iMni um^ 
 
 \ TUmE 1 
 
NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
New Churches for Old 
 
 A Flea for Community Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN HAYNES HOLMES 
 
 Minister of 
 
 THE COMMUNITY CHUKCH OF NEW YORK 
 
 Author of " New Wars for Old/' " Religion for 
 Today/' etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1922 
 
H^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1922 
 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 
 Printed in the U. 8, A, 
 
wc'A-^ 
 
 TO 
 
 Harvey Dee Browk 
 
 AND 
 
 JoHK Herman Randall 
 
 my colleagues in the work of 
 
 The Community Church of New York 
 
 this book 
 
 18 affectionately dedicated 
 
 506b J- 
 
AGRIC. DEPT. ffi'^- 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 Many books are written these days on the 
 churches. All of them recognize and lament their 
 present pitiable plight. Most of them seek no 
 cause other than the materialism of the age and a 
 certain failure of the churches to keep pace with 
 knowledge and social needs; and offer no remedy 
 other than a general exhortation to the people to 
 remember the importance of religion, and to the 
 churches to bring their beliefs and methods up to 
 date. The futility of these books is itself convinc- 
 ing evidence of the collapse of organized religion in 
 our time. 
 
 The present volume is concerned neither with 
 lamentations nor exhortations. Its purpose is not 
 to bring comfort to churches as they exist today. 
 On the contrary, it is written in the deliberate con- 
 viction that these churches as organizations are an 
 intolerable interference with the program of modern 
 life, and are therefore to be transformed or replaced 
 as speedily as possible; that Protestantism in all 
 its forms, both orthodox and liberal, is as dead a 
 religion today, and therefore as subversive a social 
 influence, as was medieval Catholicism in the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; that we are living 
 in an age when new religious forces are everywhere 
 
 vii 
 
yiii PREFACE 
 
 emerging into conscious life, and therefore should 
 prepare for the coming of a new reformation. In 
 justification of this position, this book undertakes 
 to present (1) an analysis of the situation today, 
 both inside the churches and out; and (2) a con- 
 structive program for the organization of new 
 churches to supplant the old. 
 
 The program which is outlined in its more imme- 
 diate aspects in chapters eight, nine and ten, is 
 based on the principles now being worked out in 
 what is coming to be known today as the community 
 church movement. These principles are used and 
 commended not in any sense as final ; indeed, they 
 are interpreted in this book in radical terms which 
 are likely to be acceptable to few, and have been put 
 into practice by none, of the more than four hun- 
 dred community churches already established in 
 this country. This movement is an experiment, an 
 adventure of faith ; at the best only a splendid first 
 step away from Protestantism, toward the new 
 democratic religion of the future. As such, how- 
 ever, it is the most significant phenomenon in the 
 religious world today, and the inevitable starting 
 point for the discussion of any adequate program 
 of reform. 
 
 It should be carefully noted that this book deals 
 primarily with churches, and not with religion. 
 Religion is discussed, but exclusively from the 
 standpoint of the problem of its social organization. 
 This standpoint is fundamental ; but involved with 
 it are certain more private and personal aspects of 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 spiritual experience, which are not to be ignored. 
 These are omitted here not because they are not 
 known to exist, or not recognized as important, but 
 because they do not affect in any way the forces of 
 change which are now at work. Suggestion will be 
 found that these aspects of the religious life must 
 be given place in new churches exactly as in old. 
 In closing, it may be said that this book repre- 
 sents not only the thought and hope of a single 
 man, but also the experience of a church — the 
 Community Church of New York City. For none 
 of the ideas herein set forth is this institution to be 
 held responsible. But that I have thought along 
 these lines, and had opportunity to try my thoughts, 
 is due entirely to the courage and faith of the people 
 who have sustained me as their minister. In spirit, 
 at least, this book is theirs more than it is mine. 
 It is only fitting that I should close this prefatory 
 word with public acknowledgment of my appreci- 
 ation and gratitude. 
 
 J. H. H. 
 October 1, 1921. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Three months after the text of this book was 
 finished, and at the very moment when it was being 
 placed on the printing presses for publication, there 
 came to America from a distinguished churchman 
 across the sea. Bishop Nicolai of the Greek Catho- 
 lic Church of Serbia, a call for just such a new 
 organization of religion as is described in the 
 following chapters. 
 
 Starting from the same premise upon which the 
 argument of this book is built — that "Christianity 
 is dying in the world" — ^the great Bishop asks if 
 America ^^can not give birth to the church which 
 will be so broad that all humanity can hear its 
 promises, find its comfort, realize its perfect Christ- 
 like reasonableness. . . . Let those of you who 
 find existing churches narrow and cramping," he 
 cries, "build one which shall be broad and will not 
 cramp ! Forget denomination and remember Jesus 
 Christ.'' 
 
 I believe that the community church movement, 
 as described and justified in this book, is an answer 
 to Bishop Nicolai's appeal. I present his noble 
 words as a Foreword to what I have written, that 
 my readers may know that the world is ready for 
 this answer, and will die if it be not heard . 
 
 J. H. H. 
 xi 
 
xii FOEEWOED 
 
 WILL AMEEICA WATCH CHEISTIANITY 
 DIE? 
 
 Bishop Nicolai of the Greek Catholic Church 
 of Serbia 
 
 As a moral agency the Christian Church is func- 
 tioning badly. Humankind, rendered emotionally 
 and psychologically receptive by the tremendous 
 mental and moral experiences of the war, is not 
 turning to the Church for its comfort. When 
 yearning, stimulated minds reach out for comfort 
 in religion, only to find that the religions are 
 divided against themselves, those minds draw back, 
 wondering if, after all, it really is in the Church 
 that comfort lies. 
 
 One Church proclaims Church authority as the 
 great requisite to soul salvation; another declares 
 healing of the sick by faith and the belief in that 
 creed to be essential to complete and fructifying 
 Christianity ; a third insists upon acceptance of the 
 dogma of the Trinity; a fourth requires faith in 
 Christ's second coming; a fifth demands contem- 
 plation as the main part of worship ; a sixth links 
 itself inseparably to mysticism ; a seventh cries that 
 real salvation comes through works alone. 
 
 The division of the Christians of the world into 
 small groups, each sealed in its own room with no 
 communicating doors between — that is the thing 
 which balks the Church as a great influence, which 
 
FOREWORD xiii 
 
 holds humanity, prone to aspire, in cheek upon the 
 verge of aspiration. 
 
 Revolted by such conditions, the intellectual 
 classes have been driven to agnosticism or atheism ; 
 the classes of mid-intellectual development have 
 been kept out of the Church entirely, or have been 
 converted into that soul smugness which is so great 
 a threat; the lower classes who lack the time to 
 think, or have not reached an intellectual develop- 
 ment enabling them to think alone, have been 
 poisoned by the chauvinism of one creed or another. 
 
 And so Christianity is dying in the world. 
 
 Can not America give birth to the Church which 
 will be so broad that all humanity can hear its 
 promises, find its comfort, realize its perfect Christ- 
 like reasonableness? 
 
 I shall go further than to say that you in the 
 United States are capable of producing this great 
 boon for all humanity. I shall declare my firm 
 belief that you are now in process of producing it. 
 
 It is not yet organized and it does not yet appear 
 as one Church even in the minds of those indi- 
 viduals who — unconsciously, I think, in most 
 instances — are vigorously promoting it. In the 
 United States, the Church already has thousands of 
 communicants who call themselves undenomina- 
 tional, and, in your various interdenominational 
 movements, evidence of your splendid influence 
 towards Christian unity. 
 
 Can not you organize from American Christianity 
 this Church of the Great Light — inclusive as Christ 
 
xiv FOREWORD 
 
 is — the Church of Good Will? I suggest no opera- 
 tion of destruction for the Churches as they are. 
 But can not religious thought in the United States, 
 the land of freedom and fearlessness, say to all: 
 Retain membership in your own Church as you 
 retain citizenship in your own state, but join also 
 the Church of the Great Light, accepting member- 
 Bhip in it as you accept citizenship in the United 
 States. 
 
 You may be a New Yorker, a Californian, an 
 Ohioan, but in spite of that, because of that, beyond 
 all that you are an American. 
 
 So you may be a Baptist, or a Methodist, or an 
 Episcopalian, or a Christian Scientist, but beyond 
 that you will be a full communicant of the Church 
 of the Great Light, getting from this membership 
 something spiritual comparable to that of far less 
 but of mighty import which you get from citizenship 
 in the United States. Be you Roman Catholic or 
 Puritan you can belong to the Church of the Great 
 Light. 
 
 There, I say, is the great opportunity of the 
 United States. In your national life you have been 
 educated to broad tolerance. You will not per- 
 manently hold to even slight intolerance in your 
 religious thought. With charity toward all and 
 with malice toward none, by the Grace of God — 
 free! Make the effort, you American Christians! 
 Rise to new heights in religion as your fathers 
 ascended to new heights in humanitarianism and 
 political thought. Let those of you who find exist- 
 
FOREWOED xy 
 
 ing Churches narrow and cramping, build one which 
 shall be broad and will not cramp! Forget denomi- 
 nation and remember Jesus Christ. 
 
 I have watched the progress of America with a 
 thrilling heart. This is the nation which accom- 
 plishes impossibilities. Gather up your strength. 
 Rally your tremendous power of leadership ; correct 
 the error of the centuries; create the Church of 
 which Christ himself laid down the outlines and of 
 which he spoke the creed : Love ye one another. 
 
 The gate of Christianity is closed for the man 
 who has not fulfilled the first law. Let America 
 produce the Church which may. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Collapse of the Churches: 
 
 What is the Matter? .... 3 
 
 II Denominationalism : Religion Inside 
 
 THE Churches 41 
 
 III Democracy: Religion Outside the 
 
 Churches 77 
 
 IV The New Basis of Religion . • . 103 
 V Sacred and Secular 131 
 
 VI Theology and Sociology ..... 155 
 
 VII Church and State 189 
 
 VIII The Community Church : Principles 217 
 
 IX The Community Church: Organi- 
 zation^ Message and Work . . . 249 
 
 X The Practical Problem 281 
 
 XI Conclusion 317 
 
 Appendix 335 
 
*^What Is practically necessary is this : Let your (re- 
 ligion) be the practical acknowledgement of the Spirit 
 of the Universal and Beloved Community. This is the 
 suflBcient and practical faith. . . . All else about your 
 religion is the accident of your special race or nation 
 or form of worship or training, or accidental personal 
 opinion, or devout mystical experience. . . . The core, 
 the center of the faith is not the person of the individual 
 founder, and is not any other individual man. Nor is 
 this core to be found in the sayings of the founder. 
 . . . The core of the faith is the spirit, the Beloved 
 Community. There is nothing else under heaven whereby 
 men have been saved or can be saved. 
 
 "... Since the office of religion is to aim towards 
 the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the 
 future task of religion is the task of inventing and apply- 
 ing the arts which shall win men over to unity, and 
 which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the 
 gracious love, not of mere individuals, but of communi- 
 ties. Now such arts are still to be discovered. Judge 
 every social device, every proposed reform, every na- 
 tional and local enterprise, by the one test : Does this 
 help towards the coming of the universal community f 
 If you have a church, judge your own church by this 
 standard; and if your church does not yet fully meet 
 this standard, aid towards reforming your church ac- 
 cordingly." 
 
 JosiAH ROYCE, in 
 
 The ProUem of Christianity 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES: WHAT 
 IS THE MATTER? 
 
 \ 
 
"The old religion is a tree that has borne its fruit. 
 It is dying at the top; it is feeble at the root. It no 
 longer touches men's lives as of old. The great things 
 that are done today are not done in the name of religion, 
 but in the name of science, of humanity, of civilization." 
 John Burroughs, in 
 
 Accepting the Universe 
 
NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES : WHAT 
 IS THE MATTER? 
 
 That there is something the matter with organized 
 religion in this present day, and something very 
 seriously the matter, is a fact so obvious that it is 
 no longer challenged or contradicted. A decline 
 in the vitality of the churches has been noted by 
 sensitive and honest observers at intervals for 
 nearly one hundred years. This has seldom, how- 
 ever, caused alarm, for the reason that social insti- 
 tutions of every kind are liable to fluctuations of 
 power and influence, determined by changes in 
 economic conditions, personal leadership, and the 
 more or less intangible aspects of intellectual and 
 emotional interest. There is a law of compensation 
 in such phenomena, and what is lost, therefore, at 
 one time is inevitably recovered at another. If the 
 decline seems prolonged and extreme, this fact 
 furnishes only the more reason for believing that a 
 sharp recovery is imminent at any moment. Thus 
 have we lived, during the last two generations at 
 least, not only in a consciousness of the waning 
 power of the churches, but also in an eager and 
 
 3 
 
4 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 confident expectation of a great spiritual revival. 
 During the World War this expectation reached an 
 intensity of conviction which was not unrelated, 
 perhaps, to the degree of our confusion at the 
 failure of religion to prevent so incredible a recru- 
 descence of savagery. This vast cataclysm was 
 going to act as a kind of Day of Judgment! It 
 would restore man to his senses, purge him of his 
 indijSference and sin, save him to his lost fidelity to 
 the best and highest. The spiritual revival that 
 would follow the war, would give to the churches 
 all their former prestige, and, in addition, unprece- 
 dented opportunities of service. That the reapers 
 might be prepared for the harvest, a religious body 
 of unparalleled proportions was created in the 
 so-called Inter-Church World Movement. Every- 
 thing was ready for an awakening which would still 
 all the disquietude and repair all the losses of the 
 past century. But alas, the war is long since 
 over — and the anticipated revival has not appeared ! 
 On the contrary, the churches were never before so 
 weak, the tide of spiritual life never before running 
 at so low an ebb. To our horror we are forced to 
 acknowledge that the declining vitality of organized 
 religion has ended, in this war period, not in 
 recovery but in collapse. 
 
 II 
 
 Evidence of this collapse of the churches, so long 
 impending and now at hand, is apparent in certain 
 outward and visible manifestations of our social 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 5 
 
 life. The signs are today so familiar that they 
 need only to be listed in order to be recognized and 
 understood. 
 
 That our rural churches are undergoing a process 
 of rapid disintegration has been suspected for many 
 years, and now, since the investigations of Mr. 
 Gifford Pinchot and others, is definitely known. 
 Whole stretches of country-side have abandoned 
 religious practices altogether; in the small towns, 
 Sunday worship is feebly and discouragingly sus- 
 tained by members of the older generation. The 
 spectacle of abandoned churches is almost as fre- 
 quent in many portions of the nation as that of 
 abandoned farms and homesteads. Of course, the 
 decline of the agricultural population of the United 
 States, the steady drift of people from the country 
 to the city, the substitution of alien for native 
 stock upon the land, has much to do with the fate 
 which is overtaking the country churches. But 
 there is a change here which is altogether out of 
 proportion to the change which is taking place in 
 the general social environment. The flourishing 
 Protestantism of the country-side of sixty or seventy 
 years ago is passing away, and nothing is coming 
 to take its place. A fine old parish church, set in 
 the midst of a busy town in a prosperous farming 
 community, with its spacious auditorium, once 
 crowded on a Sunday morning with happy families, 
 now occupied by a scattered handful of aging men 
 and women, is the living witness to what is happen- 
 ing everywhere in the rural districts. 
 
6 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 The decline of religion in the cities is not so 
 evident as in the country. For one thing, the 
 visible signs of dissolution and decay are not 
 allowed to clutter up the landscape. More im- 
 portant is the fact that in the cities are concen- 
 trated those influences which give a certain out- 
 ward glory to the church which has no relation to 
 the reality of its inner life. Just as the temple 
 worship in ancient Rome was never so splendid as 
 in the days when the traditional religion of the state 
 was nearest to extinction, so the churches in the 
 great political and commercial centers of our time, 
 present an appearance of power and prosperity 
 which conceals rather than expresses the essential 
 facts. In the cities there is the wealth which 
 builds and maintains churches in the same way that 
 it builds and maintains art-galleries, natural his- 
 tory museums, and opera houses; there are the 
 musical resources which make the churches on Sun- 
 day afternoons and evenings, and at the festivals of 
 the ecclesiastical year, great concert-halls for the 
 rendition of the finest cantatas and oratorios, 
 requiems and masses; there are the eloquent and 
 far-famed preachers who, like political orators and 
 Chautauqua lecturers, exercise over multitudes of 
 people a magic of the spoken word which is apart 
 from the religious motive on behalf of which they 
 speak. These, and other influences of the same 
 kind, assemble in conspicuous places great congre- 
 gations which seem to give the lie to the charge that 
 the church is dying. But other phenomena^ as 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 7 
 
 mucn more important as they are less conspicuous, 
 show that these things of splendor are like the 
 hectic flush on the cheeks of the dying invalid. As 
 a matter of fact, the city churches are in quite as 
 serious a condition as the country churches. Thus, 
 it is only in a few of the more famous institutions, 
 where wealth is able to provide beautiful buildings, 
 fine music and great preaching, or in certain local- 
 ities where a high degree of neighborhood or 
 community life has been developed, that large con- 
 gregations assemble on Sunday mornings. In the 
 majority of city churches, the old time Sunday 
 evening services and mid-week prayer meetings 
 have been abandoned; or, if held, are attended by 
 only the meagerest handful of members. New 
 church edifices are usually built much smaller 
 than the old edifices which they replace. This 
 means that the total seating capacity of existing 
 churches bears a steadily diminishing ratio to the 
 total population of the municipalities which they 
 undertake to serve. New societies, of course, are 
 constantly being organized, but not so fast as old 
 societies are amalgamating, or disappearing alto- 
 gether. The union of several great city churches, 
 each one of which formerly enjoyed an independent 
 life of abounding prosperity and influence, into a 
 single church not so large as any one of its original 
 constituent elements, is now one of the commonest 
 as it is one of the most amazing features of present- 
 day religious life. Not only are there fewer 
 churches in proportion to the population in our 
 
8 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 great cities than there were yesterday, but there are 
 in some places fewer churches in absolute number. 
 A well-defined process is now under way which, if 
 continued to its logical end, would mean the disap- 
 pearance of churches altogether from the modern 
 city. 
 
