"The Old Testament Why," or the purpose for which God has given it to us, is to fortify our hold upon Christian doctrine by enabling us to study the records of its progressive foreshadowing in the long ages that preceded its open revelation. And this determines how we should use and study the Old Testament.

T

And Now That the War Is Over

BY THE REV. BERNARD IDDINGS BELL.

HE war is practically won. We have been rejoicing

over that fact ever since our ecstatic Monday in November, nor do we cease to rejoice and to thank God for it even now, when we are cooler and saner than we were that day. Mingled with our joy, however, is a certain grave sense of responsibility for that which is to follow the war, a weighing of motives and methods and the determination upon such as must be in the days immediately before us: must be, that is to say, if the blood and tears so freely shed shall not prove futile; must be, if the half-mad orgies of peasant mobs are not to complete the ruin of morality, sanity, and civilization, which have been so ably begun in the dying gasps of aristocratic militarism.

Before the vast industrial problems of tomorrow every thinking man stands awed. Shall we ask millions of women, who have stepped into the jobs of men, to relinquish them and retire to the semi-dependency in which they lived before the war? Will they do it if we do ask it? How will the millions in the forces and in war industry be absorbed into the employments of peace? Can we still insure to labor ten, twelve, fifteen dollars a day in wages? If not, will labor take less, contenting itself with the old precarious tenure of employment at the old scarcely, or not at all, adequate wages? Can the wave of exultant Bolshevism be stayed? These are but a few of the

vital problems which must be solved instanter. How? No one under Heaven knows exactly. Particular solutions must come out of the actual conditions which arise. But unless we have certain fundamental principles to go on, we shall all be nigh to madness during the next five years. And unless these principles shall have in them the everlasting rightness and justice of the will of God Almighty, they will prove but broken reeds on which to lean.

America, alas, has no such principles. Internationally, thanks to our President, most of us know where we stand. Intranationally, no one knows where we stand. Neither American labor nor the American Church knows what to say in guidance. British labor, and very generally the English Church meanwhile, have united very nearly on four great after-the-war principles.

Let us be content here with merely mentioning the first three. The first maintains that every man and woman willing to labor has a right to demand of society a wage sufficient to insure for self and dependants a living up to a standard of minimum efficiency, decency, and comfort. The second demands that no social experiment tried under the compulsion of war necessity and found to work shall be abandoned now that peace is come. This applies in particular to the government ownership of public utilities and the government regulation of all business. The third declares that we must continue to tax in peace as we learned to do in war, placing the burden on those who possess in proportion to what they have, abolishing consumption taxes and their first cousins, import taxes, and relying on levies on land privileges, incomes, inheritances, and all profits above a reasonable figure.

It is, however, the fourth and last of these planks which is the most fundamental. In it is demanded the appropriation by the state of all excess wealth produced, the excess that has hitherto gone in exorbitant rentals to landlords and undue profits to investors, and the devotion of it to the public good: the payment from it for all community improvements; for the

care of the sick and the aged; for the endowment of motherhood and infancy; for the education of children, adolescents, and adults, with equality of opportunity for every child, that he may be educated up to his full capacity; for the extension of the best of recreation, theatrical, operatic, athletic, to everyone; for the making of great, beneficial, and beautifying cities; for all scientific research and scholarship; and for the encouragement of art, music, and literature. This surplus of wealth, it is proposed to gain for the state, partly by the nationalization and municipalization of some industries and partly by a steeply graduated taxation of riches privately controlled, above a certain amount considered reasonable for private possession. Really, truly, and simply what does this mean? It means that those who think along these lines-the great masses not merely of Russia, Germany and Austria, but also of England, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and to a large extent our own country,-have determined to diminish the profits and rents hitherto given to private investors and to expropriate them hereafter for the common weal. There ought to be no blindness about this. Let us not befuddle our minds. No one is demanding that the social millenium is to come without being paid for. It is proposed that it shall be paid for, paid for out of what have up to now been private profits.

Like it or not, apparently that is the overwhelming demand of the world today. There is no longer any real dispute on between collectivists and those who advocate the old régime of private investment. That quarrel is of the past. The only vital quarrel is between those who, in England and the allied countries generally, would socialize profits gradually and sanely and those who, particularly in Russia and Germany, would socialize them forthwith and insanely. America's choice, the Church's choice, your choice and my choice is limited to the latter pair of alternatives. The sooner we see this clearly, the less shall we be dazed in the months that are coming. Oldfashioned Capitalism has been drowned in tears and blood.

What we are concerned in now is merely the determination of what sort and manner of socialization of industry and land we shall have, rational or mad.

It is the surplus which is demanded for the people. There is a surplus. Except when, in madness, the world at war wantonly destroys millions in goods daily,-only to wake to what at best proves pinched economy and at worst is literal starvation, there is under modern conditions no deficit in production. There is not too little to go round comfortably. There is more than enough. The trouble before the war was that this surplus was diverted, by luck, by inheritance, by control of steam machinery, or by privilege in land, to a relatively small proportion of the people. The few had much more than was good for them. And the many had much too little. This, says the new world, shall be no longer.

With the new thought, the Bolsheviks have gone insane, denounced ability, dethroned brains, derided God, abolished facts, and uplifted sentimental asininity. Shall the world refuse to follow them? Only if we have the courage and wisdom to seek sanely what they seek insanely, to devote ourselves into bringing in rationally the new régime.

In the sane new régime industry, ability, skill, genius, must be recognized and honored, and paid for, too, with emolument of material sort. "The laborer is worthy of his hire." But those who merely possess, even while they serve not, from these we shall take away reward. A few years ago Mr. Frank Walsh headed a Congressional commission to study American industrial difficulties. Its report was published less than one quadrennium ago. Now, until lately, Mr. Walsh presided with Mr. Taft over American business and labor. Then he was called very nasty names. That report showed plainly that it is not the laboring people who control industry, not the hand laborers nor the head laborers, not even the managing and directing people, but very often indeed owners who have never even seen their plants, who know nothing of the technical processes or the business management of their properties, and to whom the

thousands who work for them are mere cogs in a machine they are glad to pay no attention to, so long as they draw their dividends. They have had, and the world has given to them. But what they have had has not been necessarily brains, ability, talents,-it has been just money. The world of labor says, "This must be no longer. We shall pay any man who has ability which the world needs, and pay him well; but we shall pay no one else. Whereas hitherto profits have gone to the wealth-owners, hereafter we shall give them to wealthproducers." That is, in simple, the fundamental demand of the new age.

What shall Christians and the Christian Church say of it all? Shall they sit as stupids and say nothing, inarticulate while the world's greatest and fastest economic transformation goes on all about us? Shall they, perhaps, say, "Naughty, naughty," to a world serenely intent upon doing its will? If so, where in the word of God shall they find justification for maintaining that the old system of things was divinely ordained and of the things unchanging and eternal?

Neither of these things should churchmen do. We ought to rejoice that the newer order is coming, and endeavor that it may come the sane way and not the mad way. How we should long for the day when men shall have in proportion to service rendered and not in proportion to capital controlled! How we should pray for that new day, when senseless luxury and blatant, overdone, anti-artistic ostentation shall be rendered no longer possible for those who have steeped their souls in their noxious perfume; when the wealth which hitherto has gone to making them possible shall be devoted to transforming our unprecedentedly hideous civilization into a thing of beauty for all men; when great estates bought at the cost of slums shall be no more; when it shall be possible for old men to dream in peace and for young men to see that which makes for visions and when every man shall find it not beyond him, if he labors honestly, to dwell content beneath his own vine and fig-tree.

"Absurd," sneers the cynic. Even now there are those who