February, 1904. Within two years there came an event which shook my
life to its foundations, revolutionized my thought, and changed the
whole character of my interest and work. I refer to what we have [7]
learned to describe in our time as the social question. This
question, of course, is nothing new. It has burned at the heart of
life from the beginning, and at intervals has flamed forth like the
eruption of a volcano, to the terror and glory of the world. Its
latest phase, as we know it today in the religious field, made its
appearance at about the time I entered the ministry. I recall that
the book, which first revealed the fires so soon to burst upon
us--Prof. Peabody's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question "--was
published in 1903, the year before my ordination. I was not
unprepared for what was coming. My deep-rooted reverence for
Theodore Parker, the supreme prophet of applied Christianity in our
time, and my enthusiastic study of his life, had revealed to me the
meaning of socialized religion. But I had caught only the pure
essence of its spirit; I had not thought to apply it to the social
problems of today. Indeed, I was not aware of the existence of such
problems. My whole approach to the question of truth and experience
up to that time, had been along the lines of speculation in the
field of theological, as contrasted with political or social,
thought. In the second year of my ministry, however, I read Henry
George's "Progress and Poverty"; then followed the writings of Henry
D. Lloyd and Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch; then came the deep and
prolonged plunge into the waters of socialism. For several years
after I came to this church, I was in a state of intellectual and
emotional upheaval impossible for me to describe. At last came a
conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas. I
was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light.
Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a