442 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: SOCIAL 



of the jargon of the school, the foregoing is a succinct sketch of the 

 explanations advanced by the science of society of the motive and 

 measure of social interaction and interdependence of men. While 

 statically correct, the theory is dynamically false. It weighs facts 

 as they are, but neglects forces that might be and ought to be 

 vitalized. In other words, the merely economic conception should 

 be supplemented by a mightily religious construction of man's na- 

 ture and destiny and duty. 



Religion reckons with the fundamental fact of hunger no less 

 earnestly than does economics. But it will not permit the equip- 

 ment for this struggle with hunger to determine the value or affect 

 the equality of men. To subdue nature is the part assigned in the 

 economy of the universe to the humankind. Hunger is the divinely 

 planned goad that man might not neglect his task. But while 

 struggling with nature under the lash of hunger, men are not meant 

 to struggle against one another. They are to know and feel that 

 they are brothers, destined to help one another. This is the basic 

 note in religion's construction of the nature and position of man. 

 It introduces a new element into the reasoning of the economist. 

 It makes for consecrated cooperation where, without it, chaotic 

 self-assertion, w r ith the resultant lordship of the few and the slavery 

 of the many, must appear as the inevitable issue of the battle against 

 hunger. 



The economic theories of our day are, like all modern thinkings, 

 under the spell of the natural sciences. The watchwords that echo 

 the hypotheses, by the aid of which the secrets of the heavens 

 and oceans, of eons of creative energies, were seemingly unraveled, 

 are also invoked as determinants in the domain of the humanities. 

 The survival of the fittest, the elimination of the unfit through a 

 process of natural selection, are a few of the pet dogmas by which 

 social injustices are attempting to prove their naturalness and thereby 

 stay the meddling hand of the reformer. The mechanics of a natural 

 process of selection, religion replaces by the morals of a conscious 

 effort at changing conditions and revolutionizing character. It 

 conceives of men as under a common consecration and, therefore, 

 of essential, though, of course, not externally absolute, equality. 

 Opportunity spells obligation, better equipment greater responsi- 

 bility. Possession is conceived of as while conferring power, con- 

 ferring it as a trust to be utilized for the benefit of all, never for the 

 gratification of self at the cost of others. 



Invoking impressively the essential unity, though not uniformity, 

 the functional and fundamental equality of all men, religion's 

 sociology tends to neutralize racial and national, as well as class 

 antipathies, by lifting natural differentiations into ideal potencies, 

 where the non-religious anthropology inclines to declare them 



