boat with the hired
servants, and went after him.--Mark 1:14-20.

Here we have the beginning of organized Christianity. This is the germinal
cell of that vast social movement of which foreign missions, the
establishment of the American Republic, and the modern labor movement are
products. It began with repentance, faith, and self-sacrificing action,
and it will always have to advance by the same means. To those four men
Jesus was an incarnate challenge. He dared them to come, and promised to
put their lives on a higher level. He stands over against us with the same
challenge. He points to the blackened fields of battle, to the economic
injustice and exploitation of industry, to the paganism and sexualism of
our life. Is this old order of things to go on forever? Will our children,
and their children, still be ground through the hopper? Or have we faith
to adventure our life in a new order, the Kingdom of God?

Study for the Week

Has our study of the "Social Principles of Jesus" revealed a clear and
consistent scheme of life, worthy of our respect?

I

We have seen that three convictions were axiomatic within Jesus, so that
all his reasoning and his moral imperatives were based on them, just as
all thought and work in physics is based on gravitation. These convictions
were the sacredness of life and personality, the solidarity of the human
family, and the obligation of the strong to stand up for all whose life is
impaired or whose place within humanity is denied.

It can not be questioned that these convictions were a tremendous and
spontaneous force in the spirit of Jesus. That alone suffices to align him
with all idealistic minds, to whom man is more than matter, more than
labor force, a mysterious participant of the spiritual powers of the
universe. It aligns him with all men of solidaristic conviction, who are
working for genuine community life in village and city, for a nation with
fraternal institutions and fraternal national consciousness, and for a
coming family of nations and races. It aligns him with all exponents of
the democratic social spirit of our day, who feel the wrongs of the common
people and are trying to make the world juster and more fraternal.

The best forces of modern life are converging along these lines. There is
no contradiction between them and the spirit of Jesus. On the contrary,
they are largely the product of his spirit, diffused and organized in the
Western world.