ieces on the rocks of the
business world.

You wish us to preach against sin, but you forget that, as one of our
leading sociologists has said, the master iniquities of our time are
connected with money-making. You wish us to imbue your boys and girls
with ideal standards of life, but all too often we see them, having
left our schools and colleges, full of the knightly chivalry of youth,
torn in the world of business between the ideal of Christlikeness and
the selfish rivalry of commercial conflict. We watch them growing
sordid, disillusioned, mercenary, spoiled at last and bereft of their
youth's fine promise. You wish us to preach human brotherhood in
Christ, and then we see that the one chief enemy of brotherhood between
men and nations is economic strife, the root of class consciousness and
war. You send some of us as your representatives to the ends of the
earth to proclaim the Saviour, and then these missionaries send back
word that the non-Christian world knows all too well how far from
dominant in our business life our Christian ideals are and that the
non-Christian world delays accepting our Christ until we have better
proved that his principles will work. Everywhere that the Christian
minister turns, he finds his dearest ideals and hopes entangled in the
economic life. Do you ask us then under these conditions to keep our
hands off? In God's name, you ask too much!

In the sixteenth century the great conflict in the world's life
centered in the Church. The Reformation was on. All the vital
questions of the day had there their spring. In the eighteenth century
the great conflict of the world's life lay in politics. The American
and French revolutions were afoot. Democracy had struck its tents and
was on the march. All the vital questions of that day had their origin
there. In the twentieth century the great conflict in the world's life
is centered in economics. The most vital questions with which we deal
are entangled with economic motives and institutions. As in the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries great changes were inevitable, so
now the economic world cannot possibly remain static. The question is
not whether changes will occur, but how they will occur, under whose
aegis and superintendence, by whose guidance and direction, and how
much better the world will be when they are here. Among all the
interests that are vitally concerned with the nature of these changes
none has more at stake