In His Steps

Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps (1896) is a seminal work of Christian social fiction, organized around the searching question, "What would Jesus do?" Set in the fictional town of Raymond, it follows Rev. Henry Maxwell and his congregation as they attempt to live for a year under that principle. Its plain, sermon-inflected realism and episodic structure place it firmly within the late nineteenth-century Social Gospel movement. Sheldon, a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, wrote from pastoral experience rather than abstract theology. His ministry brought him into contact with poverty, labor unrest, temperance reform, and urban inequality, concerns that shaped the novel's moral imagination. Originally delivered as a series of Sunday evening "sermon stories," the book reflects his conviction that Christianity must transform public conduct as well as private belief. This book is recommended to readers interested in American religious history, reform literature, and the ethical power of narrative. Though its tone is earnest and unmistakably didactic, In His Steps remains compelling as a cultural document and a challenge to comfortable faith, asking how belief might alter business, journalism, art, and civic life.