Five
minutes' reading of the Sermon on the Mount will convince any alert
mind that we are yet thousands of miles from a Christian civilization.
To speak of only one thing, it is certain that in a Christian
civilization these cruel riches we see standing side by side with these
cruel poverties could not exist; they would all crumble and vanish away
in the fire of the social passion of the Christ.
If we have not a Christian civilization, what have we? We have a
civilization that is half barbaric; we have a social order with a light
sprinkling of Christians in it. It is the hope of the future that this
body of earnest Christian men and women will awaken to the call of the
social Christ, awake determined to infuse his spirit into the
industrial order, and thus extend the power of the cross down into the
material ground of our existence. Men are not fully saved until tools
are saved, till industries are saved. They must all be lit with the
brother spirit of Christ the Artisan.
All of this transformation is implied in the Sermon on the Mount. For
that sermon may be taken to be the first draft of the constitution of
the new social order that the Christ has in his heart for men. It was
this new order that he had in mind when he uttered the great
invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest." All the work-worn toilers of the world were to
find rest in the new brotherly order about to be established on the
earth.
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