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Page 27
We come now to the final question of our chapter. How has this renewal
of naturalism affected the church and Christian preaching? On the
whole today, the Protestant church is accepting this naturalistic
attitude. In a signed editorial in the _New Republic_ for the last
week of December, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significant
title of "Disordered Christianity": "Both politicians and property
owners consider themselves entitled to ignore Christian guidance in
exercising political and economic power, to expect or to compel the
clergy to agree with them and if necessary to treat disagreement as
negligible. The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does not
protest against the practically complete secularization of political,
economic and social life."
You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic and
ill informed. But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January,
1918: "If after the war the church keeps on with the same old
religion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religious
leaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we
are gathering now. The church must cease to sanction those principles
of militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of the
earth have so long kept the earth at war."[20] Thus from within the
sanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism.
[Footnote 20: The _Pacific_, January 17, 1918.]
But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a little extreme in
some of his positions and he belonged to a past generation. But there
are many signs at the present moment of the increasing secularizing
of our churches. The individualism of our services, their casual
character, their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing of
the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of the
pulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of common
entertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity today
about the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree,
relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values.
We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We are
adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. In
an issue last month of the _Inter-Church Bulletin_ was the following
headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," and underneath
the following:
"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general,
says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between
Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of
the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than
anything else is a strong injection of business method into their
management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a
book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'"
In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was
an article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran:
"Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions," and its
subtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business Law in
the Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen and
the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial
prosperity, a hawker of wares! If the _Bulletin_ ever penetrates to
those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious
to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is
conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen
and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek.
Such na�ve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me
conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit
within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today
what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone
made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check
upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to
untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to
others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and
everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious
conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from
the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate,
to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young
and prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and most
detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us
has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating
of "courage," "patriotism"--what crimes have been committed in
its name!--"development of backward people," "brotherhood of man,"
"service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural ethical
idealism," "the common destinies of nations"--and now he rises up and
glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so far
as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and
flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to
believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become
a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of
sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!
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