Document Type

Speech

Publication Date

1911

Abstract

Man is a religious being. To him, everywhere and always, religion and religious institutions have been and will be of prime concern. Now, and in this United States, not less than in ages past and in other parts of the world, is this a fundamental fact. He who, without a recognition of this, would study either religion or government, would quite fail to comprehend his problem. Man is also a social being. As such he has always found it necessary to live in an organized society, under some form of government. The world depicted with such irresistible genius by Rosseau in his "Le Contrat Social," in which men are represented as living by nature individual lives which they voluntarily gave up by consenting to government only when they became so numerous as to interfere with each other's rights and pursuits, so far from being a picture of natural man, is not merely an artificial but an impossible state. Man never has lived to himself alone. His natural state has ever been a social one, in which development and enjoyment became possible only by mutual inter-dependence and social intimacy. Government is not an invention, not a necessary evil, to which men submit. On the contrary, from the most primitive beginnings it has been man's natural instrument for controlling and developing the social estate so essential to his very existence. Invention has been called in play, not to originate, but to improve and adapt this instrument to its high purposes. And universally this government has been more or less closely related to religions institutions.

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