It is neither economy of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach, to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pass into an environment worse than the one in which they are endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise thing—go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the legislatures, get bills passed, laws made that will drive out the false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves drunk, steep themselves in drugs, smoke themselves yellow with tobacco, yield to the fascination of gambling in any form. Let society be cleaned from these evils and the result will be certain. A generation that shall never see a saloon, a bottle of wine or whiskey; a generation that will never know the meaning of rum and tobacco and will never see a house of ill fame will be a generation that must grow up in righteousness and truth. There will be no more drunken brawls, no multiplied lawlessness, no diseased bodies, no moral leprosy. The world will be safe for each individual. Each individual will have a saved, moral life here, a life lived in obedience to the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of God, in obedience to God. And what danger can the hereafter, if there be such a thing as the hereafter, hold for any one who is so obeying the laws of God?
Get society right and the individual will become right.
That is the modern Gospel.
That is the message to a needy world:
“Get society right and the individual will become right.”
I do not interject here in full testimony the nevertheless fact that such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity and personal spirituality enthroned in them built up societies, assemblies of such heaven-given health that the old social conditions were overthrown; so overthrown by the personal Gospel Paul preached that throughout Asia Minor the people had been turned away from the worship of their gods, in Ephesus the temple of Diana was largely deserted and the craftsmen who made the silver, souvenir images of the goddess complained their business was almost at an end.
Strangely enough the advocates of this social Gospel set up the individual life of the Son of God as the means by which society is to be made right; but they set up, not the life He is living now as the risen, glorified God-man; on the contrary the life He lived before He died, the character He exhibited as a social reformer and an exemplar in righteousness. Men, they say, are not to be saved by the death Christ died, but by the life He then lived. He is to be taken as the proof of the doctrine of evolution and the possibilities in the natural man. He is the most advanced son of God who ever lived. All other men are innately sons of God, but undeveloped.
The fact of Christ, it is said, is a sublime encouragement to any man. He has only to copy Him in His words and deeds to find the divine life unfolding. Get away from the sacrificial Christ, this modern Gospel teaches, to the social Christ, the Christ who was interested in the poor and needy and who arraigned wrong social conditions; take the attitude of Christ in relation to the evil of His times and with Him as the inspiration institute right legislation and right social conditions and the world will soon approach the condition of heaven on earth.
This is the infidellic drive of Protestantism today.
Protestantism has come down from the plane of the supernatural to the plane of the natural.