ften
profitable to think. Yet there is effort to mediate the best results of
social-scientific thinking, through clerical education and directly to
the laity. On the other hand, a deep sense of ethical and spiritual
responsibility is prevalent among thinkers upon social topics.

Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which is here
exemplified. Each succeeding age has read into Christ's teachings, or
drawn out from his example, the special meaning which that generation,
or that social level, or that individual man had need to draw. To them
in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if this were the only lesson
reasonable men could draw. Nothing could be more enlightening than is
reflexion upon this reading of the ever-changing ideals of man's life
into Christianity, or of Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of
man's life. This chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest
possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to
religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses.
It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change
that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world.
Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against
joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion
was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive
emphasis and its entirety, is right. Our age is haunted by the sense of
terrific social and economic inequalities which prevail. It has set its
heart upon the elimination of those inequalities. It is an age whose
disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that religion
has not done away with these inequalities. It is an age which is
immediately interested in an interpretation of religion which will make
central the contention that, before all things else, these inequalities
must be done away. If religion can be made a means of every man's
getting his share of the blessings of this world, well and good. If not,
there are many men and women to whom religion seems utterly meaningless.

This sentence hardly overstates the case. It is the challenge of the age
to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs, and which
religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not conspicuously
done, nor even on a great scale attempted. It is the challenge to
religion to undertake a work of surpassing grandeur--nothi