 These facts of country and city life are bad 
 enough just as they stand. The situation becomes 
 still more serious, however, when we go behind 
 these facts, and see what the great denominational 
 machines are doing to prop up the rapidly collaps- 
 ing fabric of organized religious life. Behind prac- 
 tically every existing Protestant church today 
 there is the denomination to which it is organically 
 attached. This denomination has a central head- 
 quarters or machine, organized to perpetuate and 
 advance its own particular sectarian cause. For 
 the service of the interests involved in this cause it 
 is made the custodian of enormous funds, repre- 
 senting on the one hand the accumulation of past 
 investments and endowments, and on the other 
 hand the contemporary gifts of a comparatively 
 few individuals, families and churches which chance 
 to be liberally provided with this world's goods. 
 These funds, now, are used by the denominational 
 machines as a kind of army of reserve, to be thrown 
 into the field wherever the positions at present held 
 are weakening, or new strategic positions must be 
 occupied. Thousands of existing churches of all 
 sects, in city and in country alike, are supported not 
 bj gifts from the people of their own communities 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHE 9 
 
 but by largesses from their denominational head- 
 quarters. The fresh, clear-flowing springs which 
 once sustained them, in other words, are now dried 
 up, and they are kept alive only by streams of water 
 brought to them by pipe-lines laid from distant 
 reservoirs. Of the new churches efficiently organ- 
 ized and oftentimes handsomely housed in city and 
 suburban neighborhoods, the majority these days 
 represent not a natural growth in the spiritual soil 
 of the community in which they are located, but an 
 artificial growth imported and implanted from out- 
 side. It is the denominational machine, that is 
 to say, which has rushed in, and imposed upon 
 a locality an institution which it would never 
 have produced of itself. Once established, this 
 institution is sustained indefinitely by an elaborate 
 irrigation system of annual grants, secretarial 
 visitations, gifts or loans of building funds, etc., 
 from national headquarters. If our central de- 
 nominational organizations should for any reason 
 suddenly cease to function, if their vast financial 
 reservoirs should no longer be available for sec- 
 tarian propoganda, if our churches should all at 
 once be called upon to support themselves, great 
 numbers of them, both old and new, in city and in 
 country, would wither and fade and ultimately 
 perish, as the people of a land, the ports of which 
 are blockaded by an enemy in war, die miserably of 
 starvation. The present outward appearance of the 
 churches, in other words, is no accurate test of their 
 real condition. The sole criterion of health is that 
 
10 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 of self-support; and it is just this self-support which 
 is slowly but surely disappearing over wider and 
 wider areas of modern life. Religious activity 
 today represents, to an ever-growing extent, the 
 momentum transmitted to us by our fathers. We 
 are living on capital which we have not produced 
 but inherited. Put to this generation the challenge 
 to build and support their own churches — and 
 the result, to the traditionally minded at least, 
 would be positively terrifying. 
 
 The most impressive indication, however, of this 
 waning religious vitality, of which we are now 
 speaking, has still to be mentioned. I refer to the 
 appalling failure of the ministerial supply. For 
 years it has been noted with alarm that young men, 
 especially those of the better order of intelligence 
 and character, are no longer entering the service 
 of the church as a profession. Men who in other 
 times would have inevitably given their lives to the 
 ministry, now enter the field of medicine, or social 
 service, or even business and the law. The enroll- 
 ment at most of the theological schools in the 
 country has been steadily declining during the past 
 generation, until today the situation is one of 
 positive collapse. It is conservatively estimated 
 that five thousand (5,000) pulpits were vacant for 
 lack of clergymen in June, 1921, and that only six- 
 teen hundred (1,600) students were in that month 
 being graduated to meet this need. Another five 
 years, at the present rate of supply and demand, 
 will see ten thousand (10,000) empty pulpits, with 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 11 
 
 nobody to fill them. During the World War it was 
 confidently believed that the spiritual revival which 
 was to follow upon this vast cataclysm, would bring 
 hosts of young men to the service of religion. 
 Stirred to their depths by sudden experiences of 
 peril and death, confronted by the spectacle of a 
 shattered and bleeding world, disciplined to the 
 rigors of daily sacrifice, these young soldiers must 
 surely find God, and yearn, when peace shall come, 
 to give themselves utterly to the work of his 
 Kingdom! Nothing of the kind, however, has 
 eventuated. On the contrary, just the opposite has 
 taken place. The close of the war was followed by 
 the greatest slump in attendance at American 
 divinity schools in recent history. What is worse, 
 there is little prospect of improvement in the future. 
 In one great denomination a total of only tw^enty- 
 one candidates for theological study is now known, 
 and these are by no means every one of them certain ! 
 In seeking explanation of this phenomenon, 
 investigators are prone to lay emphasis upon its 
 economic aspects. Men do not enter the ministry, 
 they argue, because salaries are disgracefully 
 inadequate. This factor is, of course, not to be 
 ignored, but we believe that it is far removed, all 
 the same, from the actualities of the situation. 
 Who that knows the idealism of many of our 
 American youth can believe that the financial 
 problem is anything more than a complicating 
 feature of the situation? Are men refusing to seek 
 positions on the faculties of our colleges and uni- 
 
12 NEW CHUKCHES FOE OLD 
 
 versities because the pay of a teacher is only a little 
 higher than that of a clergyman? Are they turning 
 away from the social service field because it offers 
 no promise of large salaries? Are the ranks of our 
 poets, musicians and scholars becoming suddenly 
 depleted because one must starve while seeking the 
 ideal of one's heart? Worth-while men are as eager 
 today to take up worth-while work, involving sacri- 
 fice to high ends, as they ever were. But such men 
 must be convinced that the work is really worth- 
 while; and it is of just this that they are not con- 
 vinced in the case of the professional ministry. Few 
 men are today so mean, or so quixotic, as to do it 
 reverence. The idealistic youth, looking abroad 
 over the world to discover the field of service where 
 he can ^^spend and be spent" with the best results 
 of divine achievement, frankly regards the religious 
 field as sheer waste of effort. What is more, this 
 youth is increasingly being sustained in his judg- 
 ment by those of the older generation to whom he 
 naturally turns for counsel. Ministers know so 
 well in their own hearts the plight of the churches, 
 that they no longer have courage to persuade the 
 young men of their parishes to ^^leave all and 
 follow." Parents, even those who are faithfully 
 associated with church life, see so little prospect of 
 usefulness in the ministry that they are unwilling 
 that their sons shall enter the profession. The 
 present condition of our American theological 
 seminaries shows two things with perfect clear- 
 ness — first, that the rising generation has no confi- 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 13 
 
 dence in the eflScacy and worth of the churches as 
 they exist today; and secondly, that the passing 
 generation is steadily losing the confidence which 
 it once had. Which means that organized religion 
 has lost vitality to such an extent that it is no 
 longer able to accomplish the processes of its own 
 reproduction ! Like stock which has run out, it has 
 suddenly become sterile. 
 
 Consolation in the present crisis is still sought, 
 by those reluctant to face reality, in the so-called 
 church statistics which are published every now 
 and then. These indicate an increase in church 
 membership at a rate not at all discouraging. 
 Thus in 1920, after a decline not unnaturally occa- 
 sioned by the war, statistical reports showed a gen- 
 eral increase. Such figures would seem to answer 
 every charge of waning interest and depleted 
 vitality in the churches. But what is behind these 
 figures? What do they really mean? We have no 
 doubt that thousands of new names are added to 
 our church rolls every year; but how many old 
 names are ever removed? Church members are 
 strangely akin to political office-holders — few die, 
 and none resign! The membership roll of the 
 average church carries the names not only of those 
 actively and thus genuinely associated with the 
 institution, but of an indefinite number of the "lost, 
 strayed or stolen." It counts among the "regulars'' 
 those whose regularity is attested by nothing better 
 than unfailing attendance at the annual Easter 
 services. It duplicates the lists of inmates in the 
 
U NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 old ladies' homes, and competes shamelessly with 
 the headstones in the cemeteries. As for the new 
 names added to the roll each year, these include the 
 "transfers'' from other churches, the converts made 
 at elaborate revivals, most of whom are won only 
 to be lost, and the adolescents confirmed in a mem- 
 bership which they do not understand and will not 
 necessarily fulfill. Church statistics are always 
 the most inaccurate, frequently the most dishonest, 
 on record. Against these reports which indicate so 
 happy an increase in church membership each 
 year, we place the grim fact, flung into the face of 
 a complacent nation by the Inter-Church World 
 Movement, a body as remarkable for its integrity as 
 for its piety and zeal — that only sixty per cent of 
 the people of America have anything to do with the 
 churches, either Catholic or Protestant, and that 
 three children out of every four in the country 
 never receive any religious instruction of any kind ! 
 Confirmation of these definite facts as to the col- 
 lapse of the churches, may be found in certain 
 intangible but none the less impressive "signs of 
 the times" which are plain to all who have eyes to 
 see. Thus, how feeble is the public influence of the 
 churches today as compared with that which they 
 wielded a half-century ago ! The opposition of the 
 churches, for example, to the Darwinian theory, in 
 the decades of the '60s and the '70s, shook the 
 world, and the resulting battle between science and 
 religion is remembered as one of the great events of 
 the nineteenth century. Today, per contra^ the 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 15 
 
 churches might be opposed no less strenuously to 
 Einstein's doctrine of relativity or Bergson's theory 
 of creative evolution, but nobody would know it; 
 or, if any knew it, they would not care. 
 
 In the same way, the ministers of the church have 
 in our time sunk into figures of relative unimpor- 
 tance. Yesterday the minister was a personage of 
 large public influence and distinction ; he held great 
 offices, led opinion, and dominated community life. 
 Today the minister, with few exceptions, is com- 
 pletely overshadowed by the college president, the 
 editor, the social reformer and the politician ; he has 
 fallen, by a process as gradual but as inexorable 
 as the melting of a glacier, into the comparative 
 obscurity of parish administration. It is common 
 to attribute this decline in the influence of the 
 ministry to decline in the calibre of the men in the 
 profession — and this undoubtedly has something to 
 do with the phenomenon. But much more im- 
 portant is the decline in the whole social status of 
 the church and its ministerial office. There are 
 men of preeminent power in the pulpit today; 
 Bishop Williams is as great a churchman. Rabbi 
 Wise as great a preacher, as America has ever 
 known. But such men possess not a tithe of the 
 influence and fame enjoyed by men of earlier days 
 in no way their equal. As for the scores of able 
 men still active in the churches, the vast majority 
 languish in an obscurity which even the humblest 
 of their predecessors would have despised. The 
 melancholy fact is that the world is no longer inter- 
 
16 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 ested in churches and ministers as they are known 
 today. The Sunday utterances of leading preachers 
 were always adequately and occasionally fully re- 
 ported in the newspapers of thirty and fifty years 
 ago ; today, the greatest men, such as Felix Adler, 
 for example, pass unreported. Sermons in the old 
 days were printed in permanent book form, and 
 occupied a prominent place among current publica- 
 tions; today, apart from the writings of a few 
 sentimentalists of a spiritual Ella Wheeler Wilcox 
 type, a volume of sermons is almost unknown. 
 There was a time, be it said, when a man's place in 
 the ministry was his guarantee of position and 
 influence; in our time, this place must be disguised, 
 forgotten, or forgiven, as a first condition of public 
 confidence. The garb of the priest, in other words, 
 has become more often an occasion for scorn than 
 for reverence. 
 
 As for the general life of the present day, who 
 can testify that the churches are any longer of 
 much importance? Apart from a few traditional- 
 ists and conventionalists, who cares very much 
 whether they continue to do business or not? As 
 social organizations, for example, what churches 
 occupy place in the lives of men and women com- 
 parable to Masonic lodges. Rotary clubs, granges, 
 or even political parties? As agencies for public 
 welfare, how can the churches be compared for a 
 moment with city clubs, women's clubs, social set- 
 tlements, or consumers leagues? As assembly 
 places for purposes of education or reform, are the 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 17 
 
 churches in the same class with community centres, 
 public forums, current events classes, Chautauquas, 
 or the ^'movies"? As sources of refreshment and 
 inspiration, are not the churches fast yielding 
 ground to libraries, art-galleries, symphony and 
 operatic concerts, and that love of Nature which is 
 fast becoming as deep a passion to the modern 
 American as to the ancient Greek? 
 
 From the lives of the majority of our people, the 
 churches have disappeared. Those who today sup- 
 port and attend them, are members of a generation 
 reared to the practice of religious observance. The 
 new generation has broken free, and turned to other 
 things. Once the channel in which flowed the 
 swelling stream of life, the churches are now become 
 stray nooks and corners in which eddies stir. 
 These eddies not infrequently make much noise; 
 they whirl with a foam and fury that attracts and 
 holds attention. But they are turning always upon 
 themselves; are uncaught by the majestic flow of 
 that central current which seeks increasingly the 
 sea ; and, in the end, are doomed to become but "a 
 fen of stagnant waters," choked with dead debris. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The outward signs of the collapse of the churches 
 are thus obvious enough. To turn, now, from these 
 external phenomena to the inner realities of which 
 they are the manifestation, is to raise the whole 
 question of the causes of this ecclesiastical catas- 
 
18 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 trophe which is upon us. This, in turn, involves 
 the complex workings of all the social forces, 
 political and economic as well as technically re- 
 ligious, which have been active in the western 
 world since the Renaissance, and even earlier in the 
 fruitful womb of the Dark Ages. Before entering 
 upon even a cursory survey of the past, however, it 
 may be well to consider what the present situation 
 reveals. For the same forces which have been at 
 work from the beginning are at work today; and 
 at this late and climactic hour, they possess the 
 inestimable advantage of having at last registered 
 their results and thus revealed the pattern of their 
 operation. This means the simplification and 
 clarification of the whole problem ; we can see now 
 what has been going on all the while. Suppose, 
 therefore, that a keen observer, who knew nothing 
 of history, were asked to examine the inner life of 
 the churches today, as related to the life of con- 
 temporary society, and tell us what is the matter. 
 What would he say? 
 
 The answer of such a man, we believe, would be 
 direct and plain. He would point out that the 
 trouble with the churches, when reduced to its 
 lowest terms, is two-fold. 
 
 In the first place, the churches are identified with 
 ideas and practices of life in which the modern man 
 has not the slightest interest of any kind. This 
 man is not only not interested in the things which 
 concern the churches, but he does not even believe 
 in them. He has simply moved out of the world 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 19 
 
 in whicli the typical Protestant church was born, 
 and in which it is still living at the present moment. 
 What the churches are thinking and saying and 
 doing, he does not know ; or, if he chances to know, 
 he does not care. 
 
