RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL CONDITIONS.
In a recent article in an educational journal upon the vexed subject of Sex Hygiene the writer complains that it is always difficult to convince the youth that reality reaches upward as well as outward, <and> that young people are prone to believe that the higher planes of life contain nothing <anything> but chilly sentiments. He <further> finds that youth is so insatiably eager for experience, for what he considers manly companionship, that one lure of vice itself is its constant pretension that it represents the reality of human existence, and that the educator who would make war upon vice must make put his message assume solidity, and appear as part of that worldly wisdom which substantial men everywhere had <have> accepted.
Something of the same difficulty constantly confronts the religious educator who finds that the young people under his charge receive his moralizings and admonitions with polite attention, but that when it comes to action that they carefully imitate the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be part of the really desirable world.
The religious educator is further handicapped by the fact that much of the former <formal> curricula which he uses is left over from the days when education was carefully designed for men who had withdrawn from the world, and that of necessity it does not avail with the youth who is fretting with impatience to throw himself into the stream of life and to become a part of its fast flowing current.
This divergence between the unreality of religious education and the demands of stirring religious experiences never became more apparent than it did in England and America during the last decade of the past century. The religious educator lost hundreds [page 2] of young men and women who by training and temperament should have gone into the ministry or the missionary field, simply because his statements appeared to them as magnificent pieces of self-assertion totally unrelated to the world.
This failure to make religious teaching appear valid was due to many causes; the times were ripe for such divergence, and there are several reasons why life at this moment should have seemed more real outside of that which we call the religious world than it did within it. In the first place modern economists had taught that man was abjectly dependent upon the material world about him, and had demonstrated as never before the iron clamp which industry imposes upon life; they had moreover gravely asserted that man's very freedom, morality and progress may be overwhelmed by the material conditions which surround him.
Secondly; the situation was further complicated by the fact that at this very same time the doctrine of evolution having made clear man's intimate connection with the entire external world, was establishing itself in ethics and social philosophy. Students of the social order in the spirit of the scientist became content <merely> to collect data, and to arrange it in orderly sequence. The social field still contains hundreds of them devotedly considering the reactions of economic forces upon human life, who have for the most part disregarded all telelogical considerations, as they have long since lightly renounced the theological explanations of the a final cause.
Thirdly; during these decades hundreds of young people were drawn into the congested quarters of the modern city of sheer humanitarianism, by the impulse to at least <to> know the word <worst>. [page 3]. In their reaction against materialism they would warm their affections and renew their beliefs in those places where humanity appeared most pitiable and infirm, somewhat in the spirit of Carlyle who <impatiently> bade his contemporaries <to> worship and admire the hero if they could no longer worship and admire the saint.
It is as if various types of young people ardently desiring reality above all else had said to the religious teachers, "we wish to know truth for ourselves, we care not how logical your theological tenets may be if th unless we <they> can make them valid for ourselves.
It was therefore inevitable that these lines of development should shift the center of the difficulties in religious education to the most crowded industrial districts where materialism holds undisputed sway.
And yet it was during these same decades that the churches, as if appalled by the industrial situation, failed to hold their own in such <these very> districts. The church apparently felt no lure in the hideously uncouth factories in which men sometimes [worked] twelve hours a day for seven days in the week until they were utterly brutalized by fatigue; nor in the <insanitary> tenements so crowded that the mere decencies of life were often impossible; nor in the raw towns of newly arrived immigrants where the standard of living was pushed below that of their European poverty unmitigated either by natural beauty or social resources.
And yet it was into these very regions that the young people whom the church lost were most often attracted, and it was no unworthy lure which drew them into the thick of that industrial misery into which the church had not only failed to proceed them, but for so long a time failed to follow them. [page 4]
Did the religious educator at the present moment but enter into this industrial inferno he would find many ardent young people, possibly not his own pupils, but those <who> would gladly unite with him in asserting the reality of spiritual forces could he but share their experiences, and reach conclusions by a method they could comprehend. Among these young people he would find those who would <might> have brought enthusiasm and ability to his own profession had it but seemed to them valid and dealing with realities. His experience would indeed be similar to that of Dante when he hesitated to enter the Inferno dreading above all else his loneliness there, although when he boldly proceeded step by step he found it peopled with old friends and comrades, speaking in the beautiful language of Florence and cherishing the same great hopes as his own.
This adventurous educator would find traces of a new religious expression, although with marked scientific and humanitarian aspects as befitting its period. Even as the Humanism which grew out of the Renaissance was a reaction against grotesque [Ecclesiasticism], he would discover in the beginning of this Humanitarianism a reaction against Materialism of the k 19th Century and arising in the very midst of it.
