The message of Christianity, we often hear it said, is to the individual. Yes, it is; and what is the message of Christianity to the individual? The first thing that it tells him is that he is not, in strictness, an individual, any more than a hand or a foot or an eye or an ear is an individual; that he is a member of a body; that he derives all that is highest and most essential in his life from the life of humanity, to which he is vitally and organically related; that no man liveth to himself; that his good is not, and can never be, an exclusive personal good,--that it is in what he shares with all the rest. The doom from which Christianity seeks to save the individual is the doom of moral individualism; the blessedness into which it seeks to lead him is the blessedness of love. Thus it appears that even these cant phrases by which the church sometimes tries to fence itself off from the world into a pietistic religiousness that has little or nothing to do with life, all point, when you get their real significance, to a relation between the church and the social order so close and vital that any attempt to sever the bond must be fatal to the life of both. The church is in the world to save the world; that is its business; and it can never know whether it is succeeding in its business unless it keeps a vigilant eye on all that is going on in the world, and shapes its activities to secure in the world right social relations among men. In what manner the church is to carry forward this work of Christianizing society is a practical question calling for great wisdom. It may not be needful that the church should undertake to organize the industrial or political or domestic or philanthropic machinery of society. Its business is not, ordinarily, to construct social machinery; its business is to furnish social motive power. It is the dynamic of society for which it is responsible. But the dynamic which it furnishes must be a _dynamic which will create the machinery_. Life makes its own forms. And the church must fill society with a kind of life which will produce such forms of coöperation as shall secure the prevalence of justice and friendship, of peace and good-will among men. It may not be required to look after details, but it must make sure of the results. If the results are secured, if society is Christianized, if the social order is producing a better breed of men, if the business of the world goes on more and more smoothly, and all things are working together to increase the sum of human welfare, then the church may be sure that the life which she is contributing to the vitalization of society is the life that is life indeed. But if the social tendencies are all in the other direction, then she should awaken to the fact that the light that is in her must be darkness, and that the responsibility for this failure lies at her doors.