 Just to attend a religious service on Sunday 
 morning is to witness a spectacle which demon- 
 strates in vivid dramatic form the alienation of the 
 modern mind from all that is most real and precious 
 to the church. Here is a building, the architecture 
 of which is a more or less feeble attempt to per- 
 petuate the glories of Medievalism or the rigorous 
 austerities of Puritanism. Here are symbols which 
 are as meaningless to the average observer as the 
 hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb. Here is a 
 literature, offered as sacred, which contains no 
 word written down later than two hundred years 
 after the death of Jesus, and no idea later than the 
 Neo-Platonic speculations of Alexandrian Judaism. 
 Here are readings, prayers, instructions, exhorta- 
 tions, couched in language Pauline, Augustinian, 
 Lutheran, Calvinistic, Wesleyan, and therefore as 
 unintelligible today as the jargon of alchemy or 
 astrology. Here are ideas which embody science, 
 history, psychology, philosophy, of a type which has 
 disappeared long since from every hall of learning, 
 and from all literature save that specifically labeled 
 "religious." Here is an attitude toward the uni- 
 verse, toward life and its destiny, toward society 
 and its problems, which is as strange to the modern 
 man as that of a foreign country, a distant age, or 
 
20 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 even anotlier planet. Above all, there is an 
 atmosphere in this place which seems as remote 
 from our every-day world as the atmosphere of a 
 buried city; from it there seems to be excluded 
 everything that breathes of life and joy. Emerson 
 felt this as long ago as 1838, when he wrote in his 
 Divinity School Address^ "I once heard a preacher 
 who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church 
 no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont 
 to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the 
 afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. 
 The snow storm was real; the preacher merely 
 spectral ; and the eye felt the sad contrast in look- 
 ing at him, and then out of the window behind him, 
 into the beautiful meteor of the snow.'' What 
 Emerson saw in the phenomena of Nature is still 
 more vividly seen in the closely analogous activities 
 of human society. Compare a religious service, for 
 example, with a political rally, a patriotic mass 
 meeting, or a public gathering on behalf of some 
 great movement for social betterment! Is it not 
 evident that in the latter we have a vital interest, 
 and in the former a dull conformity to tradition? 
 If we put by surface indications of this kind, and 
 inquire more nearly into the ideas and purposes 
 with which organized religion is concerned, shall 
 we not find added confirmation of our thesis that 
 the churches deal with matters utterly remote from 
 anything that we really care about today? Sliall 
 we follow the churches' own example and take their 
 creeds as the evidence of what they are standing for 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 21 
 
 in this modern age? By what hocus-pocus of inter- 
 pretation can these platforms of faith be presented 
 as anything other than what they really are — a 
 record of controversies long since forgotten and of 
 beliefs long since disproved? By what imaginable 
 reversion of attention can persons who have learned 
 the lessons of Newton and Darwin, and are now sit- 
 ting at the feet of Bergson and Einstein, be per- 
 suaded to hold interest in affirmations of the 
 Trinity, the Atonement, the Resurrection, Redemp- 
 tion, Salvation, and the rest — much less to express 
 their spiritual ideals in terms of these conceptions? 
 We do not expect men today to light their houses 
 by rush-light, to travel in stage-coaches or on horse- 
 back, to converse in Latin, to live in the thought- 
 world of Plato, or Kant, or even Herbert Spencer. 
 Why should we expect them to accept the ideas or 
 even retain the phrases of the Nicene Creed or the 
 Westminster Confession? Chroniclers may be 
 interested in these documents, but not prophets; 
 antiquarians, but not martyrs or saints. And yet 
 it is the prophets, martyrs and saints of every age 
 who make the glory of the church ! 
 
 If not the creeds, which may be a mere formality, 
 after all, shall we take the religious instruction of 
 the children as witness of what the churches are 
 concerned with at this present moment? Surely, 
 what we want our boys and girls to know is what 
 we think essential to the religious consciousness! 
 But what do we find in the Sunday schools? 
 Study of Israelites, Canaanites, Midianites^ Edom- 
 
22 ]^EW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 ites, of no more importance to our age than 
 Scythians and Bactrians! Study of Biblical 
 legends, about as essential to the modern mind as 
 Greek mythology or Scandinavian lore! Study of 
 the life of Jesus, in terms of miracle and wonder 
 unchanged by anything that has happened since the 
 days of Strauss! Study of theological doctrines, 
 ethical precepts, tales of heroism and sacrifice, 
 which represent no experience nearer to our own 
 than that of hundreds or even thousands of years 
 ago ! And what is done by our Sunday schools, is 
 done again in sublimated form by our theological 
 schools, with their endless courses of Hebrew and 
 Greek, Old Testament and New Testament exegesis. 
 Christian history, doctrine and apologetics. Is it 
 any wonder that children enter Sunday schools only 
 to drift away ; and that it is fast getting impossible 
 to inveigle a wide-awake young man into a theo- 
 logical school on any terms ! 
 
 It may be objected, however, that it is unfair to 
 test the life of the churches today by such criteria 
 as these. The creeds embody nothing that is 
 vital — their retention constitutes a mere gesture 
 of salutation to the venerated past. Instruction in 
 schools and seminaries is defective, and should be 
 drastically reformed, but represents only the nat- 
 ural traditionalism of an institution operating in a 
 field not definitely its own. What is essential in 
 the churches is their service of righteousness, their 
 steadfast witness to moral precepts and spiritual 
 ideals. In an age surrendered to the grossest 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 23 
 
 forms of materialism, the churches keep alive the 
 thought of God and the vision of his holy spirit. 
 In a period which seems to have lost all sense of 
 moral values, the churches impose standards which 
 shall some day be the salvation of the race. At a 
 moment when society seems to be given over utterly 
 to hatred and bitterness, to strife, contention and 
 barbaric slaughter, the churches proclaim unfalter- 
 ingly the truth that love is the sole and perfect law 
 of life. The churches are concerned with nothing 
 less or other than the Kingdom of God on earth, 
 and this is a task as vital today as ever. 
 
 This contention we shall discuss at length later 
 on. Meanwhile we content ourselves at this point 
 with asking the question as to why churches whose 
 business is thus described to be the moralization or 
 spiritualization of contemporary society, are still 
 divided into more than one hundred and sixty dif- 
 ferent denominations, each one distinct from all the 
 others on some point not of life but of theology, 
 ritual, or ecclesiastical order? If religion is really 
 organized for the accomplishment of a practical 
 spiritual task in the world of human relation- 
 ship today, why do we have not one church of 
 God, or Humanity, or the Kingdom, but Metho- 
 dist churches, Presbyterian churches. Episcopalian 
 churches, Congregational churches. Unitarian 
 churches, Protestant and Catholic churches, Chris- 
 tian churches, Jewish synagogues and Mormon 
 temples? If we ask why a church is Unitarian 
 rather than Congregational, we have to consult 
 
24 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 musty volumes in the theological library which tell 
 us of eighteenth century disputes between liberals 
 and conservatives over questions pertaining to the 
 being of God and the nature of man. If we ask 
 what we mean by Presbyterianism, we find nothing 
 to inform us in anything that is being thought or 
 done or even hoped today, but must journey far 
 back to a distant city in a remote age, and study 
 the teachings of an intolerant dogmatist by the 
 name of John Calvin. If we inquire why there is 
 an Episcopalian church in America in the year 
 1921, we must seek an answer in the England of 
 1530, the elements of which are strangely com- 
 pounded of theological dogma, ecclesiastical law, 
 and personal and political events in the history of 
 the Tudors. If we ask about Protestants and 
 Catholics, and add to these the Greek church and 
 the Jewish synagogue, we come to regions as fan- 
 tastic and unreal to the modern mind as the lands 
 seen by Gulliver in his famous travels. The fact 
 of the matter is, there is not a single one of the 
 historic denominations or churches which repre- 
 sents in its separate organic life anything that is 
 remotely connected with the religious ideas and 
 purposes of the present hour. Their presence in 
 the world today is as anomalous as would be the 
 survival, as organized groups in modern society, of 
 the "blues'' and the "greens" of ancient Byzantium, 
 or the cavaliers and roundheads of Stuart England. 
 Their existence serves no purpose other than that 
 of perpetuating the memory of controversies over 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 25 
 
 matters once deemed of vital concern to the life and 
 destiny of the race, but now a subject merely of 
 curiosity or even jest. Their very names speak a 
 dead language, and carry the odor of a gutted 
 candle. And yet, if challenge is spoken to the 
 churches to deliver themselves from ^^the body of 
 this death" — ^to prove the sincerity of their own 
 spiritual professions by dropping their separate 
 names, abandoning their competitive sects, burying 
 their theological and ecclesiastical disputations, 
 and uniting in one all-inclusive organization for the 
 doing of the task of the Kingdom which is alone 
 rightly before them — they hesitate, and in the end, 
 for all the shame of it, refuse! Again and yet 
 again, in recent years, has the chance been given to 
 the churches to throw down their denominational 
 barriers, and become as "one body in Christ.'' An 
 unexampled opportunity came at the close of the 
 Great War, and was nobly seized by the early 
 leaders of the Inter-Church World Movement. But 
 the churches still preserve, as a woman her honor, 
 their artificial sectarian differences. The most they 
 will consider is the establishment of certain inter- 
 church bodies, like the Federal Council of the 
 Churches of Christ in America, for the doing of 
 work which they themselves either cannot or will 
 not do. Which means, if we are honest enough to 
 recognize plain facts, that the churches in the last 
 analysis are more interested in theological ideas 
 than in Christian work, more concerned with 
 dogmas of the past than with duties of the present 
 
26 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 or dreams and visions of the future ! Our churches 
 are Methodist churches, Episcopalian churches, 
 Presbyterian churches, Unitarian churches, Protes- 
 tant churches. Catholic churches, first; and Chris- 
 tian churches, second. Their raison d'etre is 
 primarily a confession of faith which is peculiar to 
 themselves, and only incidentally a platform of 
 social reform which is common to all right-minded 
 men the world around. To teach their own particu- 
 lar theological doctrines, to make converts to their 
 own exclusive way of life, to advance their own 
 patented, copyrighted, specialized sectarian inter- 
 est, this is the end and aim of their continued 
 existence. If it were not, then they would no 
 longer exist, for the modern world has no place 
 for Congregational, Episcopalian, and Unitarian 
 churches apart from churches. The conclusion is 
 inevitable. So long as the denominations survive, 
 and stand forth as the one distinctive feature of the 
 religious world, it is foolish to talk about the 
 churches seeking ^^first the Kingdom of God and 
 his righteousness." 
 
 We repeat, therefore, that the churches today are 
 concerned with things in which the modern man has 
 not the slightest interest. They live in a different 
 world from the rest of society. Their thoughts are 
 not our thoughts, nor their ways our ways ! This 
 is as true in spirit, if not in letter, of liberal 
 churches, so-called, as of orthodox. For while 
 these liberal churches have thrown off many of the 
 fetters of ancient dogmatism, and practice a free- 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHUKOHES 27 
 
 dom of inquiry which acquaints them with much 
 that is best in modern knowledge and experience, 
 they still remain denominational institutions apart 
 from the main current of life. They represent 
 denominational interests, whose character is de- 
 termined by historic reactions or rebellions from 
 older bodies, and whose mission is the service of 
 some peculiar opinion or habit of mind. It is no 
 accident that the pews of these liberal churches are 
 even emptier than those of the more conservative 
 churches which they seek to displace, their public 
 influence more insignificant. On all the churches 
 of the denominational order, which means pri- 
 marily all Protestant churches, liberal and orthodox 
 alike, has fallen the same blight of desuetude. 
 Nobody is any longer interested in their interests. 
 How strikingly is this fact emphasized in H. G. 
 Wells'^ The Outline of History, in which he stops 
 only once, in his more than twelve hundred pages, 
 to state what the churches think about man and 
 his history, and then to confess that he prefers to 
 disregard it. On every question save that of Jesus, 
 Mr. Wells evidently believes that the attitude of the 
 churches is so unimportant as not even to be worth 
 mentioning. When he comes to the figure of the 
 Nazarene, however, he feels constrained to pause — 
 but only to give an acknowledgment to theological 
 interest and opinion which it is difficult to dis- 
 tinguish from contempt. Speaking of the Christian 
 ^^persuasions" that Jesus of Nazareth is "much 
 more than a human teacher, and his appearance in 
 
28 NEW CHUECHES FOB OLD 
 
 the world not a natural event in history/' he goes 
 on gently to point out that these ^^persuasions are 
 not the persuasions of the great majority of man- 
 kind.'' Therefore, he says, ^Ve shall hold closely 
 to the apparent facts, and avoid . . . the theo- 
 logical interpretations which have been imposed 
 upon them. We shall tell what men have believed 
 about Jesus of Nazareth, but him we shall treat as 
 being what he appeared to be, a man. . , . The 
 documents that testify to his acts and teachings, 
 we shall treat as ordinary human documents ... 
 About Jesus we have to write not theology but his- 
 tory, and our concern is not with the spiritual and 
 theological significance of his life, but with its 
 effects upon the political and everyday life of 
 men." ^ 
 
 IV 
 
 Mention of Mr. Wells's Outline brings us to our 
 second statement as to what is the trouble with the 
 churches. If, on the one hand, it must be said that 
 the churches are concerned with matters in which 
 the modern man has little or no interest, so, on the 
 other hand, it must be said that they are not con- 
 cerned with matters in which the modern man has 
 the most absorbing interest. The churches, to their 
 bitter cost, return the compliment of man's refusal 
 to be interested in theological or ecclesiastical 
 matters, by refusing themselves to be interested in 
 political, economic and social matters. They are 
 
 ^Volume I, page 573. 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 29 
 
 alienated from the world, in other words, not only 
 because they give peculiar attention to their own 
 esoteric affairs of faith, worship and organization, 
 but also because they refuse or neglect to share this 
 attention with the affairs of the every-day life of 
 men. What would men care how much the 
 churches played with their creeds and symbols, if 
 only they gave their main strength to the business 
 of "Grod's commonweal/' 
 
 All this is impressively illustrated in The Outline 
 of History. In the earlier portions of his remark- 
 able story of the western world, Mr. Wells gives due 
 place to the great work of the Christian church in 
 forwarding the achievement of man's primary task 
 of securing a unified society upon earth. ^^Thanks 
 to Christianity," he says, in speaking of the middle 
 period of the eighteenth century in Europe, "ideas 
 of human solidarity were far more widely dif- 
 fused" ^ than they had ever been before in human 
 history. With the opening, however, of that 
 modern era which begins with "the new democratic 
 republics of America and France," following hard 
 upon the epoch of the Illumination in France and 
 Germany, the churches disappear from Mr. Wells's 
 book as though swallowed by some extraordinary 
 convulsion of Nature. Only twice in the last two- 
 thirds of his second volume, which tells the story 
 of western Europe and America from 1770 to 1919, 
 are the churches mentioned at all. In the one case, 
 the author speaks of the spread of popular edu- 
 
 ^ Volume II, page 394, 
 
30 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 cation in England in the nineteenth century, and 
 points out that ^^the disputes of the sects and the 
 necessity of catching adherents young, had pro- 
 duced an abundance of night schools, Sunday 
 schools, and a series of competing educational 
 organizations for children.'' ^ In the other case, 
 he tells of Darwin's establishment in modern 
 science of the theory of evolution, and describes the 
 futile opposition of ^^formal Christianity"^ to the 
 new era of enlightenment. Aside from these two 
 passing references to insignificant and hardly 
 creditable activities on the part of organized 
 religion, we would never know, from Mr. Wells's 
 narrative, that there were such institutions in the 
 western world as Catholic and Protestant churches. 
 And yet he is telling in this portion of his story of 
 the events which mark the climax of modern 
 history — the political revolutions of the last quarter 
 of the eighteenth century, the industrial revo- 
 lution of the first quarter of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, the scientific renaissance of the evolution 
 period, the flowering in manifold good works of 
 social and humanitarian idealism, the rise of 
 Socialism, the organization of trade unions, the 
 genesis of the class struggle, the development of 
 nationalistic imperialism, the Great War, the Rus- 
 sian revolution, and the Peace! Never have so 
 many world-changing and world-shaking events 
 been crowded into so short a period of time. Never 
 
 * Volume II, page 396. 
 3 Volume IJ, page 421* 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 31 
 
 have such forces been let loose in society, to the 
 weal or woe of men. It is these one hundred and 
 fifty years that determine the destiny of all that 
 the race has been striving for these twenty cen- 
 turies, this period which has prepared the final 
 dissolution or redemption (who can forecast the 
 future?) of civilization. But in all this era of 
 stupendous upheaval and cataclysmic change, the 
 churches, according to Mr. Wells's testimony, have 
 done nothing worth mentioning. Aside from sec- 
 tarian jealousies and squabbles which unwittingly 
 helped on the cause of popular education, and an 
 utterly ridiculous opposition to the greatest single 
 scientific achievement since Isaac Newton, the 
 record of the churches, in the affairs of modern 
 times, is nil. 
 
