It is very easy for us to recognise in a far off time the failure of institutions to realize the ideal that inspired their origin, and we readily admit, in the abstract, the need for the ideal to dominate [p.93] the institution and the danger of the institution running away with the ideal. It is harder to see in our own lives how far we are allowing the machinery to take us from its object, how far that machinery is out of date or out of gear, since we are in the thick of it all, our ears dulled by the roar of the wheels. Assuming that we admit that Iscariot has his right and helpful place, how are we to find it and keep him there?
It may help us to understand the danger that follows upon organization, if we make even a partial survey of a group of existing institutions and try to trace the history of some one of them.
How great is the failure of our countless institutions intended to promote social welfare, we to some extent realize as we take up such a work as the "Annual Charities Register and Digest," of the Charity Organization Society, and turn over those 700 pages describing the various societies, with all their staffs and offices at work in the city which is still the London that we know. Life appears almost to become at times to some men one long committee, but, little, after all, seems done. And this failure may be seen, to some extent at least, even in recent movements which were originally a protest against the narrowness and superficiality of earlier methods of dealing with the problems of modern society. The first thought of the men who conceived the idea of the university settlement was surely not to found a new institution, so much as to bring life into touch [p.94] with life, to make centres in which knowledge and experience might be collected, and from which men and ideas might be put at the service of all who had most need of them. Yet, in spite of themselves, they have almost become institutions; indeed, some settlements have frankly made it their aim to be such, and as one reads reports from across the water of all that our American friends are doing, one must admit that they have been most successful in achieving their object. If the settlement movement (as it is called) had not begun as it did twenty odd years ago, perhaps these wonderful centres of activity would not have come into being, or would have been very different from what they are. Yet would the founders of the first settlement have recognised as their spiritual descendants these men, unselfish as they are, whose methods are so different? Did there ever come before their vision the picture of a great building raised by some millionaire, maintained by like gifts, manned by a staff of salaried workers, and providing at the expense of far-seeing or enlightened manufacturers, healthy amusement and duly certified religious teaching and secular instruction to the workmen of these subscribers, as well as dispensing, on behalf of Dives, basketfuls of crumbs, both of plain and fancy bread, to Lazarus and his fellows at the door?