Christianity has ostensibly been the religion of Western Europe during a long period of development in all the material appliances of a civilized life when mental and physical forces, engaged in accumulating wealth, have dominated this development and tended to depress and destroy the higher impulses and aspirations of man. Christianity, already weakened by errors that had crept in, was unable to withstand the corrupting influences of a money-making age. It adapted itself to the sternly practical business-like son of the West, and dropped out much of the imaginative and reflective side of its teaching. But the “old order changeth,” and, as has been shown in previous chapters, one great department of civilized life, viz. the prevailing system of industry, is hastening to its dissolution. That system has been tried in the furnace of a longsuffering, patient experience, and found to create national wealth in abundance, while utterly failing to subserve general well-being, and bring about a just arrangement of social conditions. Through all the channels of the nation’s best thinking there has sounded low, but clear as a clarion note, a call to social reform, and now, in the depths of industrial confusion, amid dumb despair and loud-voiced public discontent, the still small voice of conscience speaks audibly, and a stirring of dry bones over the whole field of action, betokens the awakening to a new era of existence. Spiritual vibrations have loosened the foundations of our materialized, selfish life, and pierced through the crust of callous indifference to the heart of the nation. A new tenderness lurks there. It prompts to the entire overthrow of our hideous industrial warfare and the substitution of a well-ordered system based, reared and maintained through the action of wide-reaching love. But love was the distinguishing feature of early Christianity, and the genius of its teaching. Through the figure of family life, with its tender ties, unselfish actions and unity of interests and feeling, did Christianity strive to allure to the broader, higher, deeper love that embraces all mankind and manifests throughout all human relations. Pioneers of the social revolution may abjure the churches, creeds and rituals, and boast themselves agnostic, but none the less are they aiding the reembodiment, on this material plane, of the true religious spirit, or the birth of a religion fitted for the nation’s age and civilization.[18] Footnote 18: Mr. Lester F. Ward (in his new work published in 1903) formulates a distinction between human and animal societies by saying that the environment transforms the animal while man transforms the environment. This transformation constitutes what he calls “achievement,” and is the characteristic feature in human progress. The products of “achievement” are not material things. They are methods, ways, principles, devices, arts, systems, institutions.