He would find the economists groping their way in <from> the 19th Century darkness which considered the nation as <an> [agglomeration] of selfish men each moved by self-interest, forgetful of the women and children, to a conception of a state maintained to develop and nurture the highest type of human life, and testing its success by the care afforded to the <most [defenseless]> women and children within its borders. One of these economists whom we used to call [page 5] "hard headed" has actually made out a program to protect wage-earners from what he calls the five great misfortunes to which they are exposed;
1--Industrial accidents,-- 2 --Preventable Illness,-- 3 --Premature Death,-- 4 -- Unemployment,-- 5 -- Neglected Old Age.
Such a program, however, cannot be enunciated by <a> scientist who merely studies life as conditioned by economic forces, for when he ventures to suggest that these forces should be controlled, he is at once assumes the permanent dignity and value of human life, one of the [tenets] of all the great ethnic religions.
It is as if the men most exclusively devoted to the analysis of physical conditions had been driven to contemplate them from the standpoint of their ultimate purposes.
When the economist also insists that this program of social reform is to be inaugurated by legislative enactment under a democratic government, he practically asserts that the chief end of man is realizable only through an unfolding of his own being and that he must have an efficacious share in the regulation of his own life. He is forced to give attention to the aim of human existence, and whether he formulates it in the language of science, sympathy or experience, he finds himself back to an expression of the teleological aim, to an assertion of the ethical primacy of human life.
The religious educator venturing into the industrial inferno would be much startled by the discovery of the [anomaly] that the most enthusiastic believers in economic determinism are at the present moment giving us the most inspiring demonstration of [page 6] religious enthusiasm; that the socialist party is drawing to itself thousands of ardent young people simply because it holds up an ideal and demands sacrifices on its behalf. It is as if the socialists had picked up the banner inscribed with the promises of a future life, which had slipped from the hands of the ecclesiastic, as if they had changed the promise of salvation from individual to social, had substituted the word earth for heaven and had then raised the banner aloft once more. To the crowd of young people who follow them <this banner> is happening that which always happens to those who are held together in a mutual purpose; certain readjustments take place as they realize that their own future is dependent upon the consummation of their ideal, and as they demand that the whole world unite in a common effort for its realization. There are thirty millions of these socialists in the world with a definite political program in every civilized nation. The religious teacher may well long to claim this enthusiaistic host for his own, and to turn these myriad idealists into a living church.
Then there are <The religious educator as he proceeded would also find> those humbler investigators of social conditions living either singly or in groups in the thick of untoward industrial conditions. At moments they [these] find their own carefully collected data gathered into statistical tables and monographs, almost as discouraging and overwhelming in its bulk as in the dreary conditions it discloses. They are beginning to mutter darkly concerning degeneracy, and to assert that evolutionary processes are not always upward, or ethnogenic as they prefer to say. They realize that the possession of accurate information moving and stirring as it is, does not by itself arouse a social energy sufficiently enterprising to cope with the situation. Masses of men are [page 7] moved but slowly by mere knowledge and their information even when fused together by indignation and presented through our beloved popular magazines, which have so strikingly become the leaders in our moral purposes, bring about social changes very slowly.
They <Such investigators> feel that their efforts should be supplemented by the religious teachers by <through> a vigorous appeal to the public conscience and <to> the higher affections. They claim that as social development is an essentially continuing process that it <is> the business of morality to share its growth, not only to modify its harshness and brutality, but to actually direct it. We are <And they also are> thus again brought close to the religious purpose.
Then there are those groups found in all our large cities who are neither investigators [nor] students in the technical sense, but who have deliberately put themselves in vital touch, or rather in living relationship with the distressing aspects of industrial surroundings. The large colonies of immigrants each one with its own history and conscious ambition emphasizing the enormous variability of the conditions of human life, constantly drive such a group to a study of the "[normative]" in contrast to the practical sciences. For just as the social worker has come to demand a norm of housing, <or> a standard of living, so they are sorely in need of a norm of ethics. The common sense, the household tradition, the inherited customs, the [desultory] reading by which so much of life is directed, is constantly breaking down in the face of these larger problems and the social workers demands help in regard to the final end and ideals of life. The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and often so superficial that it is not to be wondered at that the old human [page 8] restraints long sustained in smaller communities by public opinion should have broken down and that large areas of city life seem to be dominated by the mere [primitive] instincts. The members of such a group who spend their days in efforts to alleviate the conditions of poverty, would not for the world use the religious phrases of comforting the sorrowful or binding up the wounds of the broken hearted, but in spite of themselves there are moments when they experience the most intimate sanctions and comforts of religion. When they see a man so beaten down by his daily toil that their pity overflows into indignation, it is largely because human life itself is outraged; the sight of an ill-nourished child, not only fills them with sorrow for the object before them, but with a desolating sense of futility and [waste] of the precious stuff the world contains. Is it not the essence <office> of [religious] communion to be lifted <lift a man from> personal experiences of pity into a sense of the universal compassion of <from> petty wrath to comprehension. A contemporary play depicts a <strolling minstrel> who refuses to surrender a stolen child to his mother although she pleads <with him> in the broken phrases of one stricken unto death. This same stroller, half man half faun, yields later to the silent reproaches of a figure of Christ stationed at the crossways, overcome as it were by the universal pity of "the lonely Man" who for so many centuries has plead with the passerby to be loving and compassionate. Who shall say that these poignant human experiences are not without religious significance and may not in the end require the expression represented by the religious forms which have survived through many generations.
