Here is where, probably, Protestantism most sharply differs from Primitive Christianity and from the Christianity which was in the mind of Jesus.
Protestantism is a fighting faith. It trains men to be self-reliant and hard. Fair play is its substitute for brotherliness, and it often finds it difficult to get as high as that.
The divine note of love is faint. Protestantism has never caught the passion for brotherhood. So it is not strange that, where the reviving spirit of brotherhood, which is the divinest movement in modern life, is strongest, there is the least drawing to Protestantism.
It is in the proletariat to-day that the sense of brotherhood is keenest. It is the proletariat which is the increasing despair of the Protestant Churches. Perhaps it is not too bold a generalization that, on this Continent at least,--it does not seem so widely true in England--the working man who is most interested in the Church is least interested in labor organizations. He is the ambitious, individualistic workingman who is bent on emerging from his class. He is least class-conscious. He hopes to become affiliated with the master class.
The workingman who is most class-conscious, whose heart is set on the betterment of his class, is usually very slightly affiliated with the Church, if at all, and that affiliation is due, generally, to the appeal the Church and Sunday School make to his wife and children. Very frequently his attitude to the Church is one, not of indifference, but of resentment and distrust. He feels, though perhaps subconsciously, that the prevailing temper of the Church is one of self-advancement. The leading men in the Church are mostly those who have been most successful in strenuous self-advancement. Any man whose heart has been stirred with the passion for the common good is liable to be disappointed in seeking in the Church for the encouragement and sympathy that he craves.
Neither the Protestant nor the Roman Catholic Churches can claim to have inspired the Labor movement. At best it can only be said that, when the movement had struggled through the early days of conflict and persecution, the Churches reached out hesitatingly and half-heartedly a hand of fellowship in a spirit, partly of genuine desire to make amends for past dereliction, partly of condescension, and partly of fear.
But during the severity of Labor's early struggle, Protestantism, except in isolated and unofficial representatives, gave no assistance, not even its blessing, to what was the most profoundly Christian movement of the nineteenth century.
When it did not frankly sympathize with the masters in their difficulties with their unreasonable and discontented employees, it maintained a cautious neutrality. The first step to right relations between the Churches and Labor would be a frank confession that they failed to give Labor their help when Labor deserved and needed it most.
But perhaps this sympathetic attitude to Labor was too much to expect of a form of Christianity which had such an origin and such associations as Protestantism. Like the form of Christianity which it largely displaced in the freedom-loving northern races of Europe and America, it has rendered great services. Like that again, it was, perhaps, the only sort of Christianity possible under the conditions under which it took its form. It has helped to train an energetic, daring, self-reliant, and relatively honorable people. It has been the Christianity of a bourgeois epoch, and with the passing of that epoch it, too, will pass away or undergo a profound metamorphosis. It is a very different sort of Christianity that will meet the religious needs of the new epoch that the world is entering.
- The Labor phase, A.D. 1914--