The Church and Charity

Abstract

One of the most interesting facts in the history of social and moral progress is the converging, into one great stream of activities, of streams which took their origin in different, and oftentimes in widely separated, parts of the field of human activity. The topography of history is much like the topography of the earth. As brooks and rivulets having their source in widely separated parts of a country at last flow together into a great river and then into the sea, so ideals and purposes conceived here and there on the surface of life generate activities which flow separately for a time, perhaps for ages, seemingly unrelated, though identical in their nature and at last converging in one great stream. The history of religion, for example, shows how without communication ideas have been conceived simultaneously in different parts of the world, have been developed in localities, and only after the progress of years, perhaps of centuries, have come together to constitute world-wide faith or practice. Sooner or later ideas and practices to have world importance must relate themselves to all other similar ideas and practices. The progress of history is toward unity, not the unity which destroys variety either of idea or of method, but the unity which is none the less unity because it embraces many varieties. The centralizing tendency of this age in practical affairs is only the surface expression of the centralizing tendency of the whole of life. And that variety is not sacrificed by this tendency to increasing unity is evidenced by an equally patent tendency to specialization. These reflections are induced by a consideration of the fact which confronts church and charity workers today that the ideas and practices of charity which obtain in the church and those which obtain in what we may call the world of scientific charity