 That Mr. Wells's judgment in this matter — wholly 
 unconscious and therefore unintentioned — is to be 
 trusted, we implicitly believe. In nothing is the 
 story of our age more remarkable than in the failure 
 of organized religion to play that important part in 
 the determination of events which marked its 
 activity during the Middle Ages, and in the later 
 more stirring period of the Reformation. How can 
 this fact be explained save on the theory that the 
 churches are not interested in those things which 
 most concern the life of the modern man? The 
 story of modern history, as Mr. Wells outlines it in 
 his book, shows clearly enough what these things 
 are. They are the conditions of his daily life and 
 labor, his conquest of the ills which sap his strength 
 
32 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 and blast his happiness, his struggles against in- 
 justices that deny him liberty, exploit his toil and 
 rob his children of their heritage. They are the 
 dreams and passions of his soul, writ large for our 
 instruction in the great movements of social better- 
 ment which have swept the world like cleansing 
 floods in the last one hundred years. The suppres- 
 sion of the slave trade, the abolition of chattel 
 servitude in America, the extension of the franchise, 
 the advancement of education, the emancipation of 
 women and of labor, the care and protection of 
 children, disarmament and international peace, 
 social justice as applied to wages, hours, employ- 
 ment, housing, health, public ownership of natural 
 resources and democratic control of industry — 
 these are the things which have held his heart, and 
 prompted glad hazard even of life on their behalf. 
 These, and not the Fall, the Incarnation and the 
 Atonement, constitute the drama of human destiny, 
 as we understand it at this moment; and it is in 
 the cast of this drama, that the churches, both 
 Protestant and Catholic, do not appear at all. In 
 only one of these great movements, in which the 
 interest of men has been so intimately involved, 
 have the churches been active agents of reform. We 
 refer, of course, to the struggle for the prohibition 
 of alcoholic beverages, which was made exceptional 
 by the presence of unusual conditions of agitation. 
 In every other movement of the kind, the churches 
 have been either indifferent or ineffective — or, as 
 in the anti-slavery movement yesterday and the 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 33 
 
 labor movement today — utterly and shamelessly 
 antagonistic. 
 
 In saying this, we are not unmindful of the fact 
 that there have been great leaders in the churches, 
 from William Ellery Channing and Theodore Par- 
 ker on the one hand to Josiah Strong, Washington 
 Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch on the other, 
 who have interpreted religion in terms of those 
 ideals and movements of social change which hold 
 the interest, because they promise the fulfillment, 
 of man's life. But these prophets, like the prophets 
 which were before them, have been as voices crying 
 in the wilderness! Neither do we forget that, in 
 recent years, the official bodies of many of our de- 
 nominations, made keenly sensitive to the obligation 
 of the churches to enter sympathetically and help- 
 fully into the every-day life of men, have formu- 
 lated platforms of social betterment which do credit 
 to the enlightenment and courage of the men respon- 
 sible for their enactment. But these platforms, 
 like the latter-day platforms of our political parties, 
 are fine words seldom translated into deeds! Say 
 what we will, hope what we may, the churches that 
 stand in rural lanes and in city avenues are not 
 interested in the social passions of the hour. They 
 do not function in those fields of life which are to- 
 day being watered by the tears and blood of men. 
 They are of no effect in politics; they are heedless 
 or openly hostile to labor's struggle for emancipa- 
 tion; they are silent on the woes of women; they 
 are nationalistic sycophants in the vast issues of 
 
34 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 war and peace; even in the traditional activities of 
 charity and social welfare, they are all but ousted 
 from the field by special agencies created to do work 
 which the churches should never have allowed to 
 pass from their control. All about us are the press- 
 ing problems of modern life, in their manifold 
 political, economic and industrial phases. These 
 problems are stirring men to the bottom of their 
 souls, prompting them to sacrifices akin to those of 
 the early Christian martyrs, because they know that 
 out of these proceed the issues of life. They are the 
 only things worth living for, certainly the onl;y 
 things worth dying for, at this present hour. They 
 are the things that count today in the vast concern 
 of man's spiritual destiny. Here is religion, if 
 there is any such thing as religion apart from 
 sordid superstitions and routine rites. But the 
 churches, with the exception of a few valiant proph- 
 ets and wise counselors, do not care. Men may 
 sweat and bleed and miserably die, but the churches 
 are concerned with other things. Like waves of 
 the sea surge the social controversies of our time in 
 streets and homes, in factories, state-houses and 
 universities. The noise of these controversies is as 
 the noise of many waters; it is a roar that shakes 
 the world, and the heart of mankind. But in the 
 churches, as the ocean in the dungeons of Scott's 
 Lindisfarne, it sounds only as 
 
 "... a distant roll, . . . 
 
 For though this vault of sin and fear 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHUECHES 35 
 
 Was to the sounding surge so near, 
 A tempest there you scarce could hear, 
 So massive were the walls."* 
 
 This, as we see it, is the trouble with the churches. 
 They are interested in what does not concern the 
 modern man; and not interested in what does con- 
 cern the modern man. Hence the gulf of separation 
 which now divides the churches from the world! 
 But why should such a gulf have ever appeared? 
 What forces have been at work thus to alienate the 
 churches from society, and society from the 
 churches? 
 
 To this question there are offered various an- 
 swers. The strict religionist — a Catholic, for exam- 
 ple — will declare that we have here nothing more 
 nor less than the severance which must ever exist 
 between a divine institution and a fallen world. 
 Men are not interested in the church because they 
 are corrupt, and thus concerned with transient 
 things, from which it is the church's business to 
 deliver them. The church is in the world, as the 
 condition of fulfilling its appointed mission of salva- 
 tion; bmt it is not, and cannot be, of the world. 
 The cause of this tragic separation, therefore, is the 
 wickedness of the human heart. If it is to be ended, 
 it must be through the surrender of men to the com- 
 pulsions of God as mediated through his holy 
 
 * Marmion, Canto IIL 
 
S6 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 church, and not through the surrender of this 
 church to those enticements of Satan which are 
 ^^the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of 
 them.'' 
 
 On the other hand, there is the answer of the 
 rationalist, or materialist, who sees in this aliena- 
 tion the sign of the corruption not of the world but 
 of the church. Eeligion, to his way of thinking, 
 is an out-and-out superstition, that is all ; and it is 
 the great achievement of the age to have discovered 
 the sham, and delivered society from its bondage. 
 The present-day separation of men from the church, 
 therefore, is simply a chapter in the attainment of 
 human liberty. Men are through with religion, as 
 they are through with magic; through with the 
 priest and his altar, as they are through with the 
 magician and his wand. For centuries, they have 
 been held in the darkness of cult and creed. Now 
 they are on the highroad, in the light, among the 
 winds — free men forevermore! 
 
 With neither of these answers to our question, are 
 w^e satisfied. For one thing, we do not believe that 
 religion is a superstition. On the contrary, we hold 
 with John Fiske in his affirmation of ^^the ever- 
 lasting reality of religion.'' For religion is to be 
 regarded as the effort of man to win the best and 
 highest that he knows. It is the struggle to estab- 
 lish upon the earth the utmost of the dreams and 
 visions of his soul. It is the endeavor to move on- 
 ward and upward out of past darkness and confu- 
 sion and hate into future light and order and 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE CHURCHES 37 
 
 brotherly love, through the motive power of the 
 spirit which, as Henry Adams has put it in his 
 Education^ ^4s the highest energy ever known to 
 man.'' Interpreted in this sense, religion is as ever- 
 lasting as the stars, as permanent as "the founda- 
 tions of the earth." So long as man endures, 
 religion will endure as the 
 
 "Center and soul of every sphere'^ 
 
 of his true being. 
 
 On the other hand, however, we have no confi- 
 dence in the churches, either Protestant or Cath- 
 olic, liberal or orthodox, as they exist and work 
 among us at the present moment. He who imagines 
 that religion is to be found in the churches, save 
 as it appears in the lives of devoted individuals 
 who may belong to them, confuses "churchianity" 
 with Christianity, and ecclesiasticism and theology 
 with the high things of the spirit. The churches are 
 apart from life, as we have seen, and therefore 
 apart from true religion. They serve no purposes 
 of vital moment, are directed to no ends of eternal 
 and universal portent. There was a time when 
 religion was in the churches. It was the time when 
 men and women were willing to die for the altars 
 at which they worshiped, and the creeds in which 
 they believed. Who thinks it worth while, however, 
 to lay down his life for the churches today? Who 
 would go to the gibbet, or the stake, or the cross, 
 stop the mouths of lions, "be stoned, sawn asunder, 
 slain with the sword, wander about in sheepskins 
 
38 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 and goatskins, ♦ * * in deserts and in moun- 
 tains, in dens and caves of the earth,'' for the sake 
 of Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, Methodism, 
 Universalism, even Protestantism? How change so 
 lightly from one church to another, or abandon 
 churches altogether, if such loyalties really matter? 
 It is not that men have forgotten how to die or to be 
 loyal. The call of country summoned men in the 
 Great War to sacrifices which it is inconceivable 
 they would have made for any church. Which 
 means that religion has disappeared from the 
 churches as water from a reservoir, not because the 
 springs have run dry, but because they flow in other 
 courses ! 
 
 Something has happened. Eeligion and life are 
 apart, not because life is wicked or religion a sham, 
 but because, as always in such cases, flooding 
 streams have broken loose from channels built too 
 narrow to contain them. Religion and life are 
 apart because men believe that they should be 
 apart, and labor to keep them apart. The fruit of 
 their labor, and of their failure in this labor, is 
 Denominationalism. Failure, of course, was cer- 
 tain, for religion is life, and cannot in the nature of 
 things be kept apart from life. The discovery and 
 proclamation of this eternal truth in our time is 
 Democracy. The study of these two movements is 
 now before us, as the pathway to that new religion 
 which shall give us new churches for old. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DENOMINATIONALISM : EELIGION IN 
 THE CHUECHES 
 
^*Let religion be seized on by sects, as their special 
 province; let them clothe themselves with God's prerog- 
 ative of judgment; let them succeed in enforcing their 
 creed by penalties of law or opinion; and religion be- 
 comes the most blighting tyranny which can establish 
 itself over the mind. . . . When I see the superstition 
 which it has fastened on the conscience, . . . the dread 
 of inquiry which it has struck into superior understand- 
 ings, and the servility of spirit which it has made to 
 pass for piety — when I see all this, the fire, and scaffold, 
 and the outward inquisition, terrible as they are, seem 
 to me inferior evils. ... A sect skilfully organized, 
 trained to utter one cry, combined to cover with re- 
 proach whoever may differ from themselves, to strike ter- 
 ror into the multitude by joint and perpetual menace — 
 such a sect is as perilous and palsying to the intellect 
 as the Inquisition. . . . The present age is notoriously 
 sectarian and therefore hostile to liberty. . . . Hap- 
 pily, the spirit of the people, in spite of all narrowing 
 influences, is essentially liberal. Here lies our safety. 
 The liberal spirit of the people, I trust, is more and more 
 to temper and curb that exclusive spirit which is the 
 besetting sin of their religious guides/' 
 
 William Ellery Channing, in 
 
 Spiritual Freedom 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DENOMINATIONALISM: RELIGION IN 
 THE CHURCHES 
 
 When we speak of denominationalism, we are 
 inclined to limit attention to the Protestant world. 
 We have been taught to believe that this phenom- 
 enon of separation is a unique characteristic of Prot- 
 estantism, and to imagine therefore that it began 
 to play its part in the religious life of man only 
 with the coming of the Reformation. As a matter 
 of fact, however, denominationalism, in origin at 
 least, if not in outward form and ultimate develop- 
 ment, is quite as much an incident of Catholic as of 
 Protestant history. Its spirit and tendency first 
 entered into Christianity in that famous council at 
 Jerusalem, where Peter and Paul agreed to divide 
 the Roman world between them — Peter and the 
 apostles to take Palestine as their field, and Paul 
 to launch out upon the vast expanse of the Gentile 
 empire. Its divisive power first made appearance 
 at the great Council of Nicaea, in 325 a.d., when 
 the body of Christendom was divided into Arians 
 and Athanasians. The movement reached climax 
 in the eleventh century, when the western church at 
 
 41 
 
42 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 Eome separated from the eastern church at Con- 
 stantinople. All through the Middle Ages denom- 
 inationalism found expression in the so-called heret- 
 ical sects, which refused obedience to the papal 
 hierarchy in expression of their own separate ideals 
 and purposes as independent Christians. Some- 
 times, as in the case of the Cathari, for example, 
 these sects were composed of obscure and humble 
 folk, and had little influence in the development of 
 religious thought. Sometimes, however, as in the 
 case of the Albigenses against whom Simon de 
 Montfort led his barbarous crusade, they were large 
 and powerful groups, and had a profound effect upon 
 the spiritual progress of the times. In either case, 
 they were in essence denominations, although they 
 were never recognized as such, and never allowed 
 by the dominant group in the Roman church to 
 develop an independent life or hold an official place 
 in the ecclesiastical world. In spite of all the pre- 
 tensions of the medieval hierarchy to universality 
 and uniformity, it was divided within itself from 
 the beginning, it marked always with unmistakable 
 clearness and frequently with cruel hate the dis- 
 tinction between orthodox and heretic, and in the 
 end it banished altogether from its circle those who 
 steadfastly refused obedience. 
 
 II 
 
 What these nonconformists were after, of course, 
 was liberty — that "liberty to know, utter and argue 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 43 
 
 freely according to conscience'' which John Milton 
 declared should be cherished "above all liberties." 
 They wanted to be free to find God for themselves, 
 and to worship and serve God in their own way and 
 to their own ends. In this sense, they were the pio- 
 neers of spiritual autonomy. There was no basis, 
 however, for this ideal until the Renaissance had 
 made the rediscovery of the individual which marks 
 the first step in the achievement of democracy, and 
 therefore the opening of modern times. Further- 
 more, there was no opportunity for the successful 
 practice of this ideal, on any other terms than 
 those of martyrdom, until the release of human 
 energy, incident to the Renaissance, had overthrown 
 the temporal power of the Papacy. Then came the 
 Reformation, which was the deliberate setting of 
 the soul over against the institution as the source 
 of life and the center of authority. The individual, 
 now happily delivered from external control, took 
 into his own hands the determination of his spirit- 
 ual destiny. He resolved, like Moses, to meet God 
 face to face, and learn of him direct, and not by the 
 mediation of any priest or synod, the command- 
 ments of his will. A symbol of this emancipation 
 is seen in what is known in history as the "unchain- 
 ing" of the Bible. In medieval times, the holy 
 book in the cathedral or the village church was 
 always chained to the desk, in order that it might 
 not be taken away and read by unsanctified eyes. 
 The medieval priests did not dare to let the people 
 study the Scriptures, for this would mean that by 
 
44 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 themselves, not merely by the mediatory power of 
 church officers, could the souls of men be brought to 
 God. The moment, however, that the Papacy was 
 cast aside, the chains on the pulpit Bibles in all 
 Protestant countries were removed, as a sign that the 
 Word of God, and therefore his salvation, was now 
 free to all. Wycliff's translation of the Scriptures 
 into the vernacular was an anticipation of this day 
 of deliverance, and therefore a heresy. Luther's 
 German Bible was the sign and seal of the victory 
 achieved by his movement of revolt. That each 
 humblest man could open his own testament, and 
 there in his own heart speak with God and learn 
 of him — ^this was the essence of Protestantism, and 
 marked the significance of the spiritual transfor- 
 mation which was consummated by this tremendous 
 event. 
 
 Such deliverance of the individual from the 
 church, however, could not end in any such disso- 
 lution of old relationships as this. It was inevita- 
 ble that new associations should be formed to take 
 the place of the old, for a religion without a church 
 is as inconceivable as a soul without a body. The 
 spirit, in other words, must "become flesh" ; and it 
 did so by organizing itself around the different 
 interpretations which diflferent men placed upon 
 this Bible which had now become a matter of such 
 curious and intense interest. Each leader, having 
 found God for himself — i. e,y out of his own experi- 
 ence! — 'hastened to bring other men to the same 
 experience. This meant, of course, since the age 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHUKCHES 45 
 
 for the moment was one of extravagant individual 
 adventuring, many leaders, many movements, many 
 groupings, many churches. It meant, in a word, 
 "denominationalism" as we have known it in its 
 true estate for the last four hundred years. Within 
 a century after the advent of Martin Luther, scores 
 of competitive and mutually antagonistic sects were 
 in the field. Today the number of Protestant 
 denominations is variously estimated from one 
 hundred and fifty to two hundred. The last relig- 
 ious census of the United States showed that there 
 were more than one hundred and sixty separate 
 denominations in this country alone. Few of us 
 could name more than twenty or thirty of these 
 ecclesiastical groups, and we wonder what are 
 the units which make up so large a total. But 
 when we recall that many of our churches have 
 divisions "north'' and "south," dating from Civil 
 War days; and that one comparatively obscure 
 sect, the Mennonites, is cut up into no less than 
 sixteen denominational sectors — Ammish Mennon- 
 ites, Old Mennonites, New Mennonites, Swiss Men- 
 nonites, Defenseless Mennonites, and so on — we 
 begin to realize what the fact of denominationalism 
 really means. The body of Christ is suddenly seen 
 to be divided like the body of Osiris in the old 
 Egyptian myth, and, like his, to be scattered in 
 pieces about the world! 
 
