The origins of this tendency are easily seen. It arises from the fact that the accent in Christian morality was placed too exclusively on religious obligation and the social obligation of the Christian was perhaps not sufficently emphasized. It is certain in the first place that for the Christian the love of God is a dimension as essential as that of love of neighbor. If there is no sacrament without charity, neither is there charity without a sacrament.
Prayer is a duty as imperious as service.
Horizontalism is an expression of the crisis of the sense of God within Christianity. But to empty Christianity of its religious dimension would be to reduce it to a banal moralizing. And that precisely at the moment when the movement of civilization has a greater need of the sacred than of the primacy given to technology. Christian charity not philanthropy I must add that horizontalism is in error on the very nature of the love of neighbor. For dedication to another, a spirit of service, kindness toward those in suffering are not at all an exclusively Christian prerogative.