ld slave systems, wrecked old
aristocracies, pushed obscure and forgotten masses of mankind up to
rough equality in court and election booth and school, and now are
rocking the foundations of old racial and international and economic
ideas? The practical applications of this ideal, as, for example, to
the coloured problem in America, are so full of difficulty that no one
need be ashamed to confess that he does not see in detail how the
principle can be made to work. Nevertheless, so deep in the essential
nature of things is the fact of mankind's fundamental unity, that only
God can foresee to what end the application of it yet may come. At any
rate, it is clear that the Christian ideal of human equality before God
can no longer be kept out of a social program.

VI

There is, then, no standing-ground left for a narrowly individualistic
Christianity. To talk of redeeming personality while one is careless
of the social environments which ruin personality; to talk of building
Christlike character while one is complacent about an economic system
that is definitely organized about the idea of selfish profit; to
praise Christian ideals while one is blind to the inevitable urgency
with which they insist on getting themselves expressed in social
programs--all this is vanity. It is deplorable, therefore, that the
Christian forces are tempted to draw apart, some running up the banner
of personal regeneration and some rallying around the flag of social
reformation. The division is utterly needless. Doubtless our own
individual ways of coming into the Christian life influence us deeply
here. Some of us came into the Christian experience from a sense of
individual need alone. We needed for ourselves sins forgiven, peace
restored, hope bestowed. God meant to us first of all satisfaction for
our deepest personal wants.

"Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee"--

such was our cry and such was our salvation. If now we are socially
minded, if we are concerned for economic and international
righteousness, that is an enlargement of our Christian outlook which
has grown out of and still is rooted back in our individual need and
experience of God.

Some of us, however, did not come into fellowship with God by that
route at all. We came in from the opposite direction. The character
in the Old Testament who seems to me the worthiest exhibition of
personal religion before Jesus is the prophet Jeremiah,