Servant in the House," when the Vicar strips off his clerical garb, seizes the dirty hand of his brother, the Drain-Man, and cries out, [9] "This is no priest's work—it calls for a man!" I was deterred, however, not, I hope, by cowardice but by wisdom. On the surface I felt that I should miss the services of the church—the prayers and worship with my people. Deeper down, and nearer the heart of things, was an unshaken trust in the church as a social institution. I loved her traditions, reverenced her saints and prophets, believed in her destiny—was unconvinced that she must necessarily serve the interests of reaction. At-bottom, was a perfectly clear understanding that my approach to the social question was a spiritual approach, and my acceptance of it the acceptance of a religious task. I saw my new position as nothing more nor less than the logic of Christianity. Men must be free from all oppression, because they are children of God, and therefore living souls. They must be equal in opportunity and privilege, because they are members of the holy family of God, and therefore brothers. They must be lifted up out of poverty, disease, war, because their heritage is the life of God, and they must have it abundantly. The material aspects of the social question, I would be among the last, I trust, to ignore. These are central—but central only as the fetters are central to the problem of slavery. Furthermore, the means which I recognized to the great end, were also spiritual. I could find no place in my thought for the use of violence. The plea of class-conscious rebellion never won my acceptance. Only patience, persuasion, and much love for humankind, seemed to me legitimate weapons of reform. In other words, I was again a victim of the logic of Christianity. And where did this logic hold me, if not to the church? Where could I make plain my spiritual position, or bring to bear my spiritual influence, apart from the church? If this institution must hold me altogether aloof from the social question, then of course my duty was manifest. But its pulpit was wide open to social preaching; its altar a chosen place for social consecration; and its machinery of service all at hand to be shifted from the gear of [10] charity to the gear of justice. Why not stay, therefore, in the church, as Theodore Parker stayed, and fight capitalism, as he fought slavery, in the garb of a minister of Christ?

Decision on this point came fairly early, and it was favorable to the church. Strangely enough, however, it brought me little peace and surety in my church relations. Outside, in the denomination at large, I found myself in almost constant conflict with my fellows. There were few meetings or conferences in which I did not speak in protest and vote with minorities. Here in the Messiah parish there was no trouble, thanks to your forbearance, friendship, and scrupulous loyalty to freedom; but almost from the beginning there was uncertainty, wonderment, at times unrest, on the part of those longest associated with this society; and the records show a melancholy tale of withdrawals of those, not unable to endure differences of opinion, but impelled to turn away when the institution, long precious in their sight, no longer presented the recognizable attributes of a Unitarian church. That my own shortcomings as a man and a minister were responsible for much of this disturbance inside and outside the parish, I have no doubt. But as I look back over the years, I also have no doubt that there was something much more fundamental here, at the heart of the trouble. That I was a heretic on the social question was insignificant, for Unitarians have long since learned not only to tolerate but to respect their heretics. What was infinitely more important, as I now see, was the fact that unconsciously through these years, I was coming to question not the church itself, as I have explained, but the whole order and purpose of the church as it now exists. Every ecclesiastical institution today is denominational in character. It belongs primarily to some particular sectarian body, and is pledged to the service of this body. Sometimes the central body is narrow, as in the case of the more orthodox Protestant denominations; sometimes it is liberal, as in the case of the Unitarians and Universalists. [11] But always there is a distinctive form of organization, or type of ritual, or doctrine of belief, or spirit of association, which binds these separate churches into a single group; and always this distinctive feature is something which had its origin, and still finds its vitality, in the thought and experience of an earlier age. Every one of our denominations, and every one of the churches in our denominations, is representative of past controversies, not of present interests and duties. No one sect can be distinguished from any other, except by a reference to the text books of Christian history.

Now with the intrusion of the social question into religion, a new concept of church organization came immediately to the fore. The unit of fellowship was now no longer the denomination, but the community. The centre of life and allegiance was no longer the challenge of ancient controversy, but the cry of present day human need. The more I became interested in questions of social change, the less I was concerned with questions of denominational welfare. The more I became absorbed in the people of New York City, the closer became my fellowship with other ministers similarly absorbed, and the remoter my fellowship with those who were bound to me only by the accident of the Unitarian tradition. More and more my hand and heart went out directly to men who saw and labored for the better day of which I dreamed; and only indirectly to those with whom I was appointed to serve, but who could not or would not catch the vision of my dreams. An irreconcilable conflict was here being joined—the old, old conflict between a dead and a living fellowship. It was my intuitive, although unconscious knowledge of this fact, which made me a rebel in every Unitarian gathering of the last ten years. It was a similarly unconscious instinct of self-preservation which taught my Unitarian brethren, to whom the old association was still central, to resent the things I sought. We had been born together, and we lived together; our past and our present were joint possessions. But when we faced the future, we divided; my [12] colleagues, many of them, were content with old, familiar ways, while I sought new associations.

What was dimly felt in those days, was suddenly transformed into something clearly seen by the impact of the Great War. If this stupendous conflict has revealed anything in religion, it is that the sectarian divisions of Christendom are no longer to be tolerated. In the fusing fires of battle, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Unitarian, even Catholic, Protestant and Jew, have been melted, and now flow in a single flaming stream into the mould which shall fashion them into a single casting. Man after man has returned from the front, to tell us that the denominational church is dead. A new ordering of Christendom is at hand. The unit of organization will be not the one belief, nor even the one spirit, but the one field of service. Not the sect, but the community, will be the nucleus of integration. We will have groupings not of Methodist churches, and Baptist churches, and Unitarian churches, to remind the world of ancient differences, but of New York churches, and Boston churches, and San Francisco churches, to teach the world of present needs and future hopes. Our churches will be related as the wards in a city are related, or the cities in a state, or the states in the nation. We shall be all Christians together, as we are all Americans together. We shall have different religious ideas as we have different political ideas. But we shall be organized religiously, as well as politically, in a single community. Our churches, like our schools, will be the possession, and the resort, of all!

This vision of the