Even with my limited abilities it would not be hard to be more interesting on this subject than I shall allow myself to be. Only a small fraction of the witty and plausible things have been said about the problem that will be said before November. Something more than smart sayings will be necessary, however, before we shall have got very far toward resolving the situation. Christianizing any part of life always has been an irksome task, and it is not likely to be less so in the future. It is almost as hard to state the task in proportioned and balanced terms as it is to contribute toward its performance. Christians are due for much hard thinking before they are qualified to plan intelligently for the Christianizing of industry. My aim now is to locate some of the more important points of departure for surveying the central moral question of our time. I must try to be judicial, although I know that to succeed I must be tedious.

But this is not the worst. In nine-tenths of what I am about to say I may seem to have ignored the subject entirely, and to have

The last of a series of ten lectures delivered Sunday afternoons of the Winter Quarter, 1920, by members of the Faculty of the University of Chicago, on the general subject: "Christianity and the Modern World."

halted at the start to mark time with trite observations about preliminaries. In my own conception, however, in the first ninetenths of what I shall say I shall be trying to weld several strands of substantial commonplace into a shaft solid and weighty enough to carry the arrowhead of specially pertinent detail in the remaining tenth.

I would not inflict the dull analysis that follows, if it were not my deliberate judgment that a university man cannot say the things which I shall say at last, without danger of doing more harm than good; unless he prepares the way for them by proof that they are not mere outbursts of superficial feeling, but conclusions from laborious survey in three dimensions.

It might seem desirable to treat the subject historically. All of us would be glad to know the whole story about the influence which Christianity has had throughout its ages in promoting economic justice.

Unfortunately, nobody knows that whole story, and probably no one ever will. The records are incomplete, and such as they are they never tell the whole truth-not even about their own time and place.

For instance, the influence of Martin Luther upon the acute issues of industrial justice in his own day is still a dubious question. It is by no means certain that the great reformer of the church was not a tool of industrial repression and oppression.

For another instance a member of our own historical department has brought to light the fact that one of the most important theological seminaries in the United States, a seminary not unknown to most residents of Chicago, was founded probably in part for the glory of God, but certainly in part to defeat the abolitionists.

It is easier to picture the past as we wish it had been than as it really was. When I was first studying church history in the theological seminary a book appeared which has served as a warning to me ever since. It was by Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, at that time regarded by many as the most eminent pulpit orator in the United States. The book was entitled The Divine Origin of Christianity Indicated by Its Historical Effects. The volume was large and imposing in appearance, and the contents would

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be equally imposing upon any completely passive mind. Upon any mind that demands proof and weighs evidence the book would make the impression of an extravagantly exaggerated claim. I have not seen it for many years, but to the best of my recollection it credits Christianity with every good thing which Western civilization has accomplished. The fact is that during most of its lifetime Christianity has been maintaining a desperate struggle for mere survival within this Western civilization, yes, even within the church which professes to be the embodiment of Christianity. The unvarnished truth is that many of the achievements of Western civilization have been realized in spite of deadly opposition within the church. Any encouragement to these achievements which may have come from the modicum of Christianity that persisted within the church is often invisible, and its effects are only partially measurable. We think we can recognize the Christian spirit whenever it shows itself warring against the discordant un-Christian spirit of a given time. Social issues are usually so confused, however, that we are not always able to distinguish genuine Christianity from unscrupulous hypocrisy. All in all then, every man with fairly developed historical sense is aware that we have at best very inadequate means of measuring the relative influence of Christianity. As a matter of strict reasoning, therefore, we are in a position only to guess how much or how little of what we value in present civilization would have been here if Christianity had never come into existence at all.

It may even turn out that Bernard Shaw's fling may rise to the rank of a sober historical conclusion, namely, the strongest argument for Christianity is that it has never been tried!

But I must protest against being misunderstood. I am not belittling Christianity. I am not impeaching the quality of its influence wherever it has succeeded in making itself felt. I do not doubt that Christianity has wrought effectively for good in the life of the Western peoples. I simply warn that it is a mistaken service to Christianity to claim for it more than can be proved. Christianity has been only one among many factors that have shaped Western civilization. Social science is so immature as yet that not even an adequate technique for measuring the proportional

influence of these factors has been invented. Even if we had the technique, it is more than doubtful whether the necessary evidence can ever be recovered to furnish the technique the material for accurate proportional rating of the different factors in civilization. The material and intellectual achievements of Babylonians and Egyptians and Greeks, for example, were before Christianity. The Ten Commandments were before Christianity. Such accomplishments as these were men's discoveries of physical and moral values by the processes of experimentation. Doubtless those processes would have continued, with or without Christianity. We believe that Christianity powerfully accelerated these processes, but we have no right to assume that they would have stopped without the support of Christianity. Critical history gives us no right to believe that Christian influences have bulked larger on the average since the crucifixion than they have since January, 1914. No responsible estimate of the ratio of Christian influence during these recent years could rate it higher than mild mitigation of some of the evils of war and war times, and contributing stimulus to some of the meliorating activities incident to war. To say the least, the main actuators in the Western world since 1914 have been something very different from Christianity. Whatever the activities have been which have made today's civilization what it is, they have been largely the direct method of reading the teachings of experience; and those of us who believe that, in the last synthesis, this will turn out to be a veracious world also believe that the tendency of this method is to converge toward consensus at last with everything vital in Christianity. The point I am trying to make plain is that between this direct method of learning from experience, and the anticipatory method of accepting Christianity in advance and trying to control life by its precepts, we have no adequate means for apportioning the credit for so much civilization as we have.

All this explains why I do not attempt a historical survey of the relations between Christianity and industry. If those relations are not unsearchable, they are still so unsearched that discourse upon them would have to be very largely mere