 ^ III 
 
 To many persons, in our time, this phenomenon 
 of denominationalism is frankly regarded as an 
 
46 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 evil thing for which there is no excuse. It is one 
 of the signs and causes of that collapse of organized 
 religion which was duly noted in the last chapter. 
 To others, however, this division of the churches is 
 only the price which must be paid for that spiritual 
 liberty in which Protestantism had its glorious 
 beginning. Such persons declare that it is not 
 denominationalism in itself, but only the abuse of 
 denominationalism, which has in our time aroused 
 the concern of the Christian world. It is inevitable, 
 they argue, that free men should see the facts of 
 life differently, and undertake to interpret them in 
 different ways and to different ends. It is no more 
 possible, nor even desirable, that men should think 
 alike in their spiritual concerns, than that they 
 should think alike in their political and economic 
 concerns. Just as long as men exercise the right 
 
 "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," 
 
 they will disagree as to conclusions; and just so 
 long as they disagree, they will divide into groups 
 or parties for the advocacy of these conclusions. 
 The only alternatives to such division are a volun- 
 tary "mush of concession" or an involuntary mash 
 of repression, to neither of which the free man will 
 consent. Just to the extent that he understands 
 the worth of the religious consciousness and rever- 
 ences the truth, he will insist upon bearing witness 
 to what he sees, joining himself gladly to others 
 who see what he sees, and striving ardently to bring 
 still others to his own angle of vision. It was this 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 47 
 
 spirit against which for many centuries the medie- 
 val church fought doggedly, and at last futilely. 
 In the great upheaval of the Reformation, the uni- 
 formity of Catholicism was shattered forever; and 
 there came into the world these beneficent "varieties 
 of religious experience'' which in the spiritual as 
 in the physical realm, are the condition of normal 
 development — indeed, of life itself. To bemoan the 
 appearance of division, is to bemoan the recrudes- 
 cense of vitality; to seek the elimination of divi- 
 sion, is to seek the restoration of that ignoble and 
 sterile unity which is synonymous with death. The 
 body of Christ is not in reality divided by the 
 denominations at all ! On the contrary, these sects 
 or divisions are only the "many members'' which go 
 to make up the one body of Christ. Our difficulty 
 has been not that there are "many members," but 
 that these members have not functioned coopera- 
 tively to a single end. Not the use but the abuse 
 of denominationalism, therefore, is our trouble. Of 
 course w^e would be free; but if free, we must be 
 many men of many minds, and therefore of many 
 churches. 
 
 That there is truth in this contention, cannot 
 be denied. We go far astray, however, if we believe 
 that denominationalism is a phenomenon exclu- 
 sively, or even to any considerable extent, explained 
 by that liberation of the human spirit which was 
 the gift of the Renaissance to men. This in itself 
 would never have produced the situation which now 
 confronts us, as it has long confronted us, in the 
 
48 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Protestant world. For what we see today is not 
 freedom, but factionalism ; not cooperation but com- 
 petition ; not variety, but antagonism, of conviction ; 
 not group vying with group in friendly rivalry, 
 but army fighting army to the death. In other 
 fields of life, freedom has not necessarily meant 
 division, or love of truth the severance of human 
 comradeship. In science, for example, savants of 
 every variety of doctrine and speculation work 
 happily together in one all-inclusive society, royal 
 or otherwise. They differ endlessly among them- 
 selves, they argue and debate and challenge, they 
 organize groups to advance one theory and confute 
 another; but they maintain unbroken the common 
 society of which they are all members together. 
 There is no "schism in (their) body"; denomina- 
 tionalism is impossible in their world. For the love 
 of truth, in which they share together, is greater 
 than allegiance to any particular formulation of 
 that truth; and the spirit of freedom, of which 
 they all partake as of a sacrament, has as its first 
 exaction, respect and tolerance for others. 
 
 So also in the social or political field ! Here are 
 we all citizens of one great country. Does this 
 mean that we all think alike in matters pertaining 
 to the ideals and practices of government? Do we 
 maintain "one union indivisible'' by imposing uni- 
 formity of opinion? On the contrary, we free citi- 
 zens of America are many men of many minds. 
 Some of us are Republicans, some Democrats, some 
 Socialists. Every now and then new groups appear, 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 49 
 
 like the Greenbackers or the Progressives. But 
 these differences of political opinion do not tend in 
 any way to divide the nation. Partisan warfare, 
 as we call it, does not bring us to the point where 
 we believe that any one group must withdraw or be 
 banished from the national life as a condition of 
 political integrity. We have tried this practice, of 
 course; once in 1861 by the method of secession, 
 when southern Democrats felt they could not stay 
 in the same country with northern Republicans, 
 and once in 1920 in New York State, when Demo- 
 crats and Republicans united in an endeavor to 
 excommunicate Socialists from American citizen- 
 ship. Both experiments, however, were failures, 
 and served only to emphasize the basic fact that we 
 are properly and pleasantly the inseparable mem- 
 bers of one political household. When we hold 
 patriotic meetings (i. e,, the religious services of the 
 state), we ignore all claims of partisanship. First 
 and foremost, we are Americans; love of country 
 transcends and dominates within our hearts all 
 love of party. 
 
 Strangely enough, also, inside our religious de- 
 nominations, when they have become strongly 
 enough organized to certain ends, discordant opin- 
 ions have appeared without causing any "schism 
 in the body." Take the Baptist church, for 
 example, which has been from the beginning a noble 
 exemplar of the free spirit. In this one fold are 
 found men as far apart as President Faunce, of 
 Brown University, a liberal of liberals, and Dr. 
 
50 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Haldeman, of New York, a pre-millenialite of the 
 extreme order. These men and their followers 
 agree, in all probability, upon no one fact of 
 theological belief, but both find place and are 
 granted recognition in the single organization of 
 the Baptist communion. The Episcopal church 
 presents another instance of the same truth. Here, 
 more than in any other Protestant denomination, 
 the catholic idea of the church has survived, and 
 reverence for the church as an institution has kept 
 its hold upon the heart of the individual. For this 
 reason, among others, this denomination succeeds 
 in maintaining organic unity amid wide diversities 
 of opinion and operation better than any other 
 denomination of the present day. For years, in 
 England, the established church has been divided 
 into the low church, the broad church and the high 
 church. The gulf which divides the extreme low 
 churchman from the extreme high churchman in 
 Episcopacy, is much wider than that which divides 
 the low churchman from the Congregationalist, the 
 Congregationalist from the Universalist, and the 
 Universalist from the Unitarian; and yet together 
 these two precisely opposite types of religious faith 
 and outlook live in the same fold and cooperate 
 with rare happiness and efficiency in the task in 
 hand. 
 
 Freedom does not explain the phenomenon of 
 denominationalism. There is something more in- 
 volved here than the right of the individual to find 
 , and maintain his own spiritual opinion. 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHUKCHES 51 
 
 IV 
 
 It is not diflQcult to get on the track of the further 
 factors that are involved in the denominationalism 
 of our time if we recognize what is so frequently 
 forgotten, ignored, or not known at all, that the 
 Protestant Reformation, whatever it was in the 
 beginning, was in the end not an expression of, but 
 a reaction against, the Renaissance. The reformers 
 themselves were made possible by that free spirit 
 which came into the world with the Revival of 
 Learning in the thirteenth century. They were 
 able to enjoy what never came to their martyred 
 forbears of earlier ages — the boon of spiritual 
 autonomy. No sooner, however, had this move- 
 ment, primarily directed against the Papacy, at- 
 tained its end of freedom, than immediately it 
 turned back upon itself and betrayed the ideal 
 which had given it birth. The forces which led to 
 this reaction, and thus made Protestantism in the 
 end a repressive rather than an emancipating force 
 in religion, are not difficult to trace. 
 
 In the first place, the Bible was no sooner 
 released from the control of the church than it was 
 itself elevated to a position of authority. So poorly 
 did the reformers understand the meaning of the 
 liberty which they had won, that they straightway 
 sought a substitute for the hierarchy which had held 
 men in bondage for so many years, and found this 
 in the Holy Word which men were everywhere 
 studying with such consuming interest. The chains 
 
52 IJEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 were removed, in other words, only to be replaced. 
 Men were granted freedom to read and study the 
 Scriptures, only to be enslaved to the book as they 
 had formerly been enslaved to the priest who read 
 the book. Authority, by its very nature, is incon- 
 sistent with the concept of liberty. There can be 
 no real freedom in the world, if anything other 
 than the soul of man is regarded as divine. If a 
 man is free, it means of necessity that he is released 
 absolutely from the control of external power; if 
 he is subject at all, it is only to those august 
 realities of the inner life which constitute his own 
 essential individuality. It was this idea which 
 was implicit in the Kenaissance, and which, carried 
 over into the religious field, precipitated the initial 
 stages of the Eeformation. But man was not yet 
 ready for the great experience of the open air. 
 Denied one shelter, he must seek another; and he 
 found it, to his great relief, in the Bible. From 
 this standpoint the Eeformation accomplished 
 nothing but the substitution of the Bible for the 
 church as the seat of authority in religion. 
 
 Secondly, there is that intellectual interpretation 
 of religion, known as dogmatism, which has con- 
 trolled the development of Christianity ever since 
 the days of Paul. It was the supreme tragedy of 
 the great Apostle to the Gentiles that, in his zeal 
 for Christ, he was persuaded to substitute doctrines 
 about the Nazarene for life lived in the spirit of 
 his word. These doctrines might not have been so 
 bad if they had concerned the moral precepts and 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 53 
 
 spiritual ideals which were central in the teachings 
 of Jesus; but under the influence of Paul, they were 
 made to comprise certain theories of cosmology, 
 history and divine intention, intellectual acceptance 
 of which was described as necessary to salvation. 
 From this developed that identification of truth 
 with dogma, of religion with theology, which 
 reached its full flower in the creeds of Protestant- 
 ism. Men read the Bible to find out from this 
 authoritative source what it was necessary to be- 
 lieve in order to be saved. Different men reached 
 different conclusions as to what was laid down in 
 the pages of Holy Scripture. Each man offered his 
 conclusion not as his humble opinion but as the 
 irrefutable revelation of the divine mind, and its 
 acceptance as the single way to eternal life. With 
 the result that Protestantism became nothing more 
 nor less than a series of squabbles between rival 
 theological systems ! To flock about the banner of 
 the one true faith, to lift a new banner if none of 
 the old banners carried the right colors — this 
 became the duty of every devout soul. To be a 
 Christian, one had first to be a Lutheran, a Pres- 
 byterian, or a Baptist. To live like Jesus was not 
 enough; the essential thing was to believe like 
 Calvin, Zwingli, or Arminius. To accept an idea 
 about the being of God, the person of Christ, or the 
 miracle of Transubstantiation — upon such weighty 
 matters hung the issues of life and death, a clear 
 conscience in this world and a soul redeemed in the 
 world that is to come. 
 
54 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 Neither Bibliolatry nor dogmatism, liowever, 
 would have created the situation now existing in 
 the realm of Protestantism, had it not been for a 
 third and decisive factor — namely7 the recovery of 
 the spirit and weapons of intolerance which had 
 been momentarily lost in the spacious days follow- 
 ing the Renaissance. Intolerance always and 
 everywhere is the real secret of division. It is 
 because the Roman church from the beginning was 
 intolerant of all nonconformity, that denomina- 
 tionalism, as we have seen, was a factor in the 
 Middle Ages as well as in the Protestant era of our 
 history. Every time a group of heretics was driven 
 from the bosom of the church, a denomination was 
 created; not recognized or labeled as such, but a 
 separatist group all the same. It was this same 
 intolerance, taken over by the reformers to serve 
 their purposes, that split the Protestant world into 
 a hundred hostile sects, and thus brought us the 
 melancholy situation in which we live at the present 
 hour. The only reason why the Protestant 
 churches did not do exactly what the Catholic 
 hierarchy accomplished in its great days, was that 
 no one of these churches exercised temporal power 
 over any considerable area of territory. They 
 flourished not because they believed in and prac- 
 ticed freedom, but because none was strong enough 
 to overcome the others. That they tried hard 
 enough, however, is shown by what Luther did to 
 the Saxon peasants, and Calvin to Servetus; by 
 what happened to the Anabaptists on the con- 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHUECHES 55 
 
 tinent, to the Separatists in England, and to the 
 Quakers and other nonconformists in Puritan New 
 England. Intolerance was the fashion of the hour. 
 In the religious field at least, society had not 
 advanced a step beyond the dark days of the 
 Inquisition. Men had suddenly become dispersed 
 by the explosive power of a new spirit in the world, 
 and now they were kept apart in divisive and hostile 
 groups by that same impulse to persecution which 
 had formerly held them together in one cohesive 
 mass. 
 
 That denominationalism is the spawn of intoler- 
 ance there is no stronger evidence than the interest- 
 ing fact that, in the case of many of even our great- 
 est denominations, there was no intention at the 
 start of forming a new and separate grouping of 
 believers. The Puritans of the seventeenth century, 
 for example, had no desire to leave the Establish- 
 ment ; they sought only, as their name indicates, to 
 remain in that body and "purify'' its habits and 
 customs. They were emphatically stay-inners and 
 not come-outers. It was only when king and bishop 
 harried them from the land, that they found it 
 necessary to build their own churches and seek 
 their own ways. John Wesley led the mightiest 
 religious revolt of modern times, and founded the 
 largest denomination in the Protestant world 
 today; and yet never at any time in his long, heroic 
 and fruitful life, did he count himself outside the 
 fold of Anglicanism. The home church closed its 
 doors against him^ drove him into the highways and 
 
56 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 by-ways to preacli his word, denounced and spat 
 upon him even as the Pharisees denounced and spat 
 upon Christ ; but he sought only as a good member 
 of the church, in obedient exercise of "the law of 
 liberty/' to widen its portals for the entrance of the 
 multitudes, and died not knowing that he was to 
 be remembered as the founder of a new and inde- 
 pendent sect. William EUery Channing, the 
 founder of American Unitarianism, refused to 
 regard himself as anything other than a member of 
 "the church universal." He had his own opinions 
 about the Trinity, and taught radical doctrines on 
 the matter of human nature and the free soul ; but 
 it was never his desire that these personal heresies 
 should become the orthodoxies of a new denomina- 
 tion. What is at work here in the creation of these 
 separate divisions, is the spirit not of freedom but 
 of intolerance. Freedom of itself would never have 
 taken one of these men out of their churches; on 
 the contrary, it would have widened the churches 
 to contain the men. What freedom has done in the 
 Protestant world is only to create an open field of 
 opportunity, in which intolerance can act for the 
 rank development of a denominationalism which 
 was impossible under the triumphant tyranny of 
 the Papal hierarchy. 
 
 Denominationalism, therefore, is no evidence of 
 liberty. It offers nothing that is to the credit of 
 Protestantism. In essence it is the emergence, into 
 modern times, of all that was worst in the medieval 
 church. Death^ and not life, is in this process. 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHUECHES 57 
 
 For this is a warfare of the members which defeats 
 the purpose of God who "hath welded the body 
 together/' 
 
 This judgment, based on causes, is only confirmed 
 when we survey results. Three things are con- 
 spicuous in Protestantism as we know it today. 
 
 In the first place, the Protestant denominations, 
 by the very nature of their origin and life, lay 
 emphasis upon the non-essentials of religious experi- 
 ence. It is always those facts which are insignifi- 
 cant, trivial, picayune, which are central in the 
 consciousness of a denominational group. Try by 
 thought and words to distinguish one denomination 
 from another, and how often do you find yourself 
 dealing with anything that is essential to the life 
 of man? I know no nobler body of Christians than 
 the Baptists. I never think of this church, with its 
 heroic prophets, its unsullied loyalty to freedom, 
 its centuries-old witness through suffering and 
 martyrdom to the sanctity of the truth, but what 
 I offer an inward salutation to its people dead and 
 living. But when I am challenged to describe the 
 Baptist church — ^to tell how it is distinguished 
 from the Congregational churches, for instance — I 
 find myself driven from ideals of truth and legends 
 of heroism to the unhappy discussion of a certain 
 ritual ceremony known as "baptism." I am forced 
 to point out that here is a group of Christians who 
 feel that, in testimony of the full obedience of a 
 
m NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Christian soul, and a condition, therefore, of mem- 
 bership in the church, a person must undergo the 
 experience of baptism — and baptism not by sprink- 
 ling but by immersion, and not in infant but in 
 adult years ! Why this pagan rite should have so 
 central a place in the life of any group of Jesus's 
 followers, may well be left to the sober doctors of 
 theology to decide; but to one who takes life as the 
 evidence of Christian character, it stands at once 
 as a puzzle and a humiliation. 
 
