animals. Vegetables have mineral elements, and animals have vegetable elements, but both are classified by their highest faculties. So man should be classified, not by his lower, animal qualities, but by his higher, spiritual powers. Science, as voiced in recent presidential addresses of the British Association, finds God in the universe, and must therefore add to its classification a spiritual kingdom, to which man also as the son of God belongs by right of his highest faculties. This spiritual kingdom includes all and only those who can know as well as obey the divine law. The fellowship of those who not instinctively but voluntarily adopt this law of our Savior-Lord is the essence of the Church, the standpoint from which we view social problems in this lecture.

§ 5. In order to solve social problems, which call for social action, the Church needs to be reminded that the Saviorship Kingship of Christ as the salvation of and Kingship. Society and the Saviorship of Christ in its relation to the individual, are equally and often together proclaimed in the Bible.

That first gospel, the promise that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head, and it should bruise his heel, pictures the promised Christ as a bruised Conqueror, a Savior-King. The later prophecies painted the Coming One sometimes as a sufferer, sometimes as a sovereign, which led some of the Jews that were unable to conceive of a king as a voluntary sufferer to expect two Messiahs. At the birth of Christ two cries rang out together: "Unto you is born a Savior." "Where is he that is born King?" On the Mount of Coronation Jesus 'spake of his decease." When we recall the cross at the Lord's Supper that very name should prompt us to look above his wounded feet and hands and side and brow, to the words above his head, "This is the King"; to which also points the word sacrament, whose original meaning is a soldier's oath of loyalty to his king. These double

pictures of the Savior-King culminate in Revelation in the throne on which was a Lamb "as it had been slain." "The gospel of our salvation" is also "the gospel of the kingdom," the good news including not only pardon through Jesus the Savior, but also protection and direction through Christ the King.

At the portals of that same book of Revelation, which is preeminently the book of Christ's Kingship, stands the most impressive sign of his present earthly authority, "the Lord's Day," the profound significance of which in this connection I have never seen developed. One day in every week an invisible Lord commands us to halt in the most absorbing pursuits of our earthly life: in the pursuit of money and business; in the pursuit of pleasure; in the pursuit of politics and fame; in the pursuit of education; and we halt as a sign that we believe in that invisible Lord and are loyal to his law. There is no other sign of our faith and loyalty so impressive to a selfish world as this twenty-four-hour halt in our work every week at Christ's command. The Lord's Day is therefore the "sign," the ensign of our Lord Jesus Christ; its field of blue spangled with stars and sun; its stripes the black and white of night and day, and the many colors of sunrise and sunset; and this flag of Christ is carried round the world every week and is saluted by some in every land by the laying aside of tools and toil, in token of their loyalty to a living Lord. Breaking the Sabbath, therefore, is tearing the flag of the Government of the universe, and so an offense kindred to treason. We have forgotten all the murderers of the Revolution, but not Benedict Arnold, because an offense against a good government the calm verdict of history adjudges to be a greater wrong than any that can be done to individuals. Desecrating the Lord's Day, in addition to any wrong to workers or to society that it involves, is high treason to the Lord Himself."

§ 6. The Kingship of Christ rather than the Saviorship of Christ, is the Bible's ultimate theme. Saviorship has chiefly Bible's Ulti to do with the abnormal and temporary mate Theme. period of sin. Kingship is Christ's eternal and normal relation to the universe. It is only as Mediatorial King that Christ's Kingship ever ends. "He shall reign forever and ever."

lected.

§ 7. But so far is the Kingship of Christ from being equal to the Saviorship of Christ in the current thought Kingship Neg of the Church, that in Schaff's Propedeutic, the standard catalogue of modern theological books, of which whole pages are required to give the mere titles of books of Christ as the atoning Savior, but one book is catalogued on the Kingship of Christ, and that a foreign sectarian argument for state support of the Church.

The Kingship of Christ has been thus neglected in our day, partly because it has been involved in five sectarian conflicts, which have made it in the past to many more suggestive of debate than of devotion; partly because this is a sentimental age, more inclined to love than law; partly because this is a democratic age, prejudiced against the very name of kings; but partly alsoand this is the profoundest reason-because, in the divine order of development, the salvation of individuals through the Saviorship of Christ precedes the salvation of society through the Kingship of Christ. It was necessary that Christ should first gather a great host of regenerated individuals, through whom the regeneration of society is now to be achieved.'

§ 8. The ideals of unselfish social reform were born of Christ, and can be fully realized therefore only through the leadership of those who have received his unselfish spirit. 10

9. Those who say society can be regenerated by the regeneration of individuals are equally in error with those

Revivals.

who assume that it can be regenerated without that. Conversion to be a cure-all must convert all, which the parables of the wheat and tares and of the net forbid us to expect. Nor does individual conversion give method of social regeneration, but only motive. A revival, in saving individuals, does not save society from social evils unless the churches, by wise social action, use their reenforcements unitedly against such evils." But the conversion of individuals has ever been the necessary preparation for such social action. Individual salvation was, therefore, the first work of Christianity.

§ 10. Before Christ brought individuality to light, not only in pagan lands but also in Palestine the unit was the family, of which the husband and father was Old Testament. both brains and conscience, in his own

unquestioned estimation. His control of his wife and child and servants was almost as complete as his control of his cattle. The old prophets spoke, not to individualssave in the case of kings, when they were really speaking to the government-but to families, tribes, cities, nations.

Ministers should not forget that they are successors, not of priests but of prophets, who were statesmen as well as preachers.* The pastors of premiers and presi

* Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst says of the sermon which inaugurated municipal reform in New York City, in his book Our Fight with Tammany: "I uttered only thirty minutes of indictment against the blood-sucking scoundrels that are draining the veins of our body municipal, and they were all set wiggling like a lot of muck-worms in a hot shovel. I am not such a fool as to suppose that it was the man that said it that did the work; nor that it was what was said that did the work, for it had been said a hundred times before with more thoroughness and detail. It was the pulpit that did the work. Journalistic roasting these vagabonds will enjoy and grow cool over. But when it is clear that the man who speaks it is speaking it, not for the purpose of putting money into his pocket or power into his party, but is speaking it because it is true, and, in speaking it, appreciates its oracular authority as one com

dents, of law-makers and law-enforcers, should imitate Nathan and Elijah in the faithfulness of their private and personal admonitions, 12 A pastor who has a large number of such persons in his audience-in a capital city, for instance-may properly preach with a degree of frequency on what are called public questions, which should also be discussed by preachers in the press and on the platform and in Christian conferences and conventions; but in the average congregation the pulpit cannot wisely be used for such themes oftener than once a month, except in the season of important elections, when the moral principles involved should be discussed repeatedly in a large, judicial way.

13

The attitude of the Christian leader in discussing open social questions, such as the labor problem and the woman question, -the attitude we shall take in these lectures in such cases,-should be not that of an advocate but that of a judge, impartially submitting to the jury of the people, for their calm verdict, attested facts and unquestionable principles, stripped of all popular sophistries and class exaggerations." The judge's personal views are in such case unimportant if not inappropriate. Time and space are better used in helping the jury to form their own opinions by giving them the facts and laws.

Christ did not cancel the prophets' social duties in showing his new order of prophets their duties to individual souls. Indeed the New Testament is hardly less sociological than the Old. The student of social problems should read the Bible sociologically, first of all." This will make it seem like a new book, as it has been read theologically, to so large a degree, in the past. There is more material for Biblical sociology than for

missioned of God to speak it, there is a suggestion of the judgment day about it, there is a presentiment of the invisible God back of it, that knots the stringy conscience of these fellows into contortions of terror."