Chapter 32

Religious Experience_, p. 315.]

Contempt for this world's goods, when generalized, promotes an attitude of indifference to the social conditions in which men live. The history of the saints is filled with references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and disease. And the "world, the flesh, and the devil" are for some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to be lost in the world. People's souls must be saved; not their bodies.

Religions, on the other hand, have frequently emphasized man's social duty. In Christianity this is largely a derivative of the highly regarded virtue of Charity. Interest in one's own well-being was a prerequisite for the devout, but interest in the welfare of others was equally enjoined. To help the poor and the needy, the widowed and the fatherless, to bring succor to the oppressed and justice to the downtrodden, have been part of the religion whose Founder taught that all men were the children of their Father in Heaven. The mendicant orders of the Middle Ages were devoted to philanthropic works; and with religious institutions, throughout their history, have been associated works of philanthropy and social welfare. Very recently urban churches in this country have been showing a tendency to reorganize with emphasis on the church as an instrument of social coöperation rather than as an aloof exponent of dogmatic theology. It is the ideal of some liberal theologians to use the churches chiefly as instruments for giving social effectiveness to the religious impulse and at the same time for making social betterment a spiritual enterprise.