Whether the interest has not been even excessive and one-sided, whether the accusation has not been occasionally unjust and the self-accusation morbid, these are questions which it might be possible in some quarters to ask.  This is, however, only another form of proof of what we say.  The religious interest in social questions has not been aroused primarily by intellectual and scientific impulses, nor fostered mainly by doctrinaire discussion.  On the contrary, the initiative has been from the practical side.  It has been a question of life and service.  If anything, one often misses the scientific note in the flood of semi-religious literature relating to this theme, the realisation that, to do well, it is often profitable to think.  Yet there is effort to mediate the best results of social-scientific thinking, through clerical education and directly to the laity.  On the other hand, a deep sense of ethical and spiritual responsibility is prevalent among thinkers upon social topics.

Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which is here exemplified.  Each succeeding age has read into Christ’s teachings, or drawn out from his example, the special meaning which that generation, or that social level, or that individual man had need to draw.  To them in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if this were the only lesson reasonable men could draw.  Nothing could be more enlightening than is reflexion upon this reading of the ever-changing ideals of man’s life into Christianity, or of Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of man’s life.  This chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to religion.  It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses.  It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world.  Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive emphasis and its entirety, is right.  Our age is haunted by the sense of terrific social and economic inequalities which prevail.  It has set its heart upon the elimination of those inequalities.  It is an age whose disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that religion has not done away with these inequalities.  It is an age which is immediately interested in an interpretation of religion which will make central the contention that, before all things else, these inequalities must be done away.  If religion can be made a means of every man’s getting his share of the blessings of this world, well and good.  If not, there are many men and women to whom religion seems utterly meaningless.