hich we deal. It can be
brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with
angels. Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal,
believed that men and women could be changed into anything--into trees,
rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites. One of the most
prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these
stories are a poetic portraiture of something which eternally is true.
Men can be transformed. That is a basic fact, and it is one of the
central emphases of the Christian Gospel. Of all days in which that
emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are
thinking about social reformation.

III

It is only a clear recognition of the crucial importance of man's
inward transformation which can prepare us for a proper appreciation of
the social movement's meaning. For one point of contact between
religion's approach to the human problem from within out and
reformation's approach from without in lies here: to change social
environments which oppress and dwarf and defile the lives of men is one
way of giving the transforming Spirit a fair chance to reach and redeem
them. All too slowly does the truth lay hold upon the Church that our
very personalities themselves are social products, that we are born out
of society and live in it and are molded by it, that without society we
should not be human at all, and that the influences which play upon our
lives, whether redeeming or degrading, are socially mediated. A man
who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human personalities
and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no
desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family
relationships, better health, better economic resources, better
recreations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus
who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else
an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the
souls of men as he says he does.

An illuminating illustration of this fact is to be seen in the
expanding ideals of missionary work. When the missionaries first went
to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one. They went
out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic
motive. They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits
out of the wreck of a perishing world; they were not thinking primarily
of building a kin