V
Our laudatory stump orators have their measure of influence on social thought, no doubt; but it is one that surely declines, and the subject may be passed with but scant mention. Likewise, the heterogeneous small fry of seigniorial retainers in the various walks of life, whose business it is, in season and out, to glorify the prevailing régime, may be noticed and dismissed in a sentence. The influence of the pulpit, however, is a subject that requires some attention. This influence, while greater than that of either of the groups just mentioned, is unquestionably less than that of either the editors or the professional lay publicists. Among practical men in the upper orders there is a widespread prejudice against pastoral interference in social and political matters, unless it be directed solely to seigniorial justification. The shoemaker should stick to his last, runs the adage; and no less it is urged that the pastor should stick to his text. He should, furthermore, discriminate and sort his texts, making careful avoidance of the ethical precepts of Jesus. For these are needlessly disturbing to the code that prevails in commerce and politics, and both politicians and magnates resent their citation. A future “popular” version of the Bible may eliminate them, and thus do away with a fertile cause of discord; but until that is done the better part of pastoral valor will continue to lie in discretion.
The sentiments of the politicians and the magnates toward the pulpit filter down to the common mass of the laity, and still further weaken pastoral influence. But weakened as it has been, it is yet felt by the magnates to be an instrument of social control which by proper use can be made to perform a needed service. A constant pressure is, therefore, brought to bear upon pastoral utterances. It is the “safe” men who are in most request to fill pulpits; and it is the “safe” men who draw to their churches the largest endowments. Under the influence of this pressure there has gradually been developed a code of pulpit ethics, outside the limits of which no prudent minister will dare range. The minister may be “long” on spirituality, but he must be “short” on social precepts. He may preach faith, hope, and charity, and also the future punishment of the unregenerate, so long as unregeneracy is depicted in general terms; but he must avoid, with the nicest delicacy, the mention of tax-dodging and stock-watering as punishable sins. He may denounce violence, and for a modern instance he may cite the occasional riotous conduct of striking workmen; but let him at his peril cite such venial backslidings from grace as the blowing up of a competitor’s refinery, the seizure of a street for track-laying, or the employment of armed mercenaries for a private purpose. Political evils may be denounced in the abstract, and the bribery of voters in the concrete. The latter is an offence usually committed by irreverent ward politicians, and may justly receive, without injury to the State and to society, the scathing anathemas of the pulpit. But he that in a moment of inadvertence miscalls by the name bribes the “gentle rewards,” the “gratuities,” as they were known in Bacon’s time, which magnates frequently bestow upon legislators and judges, had best resign his pastorate and seek some other field. Nor must any slight be thrown upon any of the conventional practices in the ordinary daily conduct of “business.” These are hallowed by custom, and are beyond criticism. Such a declaration as that of a certain minister in a recent number of the Christian Endeavor World—“What we call Napoleonic genius in business is sometimes simply whitewashed highway robbery on a gigantic scale”—verges closely upon contumacy. It is relieved slightly by the qualifying “sometimes,”—much virtue in your “sometimes,” as the immortal bard would remark,—but for all that, it is a dangerous utterance, and one apt to cause its enunciator grave trouble.
But pastoral pronouncements on social questions are permitted—nay, welcomed—if only they properly rebuke the occasional discontent and unquiet of the masses and the aggression of those foes of order, the labor unions. Such a pronouncement, for instance, is that of the Rev. Lyman Abbott, put forth in his recent philosophical disquisition, “The Rights of Man.” “Trades-unions ... are ruled over generally,” he declares, “by a directory scarcely less absolute than that which governed the revolutionists in the day of Mirabeau.” This is unexceptionably decorous, and runs no risk whatever of seigniorial censorship. The recent coal strike brought forth a large number of pastoral utterances of a like character, which must ultimately redound to the great glory of the declaimers. The good Bishop Potter, in his address before the Diocesan convention in New York City, September 24, felt called upon to rebuke envy and hatred and to deny the existence of social classes in the republic: “Wealth is unequally distributed, we are told, and the sophistries that are born of envy and hatred are hawked about the streets to influence, in a land which refuses to enthrone one class above another, the passions of the less clever or thrifty or industrious against those who are more so.” The eminent Dr. Ethelbert Talbot, Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Central Pennsylvania, according to his public letter of September 28, saw in the coal strike only a demand upon the part of the miners “that the operators shall no longer manage their own business.” “How can the question of whether a man has a right to conduct his own business,” he asks, with painfully defective forethought for what subsequently happened, “be submitted to arbitration?” The no less eminent Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, in his recent address before the Chicago Society of New York, demanded a wall of bayonets from Washington to Wilkesbarre. The Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah also called for arms instead of arbitration, and the Rev. Dr. W. R. Huntington of Grace Church echoed the good Bishop Talbot’s opinion, and “from the point of view of simple justice” could not see “that we have any reason to blame the mine-owners for refusing to allow the management of their own business to be taken out of their hands.” From Calvary, too,—or at least from the Calvary Baptist Church of New York,—came a further demand for soldiery. “These labor leaders,” declared the Rev. Dr. R. S. MacArthur, “with their large salaries, are forcing the men to be idle. They are more tyrannical than the Czar of Russia.” These are but samples of the “safe” utterances on social questions—the kind that involve no penalties, but on the contrary, reap sure harvests of glory and recompense.
