Charges of social irresponsibility have frequently been hurled against the medieval mystics, in their own day as in our yet more activist age. Mysticism and monasticism, to whose discipline the mystics owed much, have often been condemned for selfish withdrawal from public obligation. A major cause of this unjustifiable indictment is doubtless traceable to a predominant area of ignorance within the Western World. This is the growing unawareness of the balance maintained in the Christian tradition between contemplative worship of the Divine and active service of the human.

Modern research dealing with the radical fringe of the Reformation has by-passed the problem of that Italian evangelical movement which is usually assumed to have been connected with northern “Anabaptism.” Students of “Anabaptist” history, however, while they have sought to clarify the distinctions within the movement as well as the features common to its component parts, have laid the groundwork for a reconsideration of the precise position of the Italian radicals. One approach to the problem might focus attention on the question of the relationship of Italian reformers to the “Anabaptist” movement in general. However, it has become increasingly obvious that the term “Anabaptism” was applied to a great variety of individuals and groups which had in common little more than their condemnation of infant baptism. As new criteria have been set up for separating the parts of this confusing mixture, there stand out most prominently at the center of the “Anabaptist” movement certain sects which modern German scholars call the “Taufer,” viz., the Swiss Brethren, the Hutterite Brethren, and the Mennonites; and we shall follow their usage here. The Täufer differed from the Protestant state churches principally in their conception of the nature of the church and, in their stress on discipleship. The latter emphasis implies man's ability to lead a life patterned after the life of Christ, while their conception of the church as a closed community of voluntary believers underlay their insistence upon the need for adult baptism. This insistence, which carried with it a denial of the efficacy of infant baptism, was the point in their teachings that aroused the opposition of contemporaries, signifying, as it did, their non-conformity to established practices and institutions.

American Christian churches in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century were in general strongly conservative in social and economic outlook, and solidly supported the individualism of the time. But after the Civil War the swiftly and often painfully changing social scene stimulated widespread interest in economic and social matters and contributed to extensive rethinking of traditional views on the part of many Christians. Important reformist, progressive, and radical Christian social movements rose and agitated the churches. Hence, when socialism grew with startling rapidity in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, the attention of Christians was powerfully drawn to the new development. In that period when awareness of the social problem throbbed in the atmosphere of the time, that period of muckraking and trustbusting, progressivism and the sociological novel, the Socialist Party found rich soil in which to grow. The socialist vote grew from slightly over 400,000 in 1904 to some 900,000 in 1912, while party membership increased from 25,000 to 120,000 in the same period. By the latter date there were over one thousand socialists in elective positions across the land, most of them in minor posts, but with fifty mayors and twenty legislators included in the total. This rapid growth raised in a new and urgent way the problem of the relationship that should exist between Christianity and socialism.

The schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, and her reunion in 1939, fall into a pattern remarkably similar to that of the great schism and reunion of the United States. The antislavery movement possessed religious overtones of the same evangelical temper characteristic of Methodism; and the centralized—constitutional, if you will— structure of Methodism exposed it to federal-versus-regional stresses similar to those that divided the nation. There is the significant difference that the Northern and Southern Methodists parted amicably, and did not become involved in partisan bitterness until after the adjournment of their last General Conference together, but otherwise the parallel is complete: general acceptance of the principle of emancipation by the founders both of church and nation; with the renascence of slavery, the recession of this view, marked by a series of compromises in General Conference as in the Congress; the rise, and unpopularity, of militant abolitionism; a dramatic revival of partisan concern, marked by an acute constitutional debate growing sectional irreconcilability: schism; conflict—and an eventual resolution of the breach in terms of the tacit recognition by the North of the principle of segregation.