But how far, after all, is this brotherly and peaceful sentiment, ancient or modern, applicable to life as we know it? Is it feasible, is it really right, is it not a sentiment of submission in a world that grows by strife? After what has already been said on this, it is perhaps enough to add here that neither in the life of Christ nor in modern democracy do we find sanction for submission to essential, moral wrong. Christ brought a sword which the good man of our day can by no means sheathe: his counsels of submission seem to refer to merely personal injuries, which it may be better to overlook in order to keep the conflict on a higher plane. If we mean by Christianity an understanding and brotherly spirit toward all men and a reverence for the higher Life behind them, expressed in an infinite variety of conduct according to conditions, it would seem to be always right, and always feasible, so far as we have strength to rise to it. The most notable reaction of democracy upon religious sentiment is no doubt a tendency to secularize it, to fix it upon human life rather than upon a vague other world. So soon as men come to feel that society is not a machine, controlled chiefly by the powers of darkness, but an expression of human nature, capable of reflecting whatever good human nature can rise to; so soon, that is, as there comes to be a public will, the religious spirit is drawn into social idealism. Why dream of a world to come when there is hopeful activity in this? God, it seems, is to be found in human life as well as beyond it, and social service is a method of his worship. “If ye love not your brother whom ye have seen, how can ye love God whom ye have not seen?” An ideal democracy is in its nature religious, and its true sovereign may be said to be the higher nature, or God, which it aspires to incarnate in human institutions. FOOTNOTES: [94] Page 55. [95] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 275. [96] Quoted in The Commons, October, 1903. [97] Dante, Purgatorio, 15, 55-57. He is speaking of Paradise. [98] Longfellow’s Translation. [99] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 272. [100] Leaves of Grass (1884), page 9. [101] _Idem_, 59. [102] _Idem_, 48. [103] _Idem_, 48. [104] _Idem_, 110. [105] Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 181. _PART IV_ SOCIAL CLASSES CHAPTER XVIII THE HEREDITARY OR CASTE PRINCIPLE NATURE AND USE OF CLASSES—INHERITANCE AND COMPETITION THE TWO PRINCIPLES UPON WHICH CLASSES ARE BASED—CONDITIONS IN HUMAN NATURE MAKING FOR HEREDITARY CLASSES—CASTE SPIRIT.