in eternity with that inexorable
alternative:

"IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD?"

Christianity

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?

WHAT is Christianity?

The question seems a belated one.

It never was more pertinent than now. Its pertinency rests upon two
facts.

First: the modern drift in Christianity and its absolute failure.

Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive Christianity.

The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine and repudiates the
miraculous.

It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration for atonement by
sacrificial death, and positively refuses to accept the bodily
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It holds that God is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a
son of God. He has in him all the elements of the divine lineage.
Exercise and culture are alone needed to reveal these elements and
demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is not the redemption of a child
of the Devil, but recovery of a child of God from the hands of the
Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the
consciousness of this relationship; but salvation is effectively
individual only as it is primarily social. The time has passed (so
we are told) when the individual may be discussed and his social
condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and
endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains
unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend
millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential
and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district.
True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged,
the environment made healthy, the cause of malaria destroyed.

Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering because a possible
first man away back somewhere ate forbidden fruit at the insistent
appeal of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and suffering
because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill
the multitude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to
breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient
impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the
inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This
corralling and hedging of humanity _en masse_, while the few pull
away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to
themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the _raison d'etre_ for
all evil conditions. Let us have right legislati