Personality As A Redemptive Force
Social redemption depends on strong, wise personalities, not just social systems.
The salvation of the world is not to be by schemes of salvation, but by saviors, and the saviors of society are persons fit to be strong, good seed. Why is not social redemption accomplished by the vast movement of social mechanism, in which we are all so much involved that every man’s trade--as Robert Louis Stevenson once said--is that of a joiner? It is because human society is not a factory, but a field; not a mechanical unity, but a vital unity; not made of wheels, but made of people. What is needed in our day, as never before, is not new social machinery, but new personality, more wisdom, sanity, patience, light, capacity to control the already elaborate mechanism of the time; and without these traits the wheels will soon run down and the work be undone, and the workers be smitten with despair; and the children of the kingdom will find themselves good people indeed, but not good seed, fit for the field of the modern world.--FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY, “The Religious Education Association,” 1904.