men and women who will love the spirit and the purpose of those who brought about the institutions of this country. So I believe that in this great struggle between the two forces, after an examination of the facts, you will find that a sane public policy, which will lead to progressive improvements instead of violent upheavals, a movement that is directed to bring more hope into the lives of the millions of workers who toil, will win; and I hope that you will see as we do that the fight of labor is not only in labor's interest, but in the interest of the community as a whole; and after examining the facts, and reaching your conclusions, you will use all the power at your command to create a public sentiment, for a sane, healthy, and proper labor policy in the country.

CONFERENCE SERMON

THE RELATION OF SOCIAL SERVICE TO THE CHURCH

Rt. Rev. Charles H. Brent, Buffalo

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."-Matt. 22:37-40.

This moment of the conference is of solemn and welcome significance, because it is the public recognition that all our social effort springs from and centers in God. It is not a formal hour; it is not, so to speak, a mere nodding to God in order that we may say that we do not forget Him. It is the giving Him first place, and upon that depends the whole value of the efforts to which you and I are putting our hands.

We have been occupied with the second or social department of love. We now swing ourselves up into the first. What I may say to you is of less significance than that moment of silence in which with the honesty of faith we turned our souls to the Source of Being, and thought of our lives as being dependent upon Him. The importance of accent is so well known in other departments of life that it is rather curious we fail to give it proper attention in that which has to do with the more fundamental matters of our life and conduct. Accent makes all the difference, doesn't it, between sense and nonsense, between ugliness and beauty, between right and wrong, between religion and what I would call moral paganism, of which there is not a little in this country. God comes first, persons and things afterward. The emphasis is on the first commandment of love. Nothing can precede it, much less supersede it.

Two years ago the president of Harvard College, in discussing the aftermath of the war, said to me, "We are in for a period of materialism, but," he added, "I hope it will be short." The first part of his prophecy has come true. His hope we trust will be speedily realized. As you and I think of materialism, doubtless we say to ourselves: "Yes, it must be a very terrible ogre to lay hold of life and possess it. I am glad that at any rate I am not the victim of materialism." We picture it as something so repulsive that we would immediately recognize it and turn our backs upon it. But are you quite sure, if this has been the course of your reasoning, that you are not deceiving yourselves? Materialism is anything but an ogre. Materialism is a Delilah dressed in garments that appeal to our finer sensibilities, with a countenance

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If you tame serrje etjsaling wibont any viziona foundation, you wil get the wor of thing we have had from 1914 to 1920. When irreligions men control allura the danger di war in greatly increased, especially now that the implements of wat ate my cheap. That is why Ireland is such a fearful danger to the British Empire. The only remerly lon was in conacience, and you won't have conscience until you have vidim card my taught, and inculated." Truly Saul is among the prophets!

You have given me the honorable but extremely difficult responsibility of bringing home this fact to your conscience, in order that all our deliberations and findings may be lifted above the merely human sphere and the loneliness of crude experiment, and become as a sword bathed in heaven, capable of cutting its way through those discouragements and obstacles which always lie between promise and fulfilment, hope and realization. I don't need to be either a seer or sage and I am neither-to be able to way to you that I know that God is with you. "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, my little ones, you have done it unto Me." You are servants; you are organized to combat the forces of selfishness; indeed, we might say that this conference stands for organized unselfishness. Moreover, it isn't as though you each were giving your little independent contribution to the great cause. You are bound together and recognized, both by man and by God as a corporate body with a living soul, with a will, with a vitality so great that you yourselves have not yet tested how wonderful it is. The tie that binds us social workers is not artificial or arbitrary. Our conference is its expression rather than its cause. Our relationship is more intimate than that of friends; our annual gathering is-what I shall call it ?-a family festival, a coming together for the joy of it, the power of it, the sociability of it. It does not create a unity, which would otherwise not exist; it declares a unity that already is, and reaches after an intimacy that never ceases to develop fresh and enlarged contacts.

