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27 January 1847—17 March 1918

Society’s Christianization

If Henry Scott Holland’s name is recognized today, it’s most likely because of a one-liner of his, often repeated at funerals, that “death is nothing to us.” The work that he considered his true calling—awakening his fellow Christians to the truth that “duty to God and duty to man are the same thing”—is nearly forgotten. And that’s a shame.

Holland was an intellectual who enjoyed the scholarly life. But he was also an Anglican priest, and he believed it his duty to coax Christians out of their pews and into the unpleasant world of poverty, violence, and despair to which they often closed their eyes. Genuine Christianity, he believed, was much more than a set of creeds. It was the living experience of helping the poor, sick, homeless, imprisoned, and needy, just as Jesus did and just as he commanded his disciples to do. So in 1884, Holland left a comfortable lectureship at Oxford to become a member of the clerical staff at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wanted a better understanding of England’s social problems.

His experiences in the streets of London, which he described as “reeking with human misery,” led to the publication in 1889 of his most famous book, Lux Mundi. In it, he alarmed the ecclesiastical and political establishment of the day by calling for the “Christianization of the social structure whereby all men live in accordance with the principles of divine justice and human brotherhood.” This was disturbing enough, but Holland’s denunciation of capitalism as the primary obstacle to society’s Christianization, and his recommendation that the state take over and supervise commercial transactions and industrial production in order to protect workers, absolutely scandalized the upper and middle classes.

On the heels of Lux Mundi’s appearance, Holland formed the Christian Social Union to “investigate areas in which moral truth and Christian principles could bring relief to the social and economic disorder of society.” For years the Union published a magazine, Commonwealth, in which the plight of the poor—substandard housing, inadequate medical care, low wages, and so on—was regularly reported. Commonwealth also led the way on several campaigns for social and economic reform, especially in calling for a state-guaranteed minimum wage and unemployment benefits to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own.

Holland returned to Oxford in 1910 as the Regius Professor of Divinity to educate a rising generation of clergy in his vision of a Christian’s social duty. The shock of World War I seriously undermined his already fragile health, and his final years were painful. But to the end, he cautioned his students against a smug or otherworldly churchiness by impressing upon them that duty to God and duty to one’s fellow humans coincided.