The redemption of society means, in the fifth place, the purification of
politics. The dethronement of Mammon will go a long way toward this
also; most of the corruptions of our political life spring from the love
of money. Graft is the first-born of covetousness. But the love of
power also plays a part in the debauchery of citizenship; and the
central sin of using men as means to our ends is exhibited here on a
stupendous scale. This is the vocation of the boss and the briber and
the political machinist; and a deadlier way of destroying manhood it
would be hard to find. It is not only the interest of other individuals,
but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician
sacrifices upon the altar of cupidity or ambition; and when a man has
learned to turn the one great privilege of service and sacrifice which
citizenship offers into an opportunity of private gain, he has sunk
about as low as man can go. What more urgent task has the church upon
her hands than that of making men see the treachery and infamy of this
kind of conduct? And unless men can be made to see it and feel it, what
hope is there for free government? Can anybody imagine that democracy
can long endure if the ruling motive of the citizen in his relation to
the commonwealth is a purpose to get as much out of it as he can and
give it as little as he can? All political reforms which leave the
citizen in this state of mind are futile. There is no salvation for a
democracy which does not change the direction of the motive in the
heart of the individual citizen. And this is the business of the church.
Without this, social redemption is impossible, and there is no other
agency which even proposes to accomplish this.
And, finally, the redemption of society means the simplification of
life. Here, perhaps, we strike more nearly than anywhere else at the
heart of the whole problem. The bottom trouble of the world in which we
live is the enormous over-multiplication of our wants. In the multitude
of ministrations to our senses, the life of the spirit is overlaid and
smothered. Jesus said that a man's life consists not in the abundance of
the things which he possesses; it is this elementary truth which the
world has ceased to believe. For the most part our life is in our
things; our happiness depends on them; our desires do not often rise
above them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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