eased bodies, no
moral leprosy. The world will be safe for each individual. Each
individual will have a saved, moral life here, a life lived in
obedience to the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the
laws of God, in obedience to God. And what danger can the hereafter,
if there be such a thing as the hereafter, hold for any one who is
so obeying the laws of God?

Get society right and the individual will become right.

That is the modern Gospel.

That is the message to a needy world:

"Get society right and the individual will become right."

I do not interject here in full testimony the nevertheless fact that
such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous
Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by
legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by
the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity
and personal spirituality enthroned in them built up societies,
assemblies of such heaven-given health that the old social
conditions were overthrown; so overthrown by the personal Gospel
Paul preached that throughout Asia Minor the people had been turned
away from the worship of their gods, in Ephesus the temple of Diana
was largely deserted and the craftsmen who made the silver, souvenir
images of the goddess complained their business was almost at an
end.

Strangely enough the advocates of this social Gospel set up the
individual life of the Son of God as the means by which society is
to be made right; but they set up, not the life He is living now as
the risen, glorified God-man; on the contrary the life He lived
before He died, the character He exhibited as a social reformer and
an exemplar in righteousness. Men, they say, are not to be saved by
the death Christ died, but by the life He then lived. He is to be
taken as the proof of the doctrine of evolution and the
possibilities in the natural man. He is the most advanced son of God
who ever lived. All other men are innately sons of God, but
undeveloped.

The fact of Christ, it is said, is a sublime encouragement to any
man. He has only to copy Him in His words and deeds to find the
divine life unfolding. Get away from the sacrificial Christ, this
modern Gospel teaches, to the social Christ, the Christ who was
interested in the poor and needy and who arraigned wrong social
conditions; take the attitude of Christ in relation to the evil of
His times and with Him as the inspiration inst