It must open its doors, as the British and Canadian Labor Parties are now doing, to include all kinds of productive work, of hand or brain. It must make room for all who contribute to the feeding, clothing, housing, educating, delighting of the children of men. It must include the inventor, the research scientist, the manager, as well as the manual worker; the men who grow things or who distribute them as well as those who make them; the professional class, who, on their part, must cease to regard themselves as other than men and women of labor. Labor must become, in short, the category to which all belong who really earn their living and do not seek to "make" more than they earn.
2. Labor must recognize the Christianness of its own principles.
I do not say Labor must become Christian. It is profoundly and vitally Christian in its insistence on the right of the humblest man or woman to human conditions of life, in its corresponding denial of the right of any human being to live on the labor of others without rendering his own equivalent of service, in its devotion to the fundamental Christian principle of brotherhood.
The Draft Report on Reconstruction, for example, prepared near the close of 1917 for the Labor party of Britain, is not only the ablest and most comprehensive programme of social reconstruction so far drawn up, but in its aims and methods and spirit it is profoundly Christian, a thousand times more Christian than the ordinary ecclesiastical pronouncement, though the name of Christ does not occur in it. The need is not so much that Labor become Christian, as that it become clearly conscious that it is Christian and can realize itself and win its triumph only on Christian lines.
It is not strange, after all, that among working men should arise the Church which is to give the truest interpretation of Christianity. The Lord Jesus was Himself a working man and brought up in a working man's home; His chief friends and chosen apostles were mostly working men. How can He be fully understood except through a working man's consciousness? The high, the served, the rich, the mere scholars, as such, are not fitted to understand Christianity. Individuals of exceptional character and insight may escape the limitations of their environment and education, but in any large community interpretation the working man's consciousness would seem to be essential. And, on any large scale, Christianity has never found such an expression as the Labor movement promises to give it--so essentially and predominately democratic and brotherly.
Labor and Christianity, then, are bound up together. Together they stand or fall. They come into their kingdom together or not at all. It is the supreme mission of the prophetic spirit at this fateful hour to interpret Labor to itself, that it may not in this hour of consummation miss the path. To turn away from Christianity now would be for Labor to turn away from the throne. But it will not. Mankind is in the grasp of divine currents too strong to be resisted.
CHAPTER II.
AN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
It will help us, perhaps, to understand still more clearly the religious revolution which is going on to-day concurrently with the social revolution if we survey the evolution of Christianity from another standpoint,--the racial. In the preceding chapter the effort has been to show that Christianity in its organization and even in its spirit has been profoundly affected by its social environment and has changed as that has changed. The most superficial study of the history of Christianity reveals, moreover, that Christianity has been, also, deeply affected by the characteristics of each race among which it has made its home.
1. Jewish Christianity.