THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 263 



zation and mechanism comes to its close and religion asks for a 

 larger work to do. 



It is interesting to observe that religion has already taken its first 

 steps of expansion, and has annexed to its territory some outlying 

 provinces of the modern world. It has recognized, for example, the 

 religious significance of the family, and has ventured out into that 

 first circle of social duty. It has proposed better laws, better comity 

 between churches, more scrupulous administration, closer scrutiny 

 of the teaching of Jesus. Yet in this consciousness of social peril 

 there still exists the provincial impression that religion is proceeding 

 beyond its own proper sphere, as into foreign territory which may be 

 adjacent, but is not its own. Shall, then, the home be regarded as 

 a product of law and custom, to be safeguarded and shattered by 

 legislatures and courts; or is it a part of the field of religion, his- 

 torically created by moral sacrifices and restraints, maintained by 

 the ideals of faith and love, and in the hands of religion to secure or 

 corrupt? The relation of religion to the home is not that of one 

 institution patronizing another institution or crossing the boundary 

 into a foreign land. On the contrary, the home is a religious institu- 

 tion, and behind all legislative questions which concern the home 

 lies the religious problem of creating in the home a type of the Christian 

 religion. The stability of modern marriage is not to be accom- 

 plished by mechanical devices of law, but by a return from ostenta- 

 tion to simplicity, from laxity to loyalty, from the thought of the 

 home as a commercial venture to the thought of the home as a 

 moral opportunity. The problem of religion in the twentieth century 

 is to annex the province of the family, and the order of procedure 

 in this expansion of religion is to be, not, first the adjustment of 

 ritual and regulations to be applied to the family, but first the restora- 

 tion of domestic integrity within the family as an essential part of 

 a healthy, religious life. 



A second circle of social activity has already felt the expansion of 

 religion. It is the circle of philanthropy, the sense of responsibility 

 for the weaker members of the social body, the supplementing of the 

 survival of the fit by the revival of the unfit. In all the centuries of 

 Christian history the instinct of compassion has accompanied the 

 life of faith. " If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, 

 how can he love God whom he hath not seen? " Yet how provincial 

 has been the mind of the Christian Church as it has considered this 

 expansion of its mission! It is as though philanthropy were, after 

 all, an accessory enterprise, which might be becoming for Christians 

 to undertake, but which lay beyond the distinctive sphere and es- 

 sential task of the Church. I stood one day in a Women's Settlement 

 House, the most unimpeachable form of self-effacing service which 

 modern philanthropy has devised, and a minister of the Christian 



