444 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: SOCIAL 



has rendered them more efficient and through them influenced indi- 

 viduals to more beneficial social service. Two of the many social 

 institutions which religion has endowed with deeper vitality may 

 demonstrate in fuller detail the thesis of the social value of religion. 



Law as exponential of custom but also as solicitous for the perma- 

 nency of social basic relations, looks upon marriage as a contract, 

 but at the same time assigns it a peculiar rank among contracts in 

 so far as the dissolving and ending of this contract-relation is removed 

 from the decision of the parties of the contract. The law alone is 

 competent to dissolve and terminate this contract. Religion pleads 

 the sac redness of this relation. It is concerned about its permanent 

 abiding character. It assumes that marriage is a union and merging 

 of souls. It lifts the family into a higher potency by attributing 

 to it the atlas function, to pillar the whole of the moral and material 

 universe of organic society. Polygamy and other more or less 

 permanent forms of sexual unions might be justified on the ground 

 of the social function of procreation. But on that of the moral 

 values of human dignity and duty, monogamy, and that under 

 strictest safeguards of the permanency of the relation, alone has 

 credentials of nobility. Laxity of family constitution endangers 

 social prosperity. By placing this central cell of social activity 

 under special restrictions and investing it with deeper sanctity, 

 religion exerts an influence on the social organism which is of far- 

 reaching consequences. 



Exploitation of fellow man is one form of anti-social selfishness. 

 Human life, which should be the dearest of all values, has often been 

 deemed the cheapest. For while tools and machineries do not re- 

 place themselves automatically, the human tool or " hand " provides 

 its own substitute. This one-sided view of the value of human 

 " hands " has found echo in many a learned dissertation concerning 

 the unalterable law of supply and demand as the regulator of prices. 

 Religion has perpetuated a device which, almost from the very day 

 of its first inception, has stood forth as a protest against such exploita- 

 tion of men, and has become the bulwark of effective defense of the 

 manhood of the \veak against the iniquitous raids of the selfish and 

 strong. The Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day of rest after six days 

 of toil, has done more to maintain the independence and strength 

 and dignity of the laboring classes than any institution known to 

 man. It is the proclamation of man's freedom, of the essential 

 worthiness of all men alike. In this country the Sabbath has 

 protected the grand army of wage-earners against degradation to 

 peonage. Without it, who will doubt it? they would have been 

 condemned to work seven days at six days' wages. The maintenance 

 of this day as a day of rest is one of the most urgent duties of Ameri- 

 can patriotism. If in factory and mill and mine men and women 



