The Church and the Social Evil, 1912

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THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL EVIL.

CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY FOR A TERRIBLE MODERN SCOURGE.

BY JANE ADAMS

A GREAT English preacher has said that life holds for every man one searching test of the sincerity of his religious life, and that although this test if often absurdly trivial, to encounter it is to "fall from grace." We all know these tests: a given relative or familiar friend has an irritating power of goading us into anger or self-pity; a certain public movement inevitably hardens us into a contemptuous mood of all uncharitableness; one particular type of sinner fills us with an unholy sense of superior virtue.

If we may assume that society itself is subject to one such test, if it, too, possesses a touchstone which reveals its inmost weakness and ultimate meanness, may we not say that the one supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution, and that the sorry results of that test are registered in the hypocrisy and hardness of heart of average good citizen toward the so-called "fallen" women? May we not claim that in consequence of this irreligious attitude, prostitution remains today a hard, unresolved mass in the midst of so-called Christian civilization, until it has come to be regarded as a vice which cannot be eradicated, as a sin which cannot be forgiven, as a social disease which cannot be cured?

THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS.

This attitude on the part of the Christian is the more difficult to explain because Jesus himself was most explicit in the declaration of his own position in regard to the harlot. He did not for a moment imply that she could not be drawn into the radius of the wondrous affection that he radiated, the love of all mankind, so new in the history of the world, nor that the new solvent could not melt down— if I may use the phrase— that obstinate mass of wretchedness.

It is hard to forecast the results upon the social order if Christians from the beginning had followed their Master and had encompassed the harlot with his charity and loving-kindness; but it is certainly easy to point out the moral and religious disaster [page 2] resulting from her exclusion, fostering the "I am holier than thou" attitude which is the inmost canker of the spiritual life.

A DEPARTURE FROM JESUS' ATTITUDE

In less than three hundred years after the death of Jesus, St. Augustine asserted that the heart of a woman was the gate of hell; so quicky had the fear of contempt of the harlot spread out from her as the center of irreligion, that it had then included all womenkind. The very word "woman" in the writings of the Church Fathers stood for the basest temptations. The pagan women had been oppressed and despised, but the women of Christendom in addition were hated and feared as the chief emissaries of the devil himself; this in spite of the fact that the Virgin was worshiped and many women canonized as saints. It is significant that through this authorization, or their religious attitude toward the harlot, developed apace the two sins— contempt for a human creature, and self-righteousness— concerning which Jesus was most sever. The only time he referred to hell fire was to predict it for the man who should treat another with contempt, as Divis did; and he reserved the language of merciless castigation for the self-righteous men who had arrogated religion to themselves and dared to put others outside.

One result of this irreligious attitude toward prostitution, with its inevitable corollaries, has been the development of the so-called "worldly-minded Christians." Thousands of decent men have developed a peculiar distrust of human nature, a cynicism which assumes that a certain proportion of men in every community will so inevitably violate the laws of chastity as to make the prostitute a social necessity, and the free-masonry attitude among men in regard to her does much to lower the moral tone of the whole community.

THE ROOT OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION

The result of this worldly cynicism has become so registered in our political affairs that any probe into the vice conditions of a city made by a grand jury or a commission uniformly discovers that prostitution is the roo-source of political corruption. Nowhere is the hypocrisy regard to it so clearly revealed. Although laws declaring it illegal have been placed upon the statute books, out of respect for public opinion, which even the hardiest [page 3]