 So also with Unitarianism ! There is no church, 
 I believe, which has tried more faithfully to strike 
 the universal note, and to make central the moral 
 and spiritual content of the teachings of the 
 Nazarene. The Unitarians have long claimed, and 
 not unfairly, that their church is to be distinguished 
 from all others by its emphasis upon character and 
 not doctrinal belief as the evidence of Christian 
 discipleship. And yet, through a hundred years of 
 teaching and example, they have failed to gain 
 acceptance or even understanding of this claim. 
 Inevitably when defining the distinctive character- 
 istics of the Unitarian denomination,^ one finds 
 oneself talking about the nature of man, the person 
 of Jesus, the inspiration of the Scriptures, a dozen 
 or more of theological, literary and historical 
 problems which properly have no place in the 
 religious life per se. 
 
 When we move away from the most conspicuous 
 
 ^ See Ephriam Emerton's book, significantly entitled Unitarian 
 Beliefs. 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 59 
 
 sects of Protestantism to those obscure and curious 
 sects which hold the devout allegiance of earnest 
 people here and there, we find the system gone to 
 seed, so to speak, in points of doctrine or habits of 
 worship which are so insignificant as to be ludi- 
 crous. The Mennonites are a noble people who 
 have purchased their liberty with precious blood; 
 but what are we to think of the contention of a 
 considerable group of Mennonites, that hooks and 
 eyes must be used instead of buttons in the clothing 
 of Christian men and women? In Pennsylvania 
 there is a sect of sober folk who are separated from 
 all other Christians by their practice of perpetuat- 
 ing the oriental ceremony of feet-washing. This 
 rite seems to us, in this western world, not only 
 ludicrous but ugly; and yet, if the Bible be our 
 infallible authority, have not these Christians good 
 reason for contending that scrupulous obedience to 
 Jesus's example must include this practice of wash- 
 ing one another's feet quite as much as of partak- 
 ing of the so-called Lord's Supper? The Adventists 
 can find no Christianity except in the great hope 
 of the Second Coming; and there is a separate 
 group of Adventists who find it obligatory to wor- 
 ship God on the seventh and not on the first day of 
 the week. So the trivialities, and all too often, the 
 absurdities, multiply! Each denomination finds 
 itself distinguished from every other by those things 
 which are in each case non-essentials. We might 
 make a catalogue of each doctrine, practice or 
 ecclesiastical rite which is distinctive of each 
 
60 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 separate Protestant body; then, having made our 
 catalogue, we might wipe out deliberately from the 
 whole field of religious experience, every item listed 
 thereon ; and, when the process of annihilation was 
 over, I venture to say that there would be removed 
 not one smallest thing essential to the great pur- 
 pose for which Jesus of Nazareth lived and died. 
 The magnification of non-essentials — this is the 
 first, and by no means the least melancholy, attri- 
 bute of denominationalism. 
 
 As a second and complementary fact, we find that 
 denominationalism not only emphasizes the non- 
 essentials, but also obscures and oftentimes loses 
 altogether the essentials. Not only does the 
 denomination find itself bound to that which is of 
 no importance, but also cut off from that which is 
 of vast importance. Suppose we should set our- 
 selves to the task of working out and listing the 
 basic principles of the religion of Jesus! Would 
 we not find this an easy task, and would we not all 
 find it possible to agree upon the answer to our 
 inquiry? The religion of Jesus — is it not all 
 summed up in the two commandments of love to 
 God and love to man? If we would be disciples of 
 the Master, need we go farther than his own 
 reputed saying, "Ye are my disciples if ye have love 
 one for another"? Can there be any dispute about 
 the Golden Rule? Are we going to quarrel over 
 the Beatitudes? These are the essence of what is 
 known as Christianity, if anything is; and they are 
 all things so simple, so clear, so inclusive, that in 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 61 
 
 their presence argument ends, contention is silent, 
 and we become as brothers together in the common 
 reverence of the common ideal. 
 
 In our separate churches, however, what part do 
 these ideals play? Love, brotherhood, forgiveness 
 of sin, the Kingdom of God — ^these are mentioned 
 in every church ; but when they are mentioned it is 
 Christianity that is being taught and not Meth- 
 odism, or Episcopalianism, or Presbyterianism, or 
 Universalism. When the sectarian "issue" ap- 
 pears, these first and last things depart, for they 
 are of no interest or importance to the "issue'' as 
 such. If for one moment they could be made cen- 
 tral, our sectarian divisions would by that very fact 
 be conjured away. We would have nothing to 
 quarrel over, no separate roads to travel, no alien 
 altars to flee. Indeed it only needs some over- 
 whelming cause to grip our hearts, for us to forget 
 our denominational lines and barriers and become 
 immediately true members of the one body of Christ. 
 Thus when the Great War swept the world, and the 
 soldiers marched away to the battlefield, they had 
 not come within the sound of guns before all the 
 things which made them Jews and Gentiles, Catho- 
 lics and Protestants, Anglicans and nonconform- 
 ists, disappeared in favor of those essential things — 
 humanity, freedom, brotherhood — which made them 
 one. And if that passion of a great cause, generated 
 by war, could have been sublimated and carried 
 over into the days of peace, our denominations 
 would have been consumed as in a cleansing flame^ 
 
62 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 As it is, however, the cause, such as it was, has 
 disappeared, and men in the churches are again 
 concerned with interests far removed from the 
 hopes and fears of humankind. Were Jesus to 
 return to earth these days, and knock at the doors 
 of our denominational institutions, w^at would he 
 find within? That which he taught and lived, and 
 for the sake of which he died? Yes — and yet more 
 truly No! These central things would be within — 
 but so hidden, buried, lost beneath the accumulation 
 of the trivialities and absurdities of sectarian 
 division, that they would quite escape his gaze. 
 F. B. Carpenter, in his Six Months in the White 
 House, tells us that when Abraham Lincoln was 
 asked about his religious opinions, and more 
 especially about his attitude toward the various 
 churches of Christendom, he replied, "I have never 
 united myself to any church, because I have found 
 difficulty in giving my assent to the long, compli- 
 cated statements of Christian doctrine, which 
 characterize their articles of belief. . . . When 
 any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole 
 qualification of membership, ^Thou shalt love the 
 Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy 
 soul and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as 
 thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart 
 and all my soul." The great President was looking 
 for a church which dealt exclusively with the 
 essentials of religion, and this he could not find 
 amid the welter of denominations. 
 
 Lastly, there is a third characteristic of denomi- 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 63 
 
 nationalism, which must be emphasized as the most 
 important of all. This is the process by which the 
 sectarian church tends to become an institution not 
 of public service but of private possession and 
 interest. The Presbyterian or Baptist church, just 
 because it is Presbyterian or Baptist, has some par- 
 ticular, distinctive, and therefore private end to 
 further. Its primary object is not to serve the 
 public interest in any universal human sense, but 
 to take that interest and transfer it to the service 
 of that especial private purpose for the sake of 
 which it alone exists. Inevitably wherever denomi- 
 nations prevail, there is contrast, and often conflict, 
 between the social and the sectarian goal. What 
 society wants and perhaps must have for the ful- 
 fillment of its life, is alien and sometimes even 
 antagonistic to that purpose which is the sole con- 
 cern of the religious sect. 
 
 Of this there can be no better illustration than the 
 process which has been followed in the development 
 of education in the middle western states of this 
 republic. As these areas were settled in the early 
 days by the pioneers from the eastern seaboard, 
 there were planted, in all the towns and villages, the 
 various churches to which the newcomers had 
 belonged in their former homes. To these were 
 added some new churches, representative of local 
 evangelistic movements. As children came along 
 and problems of education were thereby presented, 
 these churches organized their separate denomi- 
 national schools and colleges, and thus, in addition 
 
64 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 to competing with the public schools, early gained 
 something of a monopoly in the higher grades of 
 learning. The presence of these institutions, how- 
 ever, did not solve the problems of education in a 
 democracy. On the contrary, it complicated them ; 
 for it soon became manifest that these denomi- 
 national academies and colleges were essentially 
 private and not public in their nature. They 
 existed to teach not the truth, but a certain 
 special brand of truth. They were interested in 
 meeting not the social needs of democracy, but the 
 theological and ecclesiastical needs of this or that 
 Protestant church. In other words, these institu- 
 tions had for their primary end and aim, the busi- 
 ness of "putting something over" on the public 
 mind. When, therefore, these commonwealths 
 developed into the ways of settled life, and the 
 hig'her aspects of education became matters of 
 genuine public concern, the people found it neces- 
 sary to ignore or challenge these denominational 
 institutions of learning, and shut them out alto- 
 gether from the established system of public edu- 
 cation. In all these states there were founded the 
 famous "state universities," which are now to be 
 numbered among the educational wonders of the 
 world. And in all these universities, it is a cardinal 
 principle of organization that religion, in every one 
 of its sectarian forms, shall be absolutely excluded ! 
 Now what is true of these denominational col- 
 leges, is true in an even deeper and wider sense 
 of the denominational churches. The latter, like 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 65 
 
 the colleges which they have bred and reared, 
 are private institutions, existing for private pur- 
 poses which are quite apart from the public interest 
 of a democratic society. Note, for example, the 
 ring of so-called "college churches" which sur- 
 round the state universities of the west like a 
 besieging army ! Each denomination plants at the 
 gates of these institutions of learning, churches 
 representative of its own particular theological 
 interest. Here they stand, not because the com- 
 munity wants them or needs them, but because each 
 separate sect hopes to seize some stragglers from 
 the student body of the college, as marauding 
 Indians used to seize straying children from the 
 white settlements and bring them up as members of 
 the tribe. Their purpose in such cases is delib- 
 erately to defeat the public purpose of preparing 
 young men and women for life without bias of 
 political or theological opinion. The success of the 
 churches, in this case as in all cases, is won at the 
 expense of the community. To the extent that they 
 attain their end the community is defeated. They 
 divert attention from the common interest, draw 
 ofE their respective groups from the common life, 
 make division and competition, not union and 
 cooperation, the practice of society. The denomi- 
 nations can not flourish without making true com- 
 munity association impossible. Which means, in 
 all frankness, that our churches, as they exist today 
 for the fostering of private particularistic interests, 
 are anti-social and therefore hostile to public wel- 
 
66 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 fare. When this fact is clearly seen, as it is just 
 now beginning to be seen/ there will be raised the 
 interesting question as to whether our American 
 democracy shall tolerate the continuance of these 
 centers of social discord and confusion. In more 
 than one case which has come to my attention, the 
 citizens of new communities, building their homes 
 in restricted areas, have covenanted that no denomi- 
 national church shall be allowed to acquire prop- 
 erty or do work among them. Why should not 
 this practice become general? Why should hostile 
 interests of competing churches be allowed longer 
 to divide the common life on non-essential issues 
 alien to the public welfare? Why should not our 
 civic communities provide their own churches — 
 organize out of their own social life, that is, public 
 institutions of religion which shall match in the 
 ecclesiastical field those colleges and universities 
 which they have already created in the educational 
 field? The denomination as a competitor, or even 
 open enemy, of the democratic society in the midst 
 of which it conducts its propaganda and sustains 
 its life, is fast becoming one of the pressing social 
 problems of the hour. 
 
 VI 
 
 Denominationalism may be briefly described as a 
 division of religious forces on trivial issues to the 
 service of private ends. As thus understood, it is 
 
 * B^e Joseph B. McAfee's article in The NeiM Republic, March 8, 1919, 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 6f 
 
 the antithesis of religion, and the fundamental 
 cause of the collapse which has now come upon the 
 churches. For what other reason do these churches 
 hold fast to the things which are so utterly remote 
 from the main concerns of life? For what other 
 reason do they remain indifferent to the things 
 which are central to the thought and activity of 
 humankind today? And for what other reason do 
 all attempts to save the tragic situation in which 
 Christendom now finds itself, come sooner or later 
 to failure? 
 
 Foremost among these attempts, spiritually as 
 well as chronologically, have been the experiments 
 of the so-called liberals. The Unitarians, for 
 example, of the school of Channing in America and 
 of Martineau in England, stand first among all 
 modern Christians in their endeavor to subordinate 
 non-essentials to essentials, and to establish an 
 organized body of religion which shall be truly 
 serviceable of public interests. To this end, they 
 have undertaken to build an institution which 
 shall be undenominational in spirit, and thus wide 
 enough to include all men everywhere. Not even 
 to the limits of Christianity have the more progres- 
 sive among the Unitarians confined themselves, but 
 have sought to extend the circle of spiritual friend- 
 ship to horizons wide enough to embrace mankind. 
 Theirs has been a noble endeavor to establish 
 genuine religious unity on a basis of reality; and 
 yet it stands, like those made by other liberal move- 
 ments of the time, as an endeavor which has failed. 
 
68 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 In spite of the highest type of leadership, their 
 group has taken its place as a separate denomina- 
 tion, distinguished from other denominations by 
 certain peculiar theological tenets; and thus has 
 resulted only in the addition of one more division 
 to the already extravagant number of divisions in 
 the Protestant world. 
 
 A second and more direct endeavor to strike at 
 the root of denominationalism, is represented in 
 the movements for church amalgamation which 
 have been attracting so much attention in recent 
 years. These movements are substantially of two 
 kinds. 
 
 The church unity movement is an endeavor to 
 unite in a single body several denominational 
 groups which are more or less similar in thought 
 and organization. An illustration is the attempt 
 which was made in Ohio before the war to combine 
 the Congregationalists, the Methodists and the 
 United Brethren into one denomination. Another 
 illustration is the attempt now successfully under 
 way in Canada to unite the Congregationalists, 
 Presbyterians and Methodists. In the local field, 
 the movement manifests itself in the organization 
 of the so-called "union church," which represents 
 the combination, in a single town or village, of 
 several different denominational churches. All 
 such undertakings, of course, are to be welcomed 
 and their success desired. Yet it should be evident 
 enough that such process of amalgamation can take 
 us only a few steps toward the great end of abolish- 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 69 
 
 ing denominationalism and all it implies. For 
 central to the whole scheme is the old theological 
 idea of a creed or statement of faith, as the basis of 
 religious organization. The creed adopted by these 
 union churches is always simpler and broader than 
 that which characterizes the unadulterated sec- 
 tarian institution. It therefore offers a wider basis 
 of fellowship, and reaches a larger group of persons 
 in the community, than any church affiliated with 
 a single denomination. But in essence the union 
 church represents the same type of institution as 
 the churches which it has superseded. Its new 
 basis of union represents only a new and more 
 firmly integrated center of division from the rest of 
 Christendom. Amalgamation along these lines will 
 reduce the scandalous number of Protestant sects; 
 it will wipe out the ridiculous multiplicity of com- 
 peting churches. But denominationalism as a 
 problem will still remain. 
 
 A more hopeful variety of amalgamation is that 
 embodied in the movement of federation, so notably 
 successful in recent years in the case of the Federal 
 Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 
 This undertakes not to unite denominations into a 
 single body, but to recognize them just as they are, 
 and lift them, by federation on the basis of a com- 
 mon program of action, from the plane of doctrine 
 to the plane of life. The creation of the Federal 
 Council represents an epoch in the history of 
 religion in this country. It has added to society a 
 new center of power, and thus done something to 
 
TO NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 pull the churches out of the mire of inconsequen- 
 tiality into which they had fallen. But such system 
 of federation, based as it is upon the initial recog- 
 nition of the principle of theological separatism, 
 touches only incidentally upon the basic problem 
 involved. The fact that the Council, in spite of all 
 its excellent work under what has been on the whole 
 brave and far-sighted leadership, has done so little 
 to stay the progressive disintegration of the organ- 
 ized religious forces of America, is proof of its 
 ineffectiveness. 
 
 A third endeavor to save the situation is found 
 In the "institutional church.'' This transformation 
 of the old theological institution into an active 
 agent of organized social service, represents one 
 of the great religious achievements of modern 
 times. It is a monument to the awakening of 
 Christianity to the essential aspects of human 
 life upon this planet, which it has so long and 
 scandalously neglected. It is the one successful 
 attempt in our time to socialize religion by harness- 
 ing the church directly to the service of the com- 
 munity. But when we go behind the practical 
 activities of the institutional church, and come to 
 the church itself, we find at once that there is little 
 here to give us hope. For the institutional church 
 is at bottom the same old church we have always 
 known, with its denominational prejudices, its 
 theological barriers, its frequently undemocratic 
 organization, and its always timid acceptance of 
 charity as a fit substitute for justice. The startling 
 
RELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 71 
 
 spectacle some years ago of a world-famous institu- 
 tional church participating in a Billy Sunday 
 campaign, presents convincing demonstration that 
 the institutional church is simply the old church 
 clothed in fashionable garments. 
 
 VII 
 
 The trouble with all these endeavors is the same. 
 They are vitiated by the fact that they begin with 
 the churches as they exist today, and work inside 
 the limitations imposed by the organization of these 
 churches. What is being sought is a revival of the 
 classic church-idea, which represents the church as 
 a sacred institution, embodying certain immutable 
 forces and ideas to which society must somehow or 
 other adapt itself. Implicit in every one of these 
 movements of ecclesiastical reform is the conviction 
 that life cannot go on without the churches. But 
 life is going on without the churches ! This is the 
 central social phenomenon of our time. Only the 
 churches do not know it, or will not recognize it, so 
 great is their obsession with tradition. 
 
