It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reformation because it is so indispensable to social reformation. Wherever a new social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one argument against the hope which always rises. You cannot do that--men say--human nature is against it; human nature has always acted another way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly. As one listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull mass that resists all transformation. The very man who says that may be an engineer. He may be speaking in the next breath with high enthusiasm about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as goldenrod in a New England field. But while about physical nature he is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he thinks nothing can be done. From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal. It can be brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with angels. Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal, believed that men and women could be changed into anything--into trees, rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites. One of the most prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these stories are a poetic portraiture of something which eternally is true. Men can be transformed. That is a basic fact, and it is one of the central emphases of the Christian Gospel. Of all days in which that emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are thinking about social reformation. III