O

PROBLEMS

OF

THE NEW LIFE

BY

sauc
MORRISON I. SWIFT.

ASHTABULA, OHIO.
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR.

1891.

Some portions of "The Old and The New Life" have already appeared in The Open Court, and through the courtesy of that journal I reprint the section entitled "The Sociological Function of Universities.

On pages 29 and 30 I have described the unique course of a business firm who voluntarily raised the wages of their employes. The case is stronger in their favor than I have there stated it, since it is also the practice of this firm to divide ten per cent of its profits among its employes annually.

The Social Ordeal of Christianity.

BY MORRISON I. SWIFT.

1

I.

Dr. Ernst Barth has written a book of somewhat general interest.* It is a review of the condition of society, and some hard questions about existing institutions are asked in it. The prayer, "Thy Kingdom Come," he says, is offered every Sunday in the churches and daily in the schools and at home. In this manner we have been praying for eighteen hundred years. But when is the Kingdom to come, and where are even the simplest beginnings of it? The thought must give us shame that even in Christian countries the social requirements laid upon men in this petition from Christ have received almost no attention. And there is not the excuse that the powerful of the earth have opposed the religion that offers this prayer; they have long been its protectors. Yet when we look for the fruits of our religion and consider withal the social distress, we must recognize that we have not brought it to much more than an empty, arrogant word-Christianity, and that we are not worthy to bear the name of Christ.

Are the causes ascertainable?

Consider the poor. What can be hoped of people so oppressed with want and care and labor that they have neither time, repose, nor collectedness to think of the higher problems of humanity? Indeed one who, year in and year out, in the midst of cruel distress, can only think about the scanty support of his family, and who sees his children starve and his wife pine away, will not have much time or strength to labor for the Kingdom of God. Material things engross the attention of those who are prosperous; scholars and specialists feel the pressing demands of their profession. Meanwhile human misery, bodily and moral, persists.

* Die Reform der Gesellschhaft durch Neubelebung des Gemeinde wesens in Staat, Schule und Kirche, von Dr. Ernst Barth.