Now from the very quarter on which so much of
the philanthropy of the past had been lavished came the demand not for philanthropy but justice, and also what purported to be a message of hope, based upon schemes of a great social reconstruction. But for the accomplishment of this hope a work of dispossession and a large measure of self-, abnegation were necessary, and they were thus brought back to the factor which had again and again wrecked the forces of progress,—human selfishness and the disparity of human endowment. Human nature was the basis on which human society was built up, and they were bound to reckon with the anti-social instincts,—in other words, with sin. Sin was the mountain which barred the path to the land of promise. But while the Church could help by teaching that sin was the barrier between man and his untiring hope of a perfect social order, the Churoh as a body was not committed to any one of the solutions of the problem of poverty and unemployment, though as a body she was bound to witness to the necessity of a solution being found.
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