theologically dark, darker, darkest, and morally bad, worse, and worst, while the Church in Rome declined in quality, Christianity on the whole gained in quantity, gained in charity and political liberty in its widened field, which now covered the whole of Europe, whose pagan and barbaric cruelties and despotisms it was undermining by the Christian idea of individuality.

§ 19. Christian charities and humanities displaced slowly the pagan cruelties of classic Greece and Rome Medieval and the heathen barbarities of the Northern Social Progress. tribes. The kingdom of heaven, which is like leaven, leavened laws as well as hearts from the time of Constantine and Justinian onward, as Charles Loring Brace has shown in that greatest of recent books of evidence, Gesta Christi or Humane Progress, which proves, by numerous citations from European laws, that the humane transformation of Europe is a miracle of Christ, one of the "greater things" that the world was not able to bear while Christ was upon earth.

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The much-lauded Roman "justice" was justice for Romans only, so long as Rome was pagan. The words of Terence, "I am a man; nothing pertaining to man is foreign to me,' "" often quoted to prove that the idea of "humanity" was not introduced by Christianity, occurs in a play in which the very actor who utters this apothegm, being about to depart on a long journey, urges his wife to destroy their infant, soon to be born, if it should prove to be a girl, rather than expose it alive in the foundling square, which last the mother does, nevertheless, and the daughter is taken by a procurer, as usual, and brought up to an evil life, on which fact the plot of the play turns." Other pretty sayings of pagan writers would likewise lose their luster if read, as they should be, in the light of their context."

The Christian idea of human individuality expanded the idea of justice to include the foreigner and the child,

and originated not only spirituality but also purity, charity, humanity, brotherhood, and liberty-all unknown words, in their present sense, in pagan lands."

As a train progresses when in a dark tunnel as well as when crossing sunlit fields, so the world progressed humanely even in the Dark Ages.

§ 20. It progressed also in the development of political individuality, because Christianity made every man the King's brother and so a sharer in the "divine right to rule." Despotism having been divided among petty kings by the fall of the Roman empire, was at last in a shape to be further divided with the nobles; then with the cities, when their soldiers and money were wanted by King or nobles in their wars with each other; then with the Church, when its influence was called for on the one side or the other. The "divine right" to rule having been thus quartered, the people would be able, later, to kill it by establishing parliaments and republics."

§ 21. Individualism, which had been developing in political and humane lines even in the Dark Ages, resumed its intellectual development in the Renaissance, and its religious development in the Reformation centuries, the fifteenth and sixteenth.

God had held back our virgin continent until the great reformer was born, that here Christianity might have a new field to develop a more spiritual and The Reformamore ethical type than would be possible tion.

in nations habituated to the idea of state churches. For a while it seemed as if Roman Catholics would dominate the New World. A map of the American continent in the first half of the eighteenth century, if the Roman Catholic colonies be shaded black and Protestant colonies white, will show only a narrow strip of white along our coast from Maine to Georgia, surrounded in black by Canada, Florida, Louisiana, Mexico, Central and South America. But Protestantism became dominant through

its stronger ethical individuality, for the providential continuance of the Christian evolution of individualism into liberty, equality, fraternity.

The Christian truth that every man is the King's brother, under the Fatherhood of God, led the people of Europe and America alike gradually to claim a part or all of the "divine right" to rule. And when the common people had been recognized as individuals by enfranchisement they passed the recognition down to the slaves by emancipation.

The sacred individuality of each human soul is, indeed, the spinal cord in the history of civilization."

§ 22. In the humane and political results of the leavening of Europe by Christian ideas and ideals, as Charles Loring Brace tells us in the profound title of the book we have referred to, Gesta Christi, Christ "sees of the travail of his soul." Liberty, equality, fraternity, however caricatured by infidelity, are children of Christ. Political equality having been realized in some lands, his travail is now for industrial equality, not of wealth, but of opportunity, and for social ethics in other forms.

§ 23. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was not social, affectional, ethical, but individual, intellectual, doctrinal. 37 Drunkenness, as Dean Ramsay shows, dwelt harmoniously with devotion. Gambling to the glory of God was common in church lotteries. Slavery and sanctification were preached from the same pulpits. Purity was not essential to piety in Protestant princes, whatever was the case with preachers. Religion married politics instead of ethics, whose development was to come later as a century plant from Reformation seed.” The primary work of the Reformation was to correct intellectual and doctrinal errors. Intellectual errors need first correction. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." *

*"Heart" in that passage, as in all the Bible, means intellect chiefly, rather than affections wholly.

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But the time has come to nail the claims of the ninetyfive and more current moral reforms " to the church doors as the signal for a new reformation in social ethics.

eenth Century.

24. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have brought in a new social era, which really does not begin until the middle of the eighteenth century, New Industriand but feebly even then. The first words alism of Eightof the new time were Methodism and machinery—not a mere alliteration, for spiritual and industrial quickening have often been cause and effect." In 1776 there appeared three distinct streaks of dawn, one of them not unmixed with shadows: (1) the completion of James Watt's invention of the steam engine, which was to revolutionize production; (2) Adam Smith's declaration of industry's independence of State control, which was to revolutionize distribution ; and (3) America's declaration of political independence, which was to revolutionize the relation of people to law, and so at last their relation to both production and distribution. About these were other streaks of dawn. In 1773 John Howard began his prison reform movement. In 1775 Benjamin Franklin founded the first American anti-slavery society. In 1780 Robert Raikes inaugurated the Sabbath-school movement. In 1785 Dr. Benjamin Rush began the modern temperance movement. And in 1793 Carey sailed for India on the first modern missionary ship.

But when the eighteenth century closed these movements were all faint and feeble. The twilight continued for one-third of the nineteenth century, Nineteenth including the year 1831. That first third Century.

of the century was a time of awakening. It was everywhere felt that dawn was near. But there was as yet no permanent popular government in Europe. In 1807 Napoleon had crushed the few republics of the Old World and conquered all Europe save sea-girt Britain

Great Britain's Magna Charta had been secured long before by nobles for nobles only. The people were still politically powerless. Two-thirds of the so-called House of Commons were appointed by the Lords from their "pocket boroughs," so that Parliament was really a House of Lords and a House of lackeys." The legislation was by capitalists, for capitalists. They put prices up and wages down and suppressed opposition by means of the courts. There was little popular education, for the rich rulers thought education would beget aspiration and so make the poor less submissive to their hard lot, with its hard bread and hard beds. Employers resisted all efforts to compel sanitation and the use of safety appliances in mills, and shorter hours for women and children. Royal courts still gave impurity such respectability in Christian lands as its place in the temples has always given it in heathen lands." I have described the condition of Great Britain, but the moral and social status was even worse on the Continent in that first third of this century.

§ 25. In 1832 the new era dawned. Christ came to the world for thirty-four years of greater words and works than men could "bear" when he was upon earth. That was the year of the Reform Bill in Great Britain, the people's Magna Charta, by which the House of Commons first became in reality what it was in name. Between that date and 1867, when British suffrage was broadened, popular government was established in some form throughout Christendom, except in Russia. In that middle third of our century emancipation also swept the Christian world free of slavery, save in Brazil, which reached emancipation soon after. It was also the period when American churches reached agreement on total abstinence and prohibition, under which last fifteen States were enrolled during that period. In that same period Christian union movements began with the inauguration