It is true, no doubt, as Shylock said, that we all have “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,” are “subject to diseases,” and “warmed and cooled by summer and winter.” “If you prick us we bleed, if you tickle us we laugh, if you poison us we die,” and so on. We do surely have wants and needs. We must consider values. We must have food and clothes and houses. We must have some fair share of the earth and its privileges. But that is only the basement and foundation of real living, and we want a democracy that is supremely concerned with the development of personality and with the spiritual organization of society. We shall not make our estimates of persons on a basis of their uses, or on the ground of their behavior as animal beings; we shall live and work, if we are Christ’s disciples, in the faith that man is essentially a spiritual being, in a world which is essentially spiritual, and that we are committed to the task of awakening a like faith in others and of helping realize an organic solidarity of persons who practice this faith. Our rule of life would be something like the following: to act everywhere and always as though we knew that we are members of a spiritual community, each one possessed of infinite worth, of irreducible uniqueness, and indispensable to the spiritual unity of the whole—a community that is being continually enlarged by the faith and action of those who now compose it, and so in some measure being formed by our human effort to achieve a divine ideal. The most important service we can render our fellow men is to awaken in them a real faith in their own spiritual nature and in their own potential energies, and to set them to the task of building the ideal democracy in which personality is treated as sacred and held safe from violation, infringement, or exploitation, and, more than that, in which we altogether respect the worth and the divine hopes inherent in our being as men. IV THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY There are few questions more difficult to answer than the question, What is Christianity? Every attempt to answer it reveals the peculiar focus of interest in the mind of the writer, but it leaves the main question still asking for a new answer. “Always it asketh, asketh,” and each answer, to say the least, is inadequate. Harnack, Loisy, and Tolstoy have given three characteristic answers to the great question. Their books are touched with genius and will long continue to be read, but, like the other books, they, too, reveal the writers rather than solve the central problem.