedy of ecclesiastical history in all ages is the spilling of blood and treasure by the churches in warfare against other forms of faith. It is true that the decay of religious controversy has usually meant a decay of interest in religion. A writer in the Quarterly quotes Tennyson as having said, "You must choose in religion between bigotry and flabbiness." What the present venture is in some measure to test is the possibility of laying aside hostility while yet maintaining esprit de corps, to act in the spirit of Von Moltke's dictum, "March apart, strike together!"

The success of the effort will depend on the clear perception of the enemies against which the allied forces of religion are to strike, or dropping the figure, on the concentration of effort on the positive results which the forces of organized religion are to seek to secure in the social order. These lie partly at least, avoiding dogmatic exaggeration, in those social relations in which the evil tendencies to which we have referred are so apparent. The religion which is constructive is one which makes men unwilling to exploit the vices or weaknesses of their fellow men, and at the same time makes the other men unexploitable, which destroys privilege through just laws, impartially enforced, and upheld by enlightened public opinion, which dispels ignorance by full and exact knowledge bearing fruit in sound measures of social reform, which protects the sub-normal and emancipates the handicapped from their limitations, which permeates education, business, politics, and eventually the entire social life.

There may be other tests of true religion, but these are concrete, easy to understand and to apply. They have ancient and sufficient sanction. They are unsectarian and non-controversial.