Would not these beginnings of a new religious expression among the economists, the investigators, and the [page 9] humanitarians, point to a moment in which the religious teacher might avail himself of a great opportunity. Could he but make the old formulas express for them the scruples, the painful sense of difference between rich and poor which haunt these dwellers in industrial quarters day by day; could he formulate <but transmute> the comradeship of mutual suffering into a religious communion he would find them ready to walk into the old paths. After all
After all the business of religion is not only to comfort and conserve, but the prophecy and to fortify men for coming social changes. He who [illegible] in a moment of transition boldly formulates his hidden scruples, does so not only for himself but for many others and find himself surrounded by a multitude of followers. For many years Count Tolstoy formulated these newer scruples for thousands of his contemporaries, and when the familiar pain drove him forth at the very end was <and he lay> dying in the forlorn little station house, he was surrounded by the representatives of the Greek church eager to receive a word or even a gesture of assent as evidence that he had returned into the fold of orthodoxy. Why were they so eager to have him back but that the church wished to claim as its own the religious and teaching and leadership of one who had expressed the longing of a great nation; the church felt that it was its business <own function> and its <vested> prerogative to have expressed that longing for a higher type of living, and to have [prophesied] juster social conditions.
Again and Again they during its history the church has been obliged to relieve <leave> the temples and the schools in order to cast in its lot with the poor, and to minister without ceremony or ritual directly to the needs of a <the> sinner and the outcast. [page 10]
Is it not possible that such a moment has come now, that the religious teacher must go forth into the midst of modern materialism if only to effectually insist upon the eternal antithesis between the material and the spiritual, and to if only in order to prove that religious enthusiasm is all enduring, that it is <when> founded upon the realities of life.
A noted English publicist once told me that twenty-five years ago at every public meeting in the industrial quarters of London, whatever the subject of discussion, some working men always arose and in [fiery] terms agitated the disestablishment of the English Church, but that during the last decade such a speech was seldom heard owing entirely to the efforts of certain high-church clergymen who had gone to live throughout the industrial districts of London, and had there identified themselves with all the leading movements of social reform, until the working men had become convinced that the church wanted the thing that they wanted, and that they and the clergymen were working towards a common end.
Do thus <Thus to> convince thousands of young people of the validity and reality of religion, the church must go out to meet them, both willing to take their point of view, and to understand social methods. From <In> the early days at Hull-House we had a Plato Club lead by one of our ablest residents in which the discussions were often heated and prolonged. At the end of one of these a very obstinate German member seemed to have talked himself around to the position of the leader which he had started out to combat. She <The leader> said "I am very much pleased that you agree with me Mr. D." The German at once took alarm and replied "I agree with you, not at all, [page 11] not at all; I will never agree with you, you agree with me." Could the religious teacher unite in the deed with the social reformers, could the he formulate for many others a course of action which would relieve their consciences in regard to social maladjustments, he would discover that he had become part of a new fellowship, and that religious <at the same time> his teaching was attaining a new sense of reality.
No one in considering this subject could for a moment ignore the great social awakening at present going forward in the churches. The federal organization of thirty-four Protestant Denominations with its social department; the YMCA with its well directed social work in a dozen departments; the church committees to improve the conditions of labor, and the departments of sociology in all the theological seminaries, would all indicate a new emphasis which the church is placing upon social welfare. Perhaps after all the difference is not so profound. A story is told of a country clergyman who was not a great scholar, but who had had much experience with church choirs. A parishioner in all seriousness asked him one day what was the difference between the Cherubim and the Seraphim; the poor clergyman hesitated a moment, and somewhat confusedly replied that he believed that there had once been a difference, but that now all was amicably adjusted.
Could the differences between progressive churchmen and the social reformer be amicably adjusted, I venture to predict that we would <should> find ourselves surrounded by the warmth and good cheer of <united in> a new religious fellowship <and living in a sense of a religious revival.>
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