 In all these endeavors, therefore, we see the last 
 stage in the dissolution, rather than the first stage 
 in the restoration, of Protestantism. Like a frantic 
 mother's struggle to nurse a dead baby back to life, 
 are all these attempts to save religion in a place 
 from which it long since disappeared. What must 
 be had, if religion is to survive and function, is a 
 return not to the churches but to society, an 
 
72 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 endeavor to restore not the vitality of institutions 
 but the social consciousness of men. Our work 
 must be founded not on the theological but on the 
 social concept of spiritual experience and idea. 
 For it is never the institution which is central in 
 life, but the people out of which the institution 
 is made. Not the church is holy, but humanity! 
 If we want to revitalize and reorganize religion, 
 therefore, we must begin at the bottom, with the raw 
 material of human nature, and not at the top with 
 the finished and therefore already dead product into 
 which this material has at some past time been 
 fashioned. Men and women, the people, the masses, 
 the multitudes, the proletariat, the great com- 
 munion of the common life! This is our field of 
 action — ^here the center of our problem ! If we are 
 to do anything for religion, we must plunge into the 
 stream of life, not play upon the banks and eddies. 
 We want religion ! We want it not for itself, but 
 that we may harness it to the service of men's 
 needs ! Then must we search men's hearts, as they 
 sweat and weep in the ruck of labor, as they join 
 the struggles and share the sorrows of the working 
 world. Unite these hearts in one vast accord of 
 sympathy and action, and there will be no question 
 of uniting churches. For there will be no churches 
 in the accepted sense of the word, but only men 
 living in one life, and working to one end of re- 
 demption here and now. 
 
 Our task, therefore, is to return to society, not to 
 hold apart from society; to build out of it, and not 
 
EELIGION INSIDE THE CHURCHES 73 
 
 impose upon it, the institutions of its life. This 
 means the great experience of democracy, which 
 means in turn the free functioning of society in the 
 creation of the agencies of its own redemption ! In 
 our modern political democracy, some of these insti- 
 tutions have already begun to appear, as witness the 
 school and the state. These institutions have 
 grown as native products of the soil. But the 
 churches, as they exist today, are aliens. They 
 stand not as the quick grass springing fresh from 
 out the earth, but as dead rocks molten in the heat 
 of other days. They have no place, save as relics 
 of earlier processes of life. The churches which 
 shall serve us in the future must be new churches, 
 born of our common life, and instinct with its pas- 
 sions. Therefore to understand democracy, as it 
 developed from out the past, and works among us 
 in this present, is the next task that lies before us. 
 In it is the secret of the religion of our place and 
 time; and out of it shall proceed the church for 
 which men wait. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 DEMOCRACY: RELIGION OUTSIDE THE 
 CHURCHES 
 
"Without Liberty no true society exists. . . . Lib- 
 erty is sacred as the individual whose life it represents 
 is sacred, . . . Personal liberty, liberty of locomotion, 
 liberty of religious belief, liberty of opinion, . . . lib- 
 erty of trade in all the productions of your brains and 
 hands : these are all things which no one may take from 
 you. . . . 
 
 "But when you have obtained the recognition of these 
 liberties as sacred . . . then remember that still above 
 each of you stands the great aim which it is your duty 
 to attain : ... an ever more intimate and wider com- 
 munion between all the members of the human family. 
 . . . That your individual life should be linked more 
 surely and intimately with the collective life of all, with 
 the life of humanity, God has made you essentially social 
 beings. Every kind of lower being can live by itself, 
 without other communion than with nature ; you can not. 
 At every step you have need of your brothers. . . . 
 All the noblest aspirations of your heart . . . indicate 
 your inborn tendency to unite your life with the life of 
 the millions who surround you. You are, then, created 
 for association, 
 
 "Association is the sole means which we possess of 
 accomplishing progress . . . because it brings into 
 closer relations all the various manifestations of the 
 human soul, and puts that life of the individual into 
 communion with the collective life. Liberty gives you 
 the power of choosing between good and evil. . . . 
 Association must give you the means with which to put 
 your choice into practise. Association, without which 
 liberty is useless, is as sacred as religion. . . . Con- 
 sider association, then, as your duty and your right. 
 (For) we are here below to labor fraternally to build 
 up the unity of the human family." 
 Joseph Mazzini, in 
 
 The Duties of Man 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 DEMOCKACY: RELIGION OUTSIDE THE 
 CHURCHES 
 
 In seeking to understand the meaning of democ- 
 racy, as a religion, we need to go back into the 
 past only a distance of some four hundred years, 
 for this tremendous movement, as we know it in 
 our time, finds its most authentic credentials in the 
 significant fact that it had its first appearance in 
 the spiritual upheaval of the Reformation. It 
 was from the Protestantism of the early sixteenth 
 century, so soon to betray its offspring, that it 
 took its birth. Its progress from that time has 
 been through many lands and peoples. Its story 
 divides itself into not less than three distinct and 
 separate chapters ; but its note is always the same, 
 and its fundamental religious character always 
 unmistakable. 
 
 In its initial appearance, democracy is a revolt 
 against the idea of institutional authority. Martin 
 Luther struck this note in the beginning, in his 
 assault upon "the divine right'' of the Roman 
 Papacy. Here was the church claiming to be the 
 sole repository of truth, and the sole custodian of 
 
 77 
 
78 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 spiritual life. Jesus had founded this church on 
 Peter; and Peter in turn had transmitted his pre- 
 rogatives to his successors; and these, by the 
 miraculous process of "the apostolic succession," 
 had transmitted the exclusive sanction of the divine 
 Christ to the existing hierarchy in Rome. No man 
 could come to God, save through the church; no 
 man could find the way of life, save under direction 
 of the church ; no man could attain salvation, except 
 by the mercy of the church. In life and death 
 alike, in other words, the church enjoyed and exer- 
 cised a monopoly of grace. By virtue of "the 
 divine right" conferred upon it by the Saviour, it 
 held exclusive control over the destinies of men. 
 It was this claim which aroused the wrath and 
 fetirred the revolt of Luther. He rebelled against 
 the church — flouted its authority, denied its 
 "rights," shattered the whole idea of its spiritual 
 autonomy. Democracy was launched at the mo- 
 ment when this great reformer dethroned the 
 church by proclaiming that there was salvation 
 outside the shadow of its altars. 
 
 A second chapter in the story of democracy was 
 opened some two centuries later, when the move- 
 ment of revolt spread from the ecclesiastical to the 
 political field. The institution now in question 
 was not the church but the state — the ruler to be 
 overthrown not the priest but the prince. This 
 revolution, long maturing as the fruitage of the 
 Reformation, came to its climax, of course, in the 
 French Revolution, when the feudal doctrine of 
 
EELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 79 
 
 ^^the divine right'' of kings came tumbling to the 
 dust. Since that momentous day the movement 
 has spread throughout the length and breadth of 
 the world, both civilized and barbarian, until it is 
 now only in the remote places of the earth that 
 there are left any kings who rule as monarchs used 
 to rule. A few more sovereigns overthrown, a few 
 more constitutions written, and the work of politi- 
 cal democracy will be accomplished ! 
 
 For a good many years it was believed that these 
 two chapters comprised the whole of the story of 
 this remarkable movement of revolt. In our time, 
 however, with a suddennesis which is simply terrific, 
 we have been taught that there is another chapter 
 still to come, and this the greatest and most 
 momentous of them all. For who is so blind as not 
 to see that in the modern labor movement we have 
 exactly the same phenomenon in the field of eco- 
 nomics and industry, as appeared in the ecclesiasti- 
 cal field with the Protestant Reformation, and in 
 the political field with the French Revolution? 
 The spirit of revolt against institutional authority 
 is moving on; and having disposed of the divine 
 right of the church as embodied in a pope, and the 
 divine right of the state as embodied in a king, it 
 now proposes to dispose of the divine right of prop- 
 erty as embodied in a capitalist! For the indus- 
 trial developments of the last one hundred years 
 have raised up a new institution of privilege and 
 power, this time economic instead of ecclesiastical 
 or political in character; and the spirit of democ- 
 
80 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 racy, now thoroughly aroused, goes forth to war 
 against this as against the others. And strange is 
 it to note that many of those who are most familiar 
 with democracy in its workings in church and 
 state, and who have entered most fully into the 
 inheritance of democracy as transmitted to them by 
 their revolutionary forefathers of the centuries 
 gone by, are just the ones who are most terrified at 
 what is now going on everywhere in the economic 
 world, and most eager to stop it ! One would never 
 imagine that these persons, bitter opponents not 
 merely of Bolshevism but of the mildest forms of 
 social change, are members of a church and citizens 
 of a nation, which were alike conceived in rebellion 
 and born of revolution! I know nothing in all 
 history which is more ironical than the hostility of 
 the so-called democracies of the world to the present 
 day manifestations of the democratic spirit in 
 economic life. And by the same token do I know 
 of nothing more pitiful than the frantic and of 
 course futile endeavors of this hostility to stay the 
 flood of social change! Democracy is the most 
 triumphant thing in all the world ; and what it has 
 already wrought in church and state, it is certain 
 also now to achieve in the economic field. Legis- 
 lative investigations, espionage and censorship 
 laws, leagues of nations, treaties of peace, armies 
 of intervention and occupation — what are they all 
 before the advance of resistless cosmic forces? Have 
 you ever seen a little boy building his houses and 
 castles in the sand, as the tide of the ocean mounts 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 81 
 
 along the beach? How outraged, and then alarmed, 
 is the youngster, when he discovers the waters 
 threatening the structures which he has reared! 
 How vigorously he goes to work to stop the advanc- 
 ing waves ! As they sweep around his feet, he takes 
 his shovel and pushes them away. As they wash the 
 walls of his castle, he piles on the sand, to make 
 these walls higher and stronger. As the waves 
 break through and flood the house, he seizes his pail, 
 and throws the water back into the sea. But all in 
 vain — the waves will have their way ! And so with 
 the industrial changes which are everywhere threat- 
 ening this day to engulf the mighty structures of 
 industrial autocracy. The uprising against this 
 latest form of institutional tyranny has begun. 
 Democracy has precipitated a new battle, and is 
 moving to a new triumph. The choice before us to- 
 day is no longer to be found in the question as to 
 whether the economic revolution shall come or not. 
 It is to be found rather in the simple question as to 
 whether it shall come by mutual agreement, coop- 
 eration, constructive and peaceful change, or by the 
 fire and sword of violence ! 
 
 II 
 
 Democracy, therefore, in its beginnings, is always 
 the same. It is a revolt of men against oppressive 
 institutional authority. But what is behind this 
 revolt? What is the spiritual affirmation, of which 
 such social upheaval is the practical expression? 
 
 The answer to this question is to be found in the 
 
82 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 great movement of the Renaissance. This, as we 
 have already seen, marked the rediscovery and 
 declaration on a gigantic scale of the truth, so often 
 found and again so often lost, that there is nothing 
 sacred in all the world but the human soul. The 
 Renaissance presented to mankind the individual. 
 Its supreme achievement was the elevation of the 
 single human being to a position of supreme author- 
 ity. Democracy is the working out of this achieve- 
 ment. When Martin Luther started his crusade 
 against medieval Catholicism, he founded his faith 
 on what he called ^^the priesthood of the common 
 man.'' It is not these bishops and priests of the 
 church, he said, who possess the sanctity of God's 
 grace. This grace is granted to every individual 
 and makes of that individual a priest ordained not 
 of the Papacy but of the Most High himself. 
 
 Similar was the idea that controlled the great 
 revolutions for political democracy at the close of 
 the eighteenth century. Not the priesthood, but 
 the kingship of the common man was now the 
 slogan of the hour. Not any sovereign of any royal 
 house, but the humblest citizen of the realm, was he 
 who was crowned with divine favor, and who exer- 
 cised the divine right of authority. It was this 
 belief in the individual which was the inspiration 
 behind our Declaration of Independence, with its 
 sublime affirmation that "all men are created 
 equal . . . and are endowed by their creator 
 with certain inalienable rights; that among these 
 are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 
 
EELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 83 
 
 Now in the industrial field comes the same dis- 
 covery, and with it the same movement of revolu- 
 tion. We feel today that the commonest worker in 
 field or factory is a divine being upon whom has 
 been conferred, equally with every other man, the 
 heritage of earth. This worker, just because of 
 his divine manhood, is entitled to access to the 
 earth. He is entitled to enjoyment of those natural 
 resources from which flow the tides of wealth which 
 now bless only the few and privileged. He is 
 entitled to adequate food and housing, to free oppor- 
 tunity for his children, to leisure and comfort, to 
 all the basic blessings of associated life. These are 
 the rights which the humblest workers of the world 
 are now claiming for themselves. They assert that 
 there is nothing which should be denied them, 
 nothing to which they are not entitled, nothing 
 which is not properly theirs. These workers, in 
 other words, have discovered themselves ; they know 
 themselves to be men; they have laid hold on the 
 sanctity of their own souls, and the privileges of 
 life and love which are their rightful possession as 
 sons of the everliving God. And they move on to 
 that triumphant assertion of their individual sove- 
 reignty in the industrial realm, which has long 
 since been claimed and seized in other fields of 
 social relationship ! 
 
 These are the two sides of democracy — the nega- 
 tive, which is the revolt against authority; the 
 positive, which is the affirmation of the sanctity of 
 life, the rights of men, the worth of the individual. 
 
84 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 These together may be described as the old and 
 new testament of the people's Bible. The two 
 can perhaps be combined, and thus summarized, in 
 the one great ideal of liberty, as witness the early 
 and unspoiled achievements of the Reformation! 
 Democracy, in the last analysis, means simply 
 freedom — freedom for every humblest individual, in 
 every walk of life, apart from all institutional 
 authority, to live out the destiny of his own being ! 
 The Pilgrims and Puritans crossed the wintry 
 waste of the Atlantic to come to the unknown 
 shores of this country, in order that they might be 
 free — free to worship their own God in their own 
 way. It was freedom in political relations which 
 was in our fathers' hearts when they declared war 
 upon the government of George the Third, and 
 wrote the immortal words of the Declaration of 
 Independence. And now it is this same ideal of 
 freedom which flies on every banner that is lifted 
 by the laboring millions of Europe and America. 
 It is no accident that at the entrance portal of this 
 great republic, which has stood for generations to 
 all men everywhere as the social symbol of democ- 
 racy, there stands the gigantic figure of the Goddess 
 of Liberty. Her torch of freedom has flung wide 
 its beams into the dark corners of religious bigotry 
 and political oppression. Brighter now today than 
 ever flames the beacon; and when at last its light 
 has driven darkness out of the farthest and deepest 
 corners of the world, the worker as well as the 
 citizen and the communicant will be free of the 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 85 
 
 shackles which long have bound him. Democracy 
 means free men in a free world ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was the faith of men until well into the nine- 
 teenth century, that freedom comprises the whole 
 gospel of democracy. Nothing was ever more 
 beautiful, even though naive, than the confidence of 
 liberal thinkers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, that all that was needed to 
 establish social order and to realize the fairest 
 dreams of human life, was to set men free of every 
 external limitation or constraint. In the begin- 
 ning of his movement, Martin Luther believed that 
 the task of spiritual regeneration involved no other 
 problem than that of liberating the individual soul 
 from the tyranny of the Catholic hierarchy. The 
 statesmen of France and America saw no other 
 problem in political democracy than that of emanci- 
 pating men from the authority of kings, and 
 restoring them to the primeval autonomy of "the 
 social contract" ; Thomas Jefferson summed up the 
 whole political doctrine of the time in his famous 
 dictum, "the less government the better." So also, 
 in industry, there appeared a group of men, of the 
 famous Manchester school in England, who believed 
 they had found the solution of every economic dis- 
 order in the doctrine of laissez faire^ by which they 
 meant the principle that every man should be left 
 free in the industrial realm to work out his own 
 
86 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 salvation. The same idea was carried over by 
 Herbert Spencer into the field of morals, and free- 
 dom set forth in his Data of Ethics as the all-suf- 
 ficient rule of personal conduct. The ills of life, 
 it was believed in those days, all had their origin 
 in the tyranny of autocratic men and institutions. 
 All that was needed to solve every problem, both of 
 individual and social life, was to free the individual, 
 and thus enable him without interference to follow 
 his native impulses and work out his instinctive 
 desires. 
 
