Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

276

THE CHURCH

parties, and classes-conservatives and progressives, radicals and reactionaries-meet,
mingle freely, and exchange values frankly.
At three points our contemporary, religious, and social consciousness registers the
progress of personal religion and public welfare in identifying the soul with the self,
the parish with the community, and catholicity with international relations. This
progress, developing slowly at first, has made rapid advances during the past decade.
Lone voices crying as in a wilderness have become a great chorus. Solitary pioneers
led the way in which a great rank and file have followed. The by-ways of the social
spirit have become the highways of the people. Social service has become Church
Work, for which ministers and members are being inspired and trained.
I. The soul and the self have become identified in the increasing consciousness of
the unity of personality. Soul is not anything one has, but all one is and can become
in body, mind, and spirit. From the discovery of the social sources of personality,
the consciousness of its unity has been born anew. Their study of child psychology
has led such investigators as Professor Royce, of Harvard, and J. Mark Baldwin, of
Johns Hopkins University to conclude that, "The child gets his material for the personality sense from persons around him by imitation, so that his growing sense of self
is constantly behind his growing sense of others," and that "A man is a social outcome
rather than a social unit." With the poet's prophetic vision, Alfred Tennyson long
anticipated these scientific conclusions of the psychologists, in showing "the baby new
to earth and sky" rounding out "to a separate mind" as "his tender palm is pressed
against the circle of the breast" he finds "I am not what I see and other than the things
I touch."
This derivation of the very consciousness of self from our consciousness of others
lays the lower-most layer of the foundation of the social structure in the sense of indebtedness which everyone of us should have for what we have received from all others.
Nothing is so destructive of personal religious experience and of the influence of the
church as the conception of religion as too narrow to cover all of one's life, or all of the
world and of the age in which one lives. Mrs. Humphrey Ward lets us hear her agnostic
hero, "Robert Elsmere," murmur to himself, "They have cornered off religion into a
little corner called the spiritual, past which the great world rushes unheeding and
unheeded by."
It is for this very reason that so many workingmen disclaim the influence of religion
upon their lives and their hopes. When, on the free floor of Chicago Commons, they
were asked what they thought religion to be, with common consent they replied, "Religion is authority superimposed upon the many by the few for the benefit of the few."
But when confronted with the idea of religion as the ideal of relationship Godward
and manward, gradually being realized in personal experience and in the history of the
race, they found no objection to it, except that they had not heard it preached or seen it
practiced.
That this social conception of the religion of relationship need not lessen the weight
of "the burden of the soul" is attested by what Cardinal Manning is said to have
remarked concerning the London journalist and social reformer, William T. Stead,
"He cares more for his fellow-men than anyone I know." May it not be true also
that in promoting the common welfare in so many more ways than ever, more people
really care for more of their fellows than ever before?