IN a recent issue of the Mansfield College Magazine, Mr. Percy Alden, the warden of the Mansfield College settlement, said:—
"But before long the great majority of the religious teachers of England will have to face the question, 'What is my relation to the labor movement and the organized workers of the country, and how far am I justified in insisting only on spiritual truths and neglecting the hard facts of social environment?' The religious man who thinks can not escape the social problem. It follows one as closely as the Black Care of the Roman poet. It is seated close behind us, it never quits us, and it never will quit us until Christianity is not only preached but applied, until we have learned the lesson that man is his brother's keeper, not merely from the spiritual but also from the economic point of view. The duty of the church, it seems to me, is very positive; it has not come to destroy, but to fulfil; its policy is a constructive one; it must have a clearly understood and defined moral tone for politics, for industry, for poverty, and for all the social inequalities and miseries of the age."
The thing that the church people of to-day need to do is to study Jesus of Nazareth closely. For it is said of Him that "the common people heard Him gladly." It is the "common people" that the church talks so much about trying to reach. They gravely say, "What shall we do with the labor problem and the other social problems that are confronting the world to-day?" But when Jesus was here the people thronged to hear Him, for He came to them as the Son of man as well as the Son of God.
What all of the ministers in all of our churches need is to learn more of what the Bible means when it speaks of Christ as the "Son of man." He was a man among men. He wore common clothes like common people. He went to the homes of the common people. He took their little children in His arms, and there was something so sympathetic in His nature that their little hearts could drink in from Him more than a father's or mother's love.
O, what we need is the Christ life, the Christ love for humanity! and then we will see that anything that relates to humanity is a question with which we have to do. We will not wait for the church to be driven into taking a hand in this or that problem, but as individual Christians we will be ready at all times for every good work.
There are men and women to-day who are hungering for great, warm-hearted Christian sympathy just as much as there were in the time of Christ's earthly ministry. What we need is to come into a living vital connection with the Master so that we can love as He loved, and feel as He felt, and sympathize as He sympathized, and then we will be ready to do a work for the masses. Then we will be able to show the people the meaning of all these labor troubles, and capital troubles, and every other social ill, and at the same time point them the way out.
O, that every one that has named the name of Christ might be baptized into His spirit of devotion to distressed and suffering humanity! T.