generation will ever
remain a large part of God's work through His Church. Unless we can
raise the dead in sin to life in Christ, we have lost the quickening
Spirit of God; so long as the world lieth in wickedness, every follower
of Jesus must go with Him after men one by one, to seek and to save that
which was lost.

But a man's religious experience is vitally affected by social
conditions. Moses' protest against the slavery of the Israelites in
Egypt sprang from his feeling that it hindered their fellowship with
God. "Let My people go," he felt God saying, "_that they may serve Me_."
Mencius, the Chinese sage, wrote: "If the people have not a certain
livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a
fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of
self-abandonment. An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of
the people, so as to make sure that, above, they have sufficient
wherewith to serve their parents, and, below, sufficient wherewith to
support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always
be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the
danger of perishing. After this he may urge them, and they will proceed
to what is good." Christian workers, today, know well how all but
impossible it is to get a man to live as a Christian, until he is given
at least the chance to earn a decent living.

But we have to be on our guard lest we overemphasize the force of
circumstances either to foster or hamper a man's fellowship with God.
The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord's song may
be sung in a strange land. It is always possible to be a Christian
under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not
shirk the inevitable cross. But the social order under which men live
shapes their characters. Ibsen calls it "the moral water supply," and
religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their
ideals.

A glance over a few typical forms of social order will illustrate its
influence on character:

Perhaps the noblest society of antiquity was the Greek city state. It
expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen,
legislators, judges. It set a premium upon the virtues of courage,
self-control, justice and public spirit. It delivered its citizens from
that "greasy domesticity" which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman
of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded. But