1924

Bishop Williams is dead. I sit and stare at the floor while I say that to myself and try to believe it. How strangely a vital personality defies the facts of death. Nowhere have I seen a personality more luminous with the Christ spirit than in this bishop who was also a prophet. Here was a man who knew how to interpret the Christian religion so that it meant something in terms of an industrial civilization. His fearless protagonism of the cause of democracy in industry won him the respect and love of the workers of the city as no other churchman possessed it.

Yet I am afraid that it must be admitted that he didn’t change the prevailing attitude of Detroit industry by a hair’s breadth. He even had to offer his resignation in the face of increasing hostility to his social views. That letter of resignation was incidentally a gem of humble self-analysis and courageous insistence on the truth of his doctrine.

He did not change Detroit industry but he left many of us holding our heads more upright because of his intelligent and courageous analysis of contemporary civilization from the perspective of a Christian conscience. If a bishop with all his prestige could make no bigger dent upon the prevailing mood of the city, what chance is there for the rest of us? Perhaps the best that any of us can do is to say:

Rejoice, said Jesus, not that the devils are subject unto you but that your names are written in heaven. One ought to strive for the reformation of society rather than one’s own perfection. But society resists every effort to bring its processes under ethical restraint so stubbornly that one must finally be satisfied with preserving one’s moral integrity in a necessary and yet futile struggle. Of course the struggle is never as futile as it seems from an immediate perspective. The bishop did not change Detroit industry, but if the church ever becomes a real agency of the kingdom of God in an industrial civilization, his voice, though he is dead, will be in its counsels.