SOCIAL RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE 463 



love of self. Men have sacrificed everything dear in this life in the 

 hope of gaining the divine favor and the life to come. But this is 

 not seZ/-sacrifice; it is sacrificing present good for future good, and 

 for the sake of self. This is investment, not sacrifice; it is commer- 

 cialism, not Christianity. " Other-worldliness " is no more unselfish 

 than this-worldliness ; it is only longer headed. Self-suffering 

 which I inflict to please my God is no more Christian than the self- 

 suffering inflicted by a Hindu to please his God, and reduces the 

 two gods to the same moral level. 



Again, love to God which is not love to man seeks to lose the 

 consciousness of earthly things in the contemplation and the enjoy- 

 ment of God, sometimes rising into ecstasy. But such pious rapture 

 is not Christian love, because it is selfish. It is good-feeling, not 

 good-willing. The only genuine love to God is that which longs and 

 labors that all men may know the blessedness of sharing it. 



Thus the social interpretation of the three fundamental laws of 

 Jesus substitutes the service of humanity for the hollow and puerile 

 forms of ritualism; it substitutes the beauty and helpfulness of 

 genuine sacrifice for the wasted suffering of asceticism; and it 

 substitutes benevolence and beneficence for a morbid and selfish 

 mysticism. 



This is not what some would call humanitarianism substituted 

 for religion. It is love to God expressing itself in loving and sacri- 

 ficial service to man. " Lovest thou me? Feed my sheep." " In- 

 asmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me." 



Jesus' doctrine of the kingdom of God is not only destructive of 

 the old individualistic theologies, it is reconstructive. It affords 

 a new germinal principle capable of assimilating all the elements of 

 truth in the disintegrated systems of the past, and of producing 

 a vital and progressive theology. We expect all other sciences to 

 grow, but there is a widespread impression (or conviction) that a 

 system of theology is final, if true, because it is based on a closed 

 revelation; hence the reluctance of theologians to modify their 

 views, and the consequent odium theologicum. But when we 

 recognize an immanent God, organizing the world into his kingdom, 

 then all things animate and inanimate are seen, like the Scriptures, 

 to contain a revelation of him, and all natural laws are seen to be 

 God's laws; so that a discovery in natural science may as reasonably 

 call for a revision of our doctrine of God as for a revision of our 

 doctrine of matter. Thus theology, being based on a progressive 

 revelation, would itself become progressive. Instead of being like 

 a cast-iron case fastened about the trunk of the tree of knowledge, 

 and either preventing growth or being shattered by that growth, it 

 would be rather like the bark of the tree, itself partaking of the 

 growth to which it ministers. 