Occasionally from too close and exclusive reading of the synoptic gospels, with their recital of Jesus’ specific teachings on social matters, a young and ardent minister loses his perspective, and seeing over-large the industrial and social evils of his time, seeks to remedy them. Usually, however, the mood is but transitory, and a few months, or at most a few years, witness the reaction. Renunciation of heretical doctrines follows, and ultimately the errant is restored to the fold of the “safe.” But let no one imagine that in seigniorial halls his sins are remembered against him. On the contrary, there is more joy over the recovery of one strayed sheep than over ninety and nine that remain faithful.
Sometimes, it must be conceded, there are to be found those who refuse to be forced or cajoled, and who hold their intrepid way in defiance of power. The World assails them, in the words of Matthew Arnold, with its perpetual challenge and warning:—
“‘Behold,’ she cries, ‘so many rages lulled;
So many fiery spirits quite cooled down.
Look how so many valors, long undulled,
After short commerce with me fear my frown.’”
But they fear not her frown; and they teach the social precepts of their Master regardless of material consequences. What those consequences are, the average man knows full well. They are ostracism, a reduction, sooner or later, to the poorest livings; a hemming in and constraining to the narrowest fields of effort and influence—in a word, the full sum of the forceful rebuke which it is possible for the magnate class and its retainers, in the present state of society, to deliver. In the more developed state of the future the rebuke will be yet more emphatic; for the influence of the pulpit, whatever it may be in degree, must in kind be confirmatory of the right of the magnate class to rule.
CHAPTER VIII
General Social Changes
The historic props of class rule, according to Professor Edward A. Ross, in his recent volume, “Social Control,” have been force, superstition, fraud, pomp, and prescription. Our present seigniorial class makes use, with fine discrimination as time and occasion require, of each of these means of support, though unquestionably it sets the greatest value upon the last named. Force is employed less openly, less obviously; decreasingly by the direct imposition of the magnates, increasingly through their ingenious manipulation of the powers of the State. The superstition latent in most minds proves now, as ever, a means of ready recourse; but though supernatural sanction to the acts and authority of the magnates is cunningly deduced and volubly preached from a thousand pulpits, the prop fails somewhat as a constant and sure reliance. Even testimony so authoritative as that of President Baer to the effect that the Great First Cause had intrusted to himself and his co-magnates the control of the business interests of the country, has been flouted in a number of places. The notion of supernatural sanctions, as most people know, and as Professor Goldwin Smith has repeatedly taken pains to point out, is losing its hold upon the reason of mankind; and though it still has, and will ever have, a certain potency, its best days are passed.
As for fraud, both of class against class, and individual against individual, attempts to practise it no doubt increase; but the tooth-and-claw struggle of the last generation has developed and sharpened the wits of the combatants, so that it tends to become a less profitable game. He would be a sharper indeed, according to the proverb, who among the Turks of the Negropont, the Jews of Salonika, or the Greeks of Athens could cheat his fellow: each knows by heart all the tricks and devices of which the others are capable. Matters are not yet at such a stage in free America: great frauds, both of the group and of the individual, are still practised. But the almost infinite possibilities of other days have been sadly restricted by the operation of those natural laws which tend to fit beings to their environment. Pomp, too, is less a factor of control than in past times. It has a powerful grip on the imaginations of the poor, as the columns of our “yellow” journals, which devote so large a space to the ceremonies of the great, amply attest; but though it charms the more, it deceives the less. It interests, it delights; but it does not overawe or subdue.