308 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
protest against child labor was publicly registered in England to the enactment of any effective factory legislation. While wander- ing in this wilderness those more than forty years the manu- facturing population was lost to the fold. While letting them wander there, as " sheep having no shepherd," the churches lost an ethical insight, a sense of identification with the masses, and a social leadership which they have by no means made up and which, after all their social progress in these later years, even yet leaves them far from abreast with the complex and increas- ingly critical social situation of our own day. How much more in keeping with the pace of its splendid progress might "Evan- gelicalism " have rounded out the present century if, in addition to its many great achievements in home lands and its still more glorious conquests in foreign fields, its churches had listened when Richard Oastler was a voice crying in that wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord!" if they had more promptly followed young Shaftesbury when by his vicariously sacrificial service he led the mediatorial way toward the redemption of modern industrialism from the curse of Cain ; if the judgment of God's throne against the slaughter of the innocents which rever- berated in Mrs. Browning's "Cry of the Children" had startled the Christians of both continents to united action ; or, farther back, if they had carried on and out Wesley's emancipation of Christian experience and method, as he himself began to do, into the equalization of the social and economic conditions of Christendom ; or, still farther back, had they developed and extended their reformation of dogma to that of the social order and had worked out the ethical corollaries of the farther-reach- ing propositions of their world-revolutionizing, kingdom-building faith. Wyclif did so. For he cried to the people : "Father he bade us all him call, masters we have none." The right of pri- vate judgment is democracy. Will we admit it not only, but practice it ? Common salvation from common sin is equality of opportunity. Dare we not only proclaim but apply it ?
But this great loss of that half century to the people and the churches should now be only the incentive toward the gain to be won by loyalty to the social ideals of the gospel of the