"Kindred groups," as they are called, like to find shelter under the family eaves, with reciprocal recognition of, shall it be, first cousinship? Nor do we fail to claim a treasured kinship with that great army of social servants who have not specialized, but whose sympathy and faith and insight make them the light of the world and the salt of the earth. We all gravitate together because of a common hope, and need,

and vision. The great beauty of such a gathering of social workers as we are is that we are inclusive, and we would scorn to be thought exclusive. It is true, isn't it— and you know it perhaps more in detail than most people—that our world of today is complicated and intricate and tangled, and the question is: How are we going to make things better? Now, we are at it in the right way. Simplification comes through coordination on the discovery of common principle and inspiration. Simplicity-real simplicity is never the result of elimination. It is the gathering together and relating to one another of all honest thoughts and words and deeds.

I am sure that the conference must have had the same effect on you that it has had on me. It has tended to deliver me from the crippling self-conceit of mere specialism. I think it was the famous Master of Babliol who once said that "most men live in a corner and see but a little way beyond their own home or place of occupation; they don't lift up their eyes to the hills; they are not awake when the dawn appears." It is in order, in part, to prevent this crippling life of isolation that the conference method has come in, and, I believe, come in to stay. The worker perforce gets new zest if he sees the whole plan of which his own product is a part. It not only helps the finger to be content to do the work of a finger, but also to be glad that it is a finger.

You know as well as I do some of the great defects of our American democracy. I am inclined to think that we are frequently in danger of giving too much importance to officialism, aye, and even to specialism—not that I am against specialism, far from it, but specialism in isolation, that so frequently tends to make specialists become not merely dogmatic, but ultra-dogmatic. The value of all specialism comes out only when it is related to the whole. I have taken a quotation from Scripture, the two great commandments, the twofold commandment of love, and it closes by Christ saying that all the law and the prophets hang on those two commandments. Without them, the specialism of the law and and prophets are of no avail. Now, the law and the prophets gain and do not lose dignity by being put into such a noble relationship; and so it is, not only in relation to social work but to every department of life, the larger our contacts, the more we can recognize just how great a bearing on the whole part has, the more likely are the workers to do their work well.

You have given me a subject—the relation of social service to the Christian church. Perhaps it was put the other way-the relation of the Christian church to social service; but if you will allow me I will restate it in the form I have just read, because, after all, all social service originated in the church. Now, the relationship is that of a child, albeit a grown-up child, to the parent, and the parent is asking for aid that the developed and educated child can give. Unfortunately, in order not to be misunderstood, I shall have to take a few moments to define what is meant by the church. It does not mean the churches. It means something infinitely more than any one church, as we use the term, or all of them put together. Ideally the church is an eternal society which looks to and leans upon God as its living head and accepts His plan of life and conduct for all its members. In the second place, the church is not a synonym for the clergy or for the single generation of Christians now on earth any more than the nation is a synonym for the present administration, or for the population of the United States at this moment. It is an ideal society that lives from age to age, gathering momentum and power as it goes on, surviving all the individuals of any given age or all the ages together. It is not co-terminous with society, but it has a standing mission to the society of every age. In one sense that mission

never changes; in another sense it changes with each new generation, as the problems vary from century to century.

The purpose of the church and the meaning of life are all summed up in the words that I have quoted in the twofold commandment of love. "Love is life, and life is love; and where there is no love there is no life." Love must be twofold. Mystical? Yes. Do not tell me you are not religious; I know the human heart, because I have one. You will never be satisfied unless or until your heart finds rest in mystical relationship with the invisible God. But there is another fellowship and another love, love toward our fellow-men, widening out in increasing circles, so that when at last that timeless time will come when there will be a multitude that no man can number, we shall not be afraid of the multitude because we know we shall find, not lose, ourselves in the multitude and the innumerable friendships which that multitude stands for.

Life is twofold fellowship, and there is no superior definition of life-fellowship with God and fellowship in God with one another. I said that the church was separate from society and yet with a mission to society. There was a time when leaders of the church thought that the true Christian, if he were going to be perfect, would have to retire from the world of men about him, and carve within his soul a perfection, with the help of God and those who were like-minded with himself. That conception of the church has passed. The church, if it is to fulfil its mission, must go out into this great world of progress and make captive for God everything that has been achieved by the mind and the hand of man. Today the special mission of the church is a social one, to give vitality and aid and illumination to those who, like yourselves, are trying to bind up the wounds of a suffering world, to bring comfort to those who are in distress, to aid in the normal development of those lives which are peculiarly blessed.

