Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD The church can prepare men for heaven only by teaching them how to live upon the earth. The gospel of the risen Christ is also the gospel of regenerate men building the eternal life into a fraternity that must some day include all social relations. For the heart of eternal life is aggressive, privilege-sacrificing love like that of Jesus himself. To many men the faith in an abiding social peace grows hardly more than a dream and a wish. Progress, so far as social solidarity is concerned, seems leading for the moment to a cul-de-sac walled in by contradictions of its own making. Human life has passed from savagery, where that man was safest who was most alone, to the present chaos of relationships. Never was the division of labor so minute and cooperation so imperative. Never was power more synonymous with dependence. Never was a theoretical democracy more in evidence. And yet from its evolution the social universe has not yet emerged. The division of labor has not growncooperative; democracy was never more in need of guidance; social classes were never more sensitive to each other’s prerogatives; the interests of the individual are not yet always those of society; education has not yet taught our children the art of living together as men; the church has not yet brought about the kingdom of God. To offset this disintegrating force, to what shall we look? Economic cooperation, the brute forces of army or police, foreign war, and socialism have had their champions, and to a greater or less degree each has been tried in actual life. Yet, so far as we can judge, the question still awaits an answer, and it must continue to wait until a basis be found in some fundamental human relationship so independent of the accidents of…