Social Salvation Versus the Gospel
By William N. Glenn
is to hold together, and so entered upon a crusade to save society in the lump. Instead of continuing to preach the Gospel of a new life through faith in Christ Jesus he began to preach the gospel of a social law of righteousness. He came to the point where he seemed to ignore the fact that no high social law can be made operative without a life to back it up. 'From the Gospel Mr. Mills began to turn aside. He ceased to put the emphasis on the Fountain and devoted his energies to cleansing the stream. He gave himself to the fruitless task of painting the pump to purify the well. He slipped away from the necessity of the supernatural and divine, and became wholly absorbed in the human. From preaching Christianity he took to preaching morality, and as a consequence he has lapsed from the historic faith of the church of the living God.' This "gospel of a social law of righteousness," this "social salvation," this "crusade to save society in a lump," has become almost a mania in modern religious zeal. From this source come many efforts to "cleanse the stream" by virtue of civil law and other human schemes. Mr. Mills is not by any means alone in the erroneous idea of wholesale social salvation, if he has, in advance of some of his former collaborators, arrived at the point of logical consistency where he could openly declare that he had left the cross behind him. W. N. G.