Now, the church, or rather, I shall say, the special representatives of the church in a given generation have not always been true to their mission. When Sir Thomas More wrote his Utopia people criticised it on the score that it was beyond human ability to put into effect. He met his critics in words which are pertinent in our own day: "The greatest part of Christ's precepts are more disagreeing to the lives of the men of this age than any part of my discourse has been; but the preachers seemed to have learned that craft to which you advise me, for they, observing that the world would not willingly suit their lives to the rules that Christ has given, have fitted His doctrine, as if it had been a leaden rule, to their lives, that so, some way or other, they might agree with one another." In part that is true as applied nor merely to the clergy but also to the laity of our day. We are alive to the fact, we are ashamed of it, and we are going to change it; but the clergy cannot change it without the help of the laity, because the laity are as much a part of the church as the clergy, and the responsibility is on them as well as upon us. The charge has been made that the clergy are afraid to preach the truth boldly because it may interfere with their immediate interests. That is not a just generalization. It is true that in the first group that Christ chose to represent His Kingdom, there was a traitor-one in twelve. I hope that the proportion has not changed for the worse in succeeding generations.

There is a charge against the clergy of class partisanship, especially in connection with the industrial question. But just as in those early days when there was an attempt to buy spiritual advantage, the response came, "Thy money perish with thee!" So from the lips of some of our generation of clergy who have been submitted to the

indignity of a bribe, have come the words, "Damn your money!" Again let me say, I believe there are very few men who call themselves Christians who would demean themselves in such a way as either directly or indirectly to offer a bribe. I recall one instance where it was stated that the clergy must be properly paid because if they were not they might take a position that was contrary to the established order of society, an order that it was desired to continue by those who had certain vested interests. The insult of it you at once see-if a dog is well fed he is not likely to bite. I believe that both the clergy and laity today are ready to make a bold adventure in the direction of the twofold law of love, not for the sake of their own individual salvation but for the salvation of the social whole, without which I do not care to be saved. In such an adventure the church must not go to sleep mystically or theologically because it is awakening socially. We are apt, in our enthusiasm, to lose our balance and when we get a new vision as we have today—a social vision-to think that it is the whole thing. It is not. It hangs upon the mystical and the theological. The mystical is the basis of the practical, the ideal of the real, poetry of prose.

Perhaps the most pertinent question that was asked in this conference—and I am not aware that it has been answered-was: What is the meaning of social or organic progress? The query has been on the lips of men ever since there was a human society. Just where are we going; what is the goal that we are after? The War has shattered a great deal more than the cities of Flanders and of France; it has shattered certain goals that we hitherto had in view, and which we considered sufficient.

Today large masses of people are moving without any clear sense of where they are going, and are more or less satisfied because they are moving and doing. Remember -and I say this without any fear of justifiable contradiction—that progress is not inevitable; it is not a necessity; it is a task. Progress indicates that you know what your goal is, and where that goal is. It is not sufficient to say that we are doing kind things, or that we are ministering to man in this way or that. Admirable as it is on the side of unselfishness, it is necessary that the world of serious-minded men and those who are religious at the core, should once again as in days of old, get a clear social goal before them, and then at all costs move toward that goal. We have outlived the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and all that group of luxuriant optimists, who were confident that everything must come out right in the end. Indefiniteness, so far as a goal is concerned, is a fatal thing to progress. Once again we must draw pictures of an ideal society, an ideal society not only for the nation but also for mankind.

In the ages that are past, it was deemed sufficient that a nation should have its own definite goal, and democracy was the charming and charmed word which held the attention and represented a goal to the American mind. If democracy is still to hold our attention, it must be restated in entirely new terms. It has lost in potency and attractiveness. As long ago as Plato the necessity of having the vision of an ideal society was recognized, and as a result we have today his great work "The Republic," a work that it would be well for us social workers to read about once a year. Again, in the New Testament, aye, and in the Old Testament, there was a perfectly clear goal towards which social progress was directed. The New Testament derives much of its force from the distinctness with which social completeness is held before us. I have taken the fundamental commandments of ideal society as my text. The twofold law of love covers everything necessary for the commonwealth of mankind. Given that this was lived out in the world today the world would be heaven. Not