 This implicit reliance upon the idea of abstract 
 freedom was rooted in a definite reading of the facts 
 of human nature. At bottom, it was said, all men 
 are dominated by the motive of self-interest. To 
 the human being, as to the animal, nothing is im- 
 portant except the desire for self-preservation, sur- 
 vival, individual prosperity and happiness. These 
 are things which all men want, and which they 
 insist upon having at any cost. Now if men can be 
 only freed to act upon this passion of self-interest, 
 there will result a certain automatic adjustment of 
 relations which will guarantee to all persons the 
 peace and happiness which they seek. Each indi- 
 vidual, in other words, will be limited in his quest 
 of personal satisfactions by the similar quest of all 
 other men with whom he is associated; and this 
 limitation of one individual upon another, will be 
 certain to act, in the long run, as a kind of balance 
 in the social process. It is sure to bring order 
 automatically out of what would seem to be the 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 87 
 
 hopeless disorder of conflicting desires and ideas. 
 It was this faith in an automatic regulation of 
 men's lives by the unescapable modification of one 
 man's actions by another, that induced the leaders 
 of the early nineteenth century to believe that no 
 other regulation was necessary, in order to secure 
 the ends of life. Hence their destruction of 
 spiritual hierarchies, political sovereignties, and 
 economical monopolies! Hence their reading of 
 democracy exclusively in terms of individual 
 liberty ! 
 
 IV 
 
 It is the discovery that this sole reliance upon 
 freedom is illusory, which is the dominant fact in 
 the democratic experience of our day. The indi- 
 vidual has been liberated in one field of social life 
 after another, only to discover that he is not really 
 free. It has been one of the supreme tragedies of 
 modern times to find that democracy, for all its 
 triumphs, is as far away as ever. We are begin- 
 ning to feel, if not to know, that while freedom is an 
 excellent thing, it is not in itself enough. As 
 Dr. Richard Roberts expresses it, in his little book, 
 The Red Gap on the Gross, ^^freedom must have a 
 coefficient, if it is to do its work in establishing a 
 true and permanent democratic order!'' Left 
 alone by itself, to work ^^on its own hook," so to 
 speak, freedom is almost certain to fall into one or 
 the other of two supreme disasters. 
 
 In the first place, it is likely to be abused. 
 
88 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 Liberty easily becomes lawlessness, and the demo- 
 cratic order a degeneration into anarchy. Martin 
 Luther held up his hands in horror at the things 
 which were done by the Christian men and women 
 whom he had emancipated from the yoke of Rome. 
 The excesses of the French Revolution filled Europe 
 with terror, and turned against the revolutionists 
 the staunchest friends of liberty in England and 
 America. Now from Russia there comes the tragic 
 tale of the abuse of the freedom wrested from the 
 Czar. Liberty of itself cannot control the social 
 order; it simply cannot be trusted alone to work 
 out the great ideals of democracy. By the best of 
 men as well as by the worst, by the educated as well 
 as by the ignorant, it is always subject to abuse, 
 and therefore becomes the means of destroying the 
 very thing for the sake of which it was inaugurated ! 
 But the abuse of liberty is not the only danger 
 which is involved. Less terrible, but more fre- 
 quent, is the neglect of liberty. Freedom once 
 purchased at a great price, and enjoyed for a time 
 as the most precious of possessions, becomes in due 
 course of time a thing of commonplace, and is then 
 neglected. This neglect it is which gives an open- 
 ing to what is known in history as "the strong 
 man," and enables such a man to seize upon the 
 8eat of power, and thus to restore in his own person 
 the autocracy of an older day. Freedom when 
 relied upon as the sole principle of social organiza- 
 tion and the single foundation of democracy, again 
 and again does nothing but "clear the ground" for 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 89 
 
 conflict between competing powers and the dom- 
 inance of selfishness and strength. Thus in govern- 
 ment there appears ^^the man on horseback" — ^that 
 sinister figure who has so often ridden rough-shod 
 over the neglected liberty of free peoples. In the 
 industrial field appears the monopolist — the master 
 of privilege — who utilizes the open opportunity of 
 economic life for the accumulation in his own hands 
 of such social power as would have turned a Caesar 
 to envy and despair. Eternal vigilance, we have 
 been told, is the price of liberty; but eternal 
 vigilance is seldom practiced, and liberty, thus 
 neglected, becomes the opportunity for the Napo- 
 leons of state and market-place. Thus is freedom 
 lost as soon as won, and democracy destroyed as 
 soon as established. By abuse, or by neglect, the 
 fairest promises of free men, in nearly every case, 
 have turned sooner or later, like the apples of 
 Sodom, to dust and ashes. 
 
 This fact of the inadequacy of freedom as the 
 guarantee of democracy, has become manifest at 
 intervals in the past, and is supremely manifest to 
 the men and women of our time. Freedom, we now 
 know, is not enough. Democracy, if it is to stand, 
 must have another and second foundation upon 
 which to build. It must have a ^^coeflScient".^ And 
 it is the tragedy of every era of abused or neglected 
 liberty that this "coefficient'' of freedom has been 
 sought not in new or prophetic principles of life, 
 but in a return to that old, discredited principle 
 
 ^ See Bichard Roberts, The Red Cap on the CrosSj page 51, 
 
90 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 of authority, which men had thought to leave behind 
 forever. Where does history present to us an 
 instance of more terrific irony than the resort 
 of men who have won liberty for their fellows, or 
 inherited it from their predecessors, to the practice 
 of shameless tyrannies, when they have seen liberty 
 turned to license or captured by power? This was 
 the tragedy of the Reformation, as we have seen. 
 Immediately that Luther saw what freedom was 
 doing to the people of his time, he gave himself to 
 the work of organizing a church as closely after 
 the pattern of the Roman Papacy as it was possible 
 to build outside the borders of Catholicism; and 
 resorted to the swords of princes to sustain his 
 authority. Instinctively, that is, in defence of the 
 very liberty which he had brought into the world, 
 he returned to the uses of that tyranny to the over- 
 throw of which he had given his life. 
 
 The same thing has been true again and again 
 in the political realm. The liberals of France knew 
 no way of saving themselves from the confusion and 
 horror of the Reign of Terror, except by giving their 
 destinies into the hands of an autocratic ruler like 
 the first Napoleon. Here in our country we have 
 had a contemporary instance, in the speedy resort 
 of the American government in 1917-1919 to Prus- 
 sian methods of social control during a war defi- 
 nitely fought "to make the world safe for democ- 
 racy." During these two years, we were wantonly 
 deprived of liberty of speech, of press, of assembly ; 
 and all on the plea that, in such a crisis of the 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 91 
 
 national life, liberty could not be trusted! Of 
 course, it could not be trusted ! Experience, as we 
 have said, has demonstrated beyond question that 
 liberty is a reed upon which alone it is impossible 
 to lean. But alas for the wisdom and imagination 
 of men, that they know no way of saving the situ- 
 ation except by abandoning this very liberty to 
 which their society is dedicated! 
 
 The same thing will be true, we may be sure, 
 when, through the establishment of economic free- 
 dom, democracy has made its way into the economic 
 realm. We flatter ourselves that such democratic 
 control of economic life will bring us at last the 
 perfect freedom for which men have been laboring 
 so long. But let us not be deceived! In indus- 
 try, exactly as in the church and in the state, 
 it will need but a moment's peril to rob us of all 
 the freedom which we apparently had won. In 
 Russia today w^e see a perfect instance of this fact. 
 Here the revolution has taken place, and a vast 
 new experiment in democracy is launched ! Every 
 true lover of progress desires this experiment to 
 succeed. But almost from the beginning, liberty 
 has broken down; and autocracy, by the deliberate 
 choice of the men in control, has been lifted into its 
 place. In other words, for the sake of democracy, 
 as we are told, the tyranny of the Czar has been 
 succeeded by the tyranny of the Bolsheviki. The 
 revolutionists tell us that their power could not 
 have been sustained and their work thus continued 
 if they had trusted absolutely to the ideal prinei- 
 
92 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 pies of social freedom. This is undoubtedly true! 
 But again we raise the question as to why, in order 
 to protect liberty, this liberty should forthwith be 
 abandoned? Here is a paradox which simply defies 
 explanation! Such return to the practice of cen- 
 tralized authority may be justified, of course, in 
 a hundred ways. It may be described as wise, 
 prudent, necessary, inevitable. But one thing at 
 least cannot be said of it, and that is that it is 
 democratic! We may argue until "the crack o' 
 doom," but it will still remain indubitable that 
 democracy is not democracy when liberty is over- 
 thrown. Some secret here is not yet solved. Some 
 saving principle there is which we have not yet 
 discovered. Democracy undoubtedly means at 
 bottom the action of free men in a free world ; but 
 it is also something more and better than this, and 
 it is this more and better that we must find. 
 
 In seeking this further democratic principle, 
 where can we better turn than to that intensive 
 study of human nature, which revealed to us the 
 basis for the ideal of individual liberty? In this 
 first examination of man's being, we discovered his 
 primary instinct of self-preservation; and on this 
 we established that political and economic prin- 
 ciple of laissez faire, which we believed would work 
 out automatically in terms of social order. In this 
 interpretation of human nature we were right, as 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 93 
 
 far as we went; but we certainly did not go far 
 enough, for there is more in man than the mere 
 passion for survival. Side by side with this basic 
 instinct of the soul is another instinct, equally 
 basic, which is of opposite character. 
 
 This instinct, as uncovered in the animal realm, 
 is what Prince Kropotkin has called "mutual aid.''^ 
 Side by side with the principle of "struggle for 
 survival," in which the early evolutionists found 
 the secret of organic development, later evolu- 
 tionists found the principle of "struggle for the life 
 of others." The brute creatures of the jungle battle 
 not merely in aggression against their enemies, but 
 in defence of their friends, as a lioness in defence 
 of her cubs or Darwin's famous baboon in defence 
 of his forsaken comrade.^ Many of them live not 
 a separate existence at all, but pool their interests 
 and thus develop the phenomenon of herds, as of 
 elephants and deer, and flocks, as of sheep. All 
 through what John Burroughs calls "the long road" 
 of evolution, animals have struggled not merely for 
 themselves but for their kind ; have been dominated 
 not by the selfish passion of survival but by the 
 unselfish passion of sacrifice. There are "cosmic 
 roots," as John Fiske expresses it,^ "of love and self- 
 sacrifice"; and these roots come to flower in the 
 human soul. Man is indeed a creature who seeks 
 the preservation of his own personality; he is 
 
 * See Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution. 
 
 » See The Descent of Man^ page 102. 
 
 ' See Through Nature To God, page 57. Also Henry Drummond's 
 Ascent of Man; James S. Blxby's The New World and the New 
 Thought; and John C. Kimball's The Ethical Aspects of Evolution, 
 
94 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 swayed again and again in fundamental things by 
 the motive of self-interest. But side by side with 
 this instinct is the supplementary instinct of 
 sociality. Along with his passion to save himself 
 is his passion to save his mate. Man cannot live 
 alone; he must have company if he would be sane 
 and happy. It is G. K. Chesterton who refers to 
 a certain lunatic asylum in England as a place 
 inhabited by those who believe absolutely and 
 exclusively in themselves. Rudyard Kipling's acute 
 psychological story of the death of one of two men 
 upon a lightship on the ocean and the tragic loss 
 of reason by the unhappy man who was left alone, 
 is familiar. The pages of history, as H. G. Wells 
 has been lately showing, bear nothing but the 
 record of man's unquenchable desire to live in 
 association with his fellows, and of his age-old 
 experiments in the form of tribes, clans, city- 
 states and nations to satisfy this desire. Whether 
 he will or no, in other words, man must love. It 
 is a very part of his nature to seek and hold to 
 fellowship with members of his own kind. The 
 barriers that divide have no such significance as 
 the bonds that unite. At bottom, we are not rivals 
 but comrades, not enemies but friends. We belong 
 together. To be members one of another is as 
 original and fundamental a part of our being as 
 to be ourselves. Nay, to be thus members one of 
 another, is alone to be really and nobly ourselves. 
 For the transition, or translation, from selfishness 
 to unselfishnesis, from individuality to fellowship, 
 
EELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 95 
 
 brings us at last to the triumphant truism that 
 man can realize his own self only through associa- 
 tion with and love of other selves. Brotherhood in 
 thought and life is alone salvation. "He who 
 findeth his life shall lose it," said Jesus, "and he 
 who loseth his life . . . shall find it.'' 
 
 Now here, in this tremendous discovery of the 
 social instinct inherent in human nature, do we 
 find answer to our inquiry as to the "coefficient" 
 of freedom. Democracy means free men; but it 
 also means free men joined together in the bond 
 of fellowship. Democracy means the emancipated 
 individual; but it also means the organization of 
 those individuals into a social order that is held 
 together not by outward authority but by inward 
 consent. It is this discovery which brings to us in 
 this modern age our new task of democracy. Yes- 
 terday our task was to deliver men from the insti- 
 tutional tyranny of church and state and property. 
 This task, especially in the field of industry, is still 
 undone, and will long remain undone; but today 
 this task of individual emancipation is no longer 
 primary. In its place there stands the new task 
 of finding the ways and means of so ordering free 
 men that they may be controlled and disciplined 
 without sacrifice of individual freedom. The secret 
 of this miracle is fellowship. Already in the 
 religious field there are some groups of Christians 
 who have been able to organize themselves success- 
 fully without the recognition of any ruler or the 
 establishment of any hierarchy. Thus among the 
 
96 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Friends do we find freedom, complemented by a 
 spiritual fellowship which realizes the essence of 
 democracy. The same thing has been deliberately 
 sought, but never yet successfully realized, in the 
 sphere of government. Certainly it was this 
 thought of fellowship, as contrasted with authority, 
 which our fathers had in mind when they wrote 
 that immortal phrase about all "just governments 
 deriving their powers from the consent of the gov- 
 erned." In the industrial field, even before men 
 have themselves been wholly freed from tyranny, 
 we find great experiments in fellowship in such 
 organizations as the cooperative societies of Bel- 
 gium, Denmark and Russia, and such labor groups 
 as the trade unions of England and America. On 
 the whole, however, this task is still before us. 
 We have achieved much freedom, only to throw 
 it wantonly away whenever it is threatened. Now, 
 holding fast to the liberty thus dearly bought, it is 
 for us to seize upon the second and higher principle 
 of life, the source of all order and the secret of all 
 joy — namely, the association of man with man in 
 one high fellowship of the spirit — and build out 
 of it that social structure which shall bring at last 
 the realization of our hopes. 
 
 What this social structure shall be when ulti- 
 mately realized in ideal form, we find suggested in 
 our present-day community, with its great variety 
 of institutions and forms of associated activity. 
 The whole basis of democracy, as thus conceived, 
 may be said to be the community. This is the cen- 
 
EELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 97 
 
 tral fact, the primal cell, so to speak, which is the 
 unit of the whole. Around the community turns 
 the movement of democracy ; out of it proceeds the 
 structure of democracy. Whether it be political 
 government, trade unionism, guild socialism, coop- 
 eration, the soviet, the basic unit of integration is 
 still that locale where men live and work together, 
 the socialization of which constitutes, therefore, 
 the organism of their common life. The community 
 may be described as democracy made manifest. It 
 is the "body" in which "the spirit'' of freedom and 
 fellowship, which is "the Word," becomes "flesh." 
 
 VI 
 
 Such is democracy in its ideal estate ! As applied 
 to religion, it represents the exact antithesis of that 
 denominationalism which characterizes so uniquely 
 the Protestant world. Denominationalism has its 
 origin in intolerance and bigotry; democracy, in 
 that sense of liberty which practices toleration as 
 its primal virtue. Denominationalism works out 
 into a type of separatism which divides men into 
 scores of competitive and warring camps; democ- 
 racy on the other hand fulfills itself in a sense of 
 fellowship which unites men in the service of 
 one another. Denominationalism inevitably takes 
 refuge in some form of authority for the imposi- 
 tion upon unwilling souls of uniformity ; democracy 
 glories in the abrogation of every last trace of auto- 
 cratic control, and seeks uniformity only as a spon- 
 
98 NEW OHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 taneous development from within of that conscious- 
 ness of common life which is the community in 
 action. Denominationalism means reliance upon 
 dogmas, institutions, a creed and church; democ- 
 racy means confidence in men — in men as indi- 
 viduals seeking the fulfillment of their native 
 powers in terms of abundant life, as brothers seek- 
 ing their happiness in terms of social welfare. 
 
 Of such democracy, of course, we have but an 
 imperfect beginning at the present moment. We 
 have entered only, and all to inadequately, upon 
 the use of liberty, which means hardly more today 
 than a gross battle between individuals and groups 
 or classes of individuals, for social predominance. 
 All about us are institutions of authority, sustained 
 and reverenced as means of establishing some type 
 of order in these internicine struggles. Freedom 
 to tyrannize, to exploit, to mount and hold the seats 
 of power, with not a vestige of that fellowship 
 which marks the fulfillment of the community ideal 
 — ^this is what our democracy too often means 
 today ! But blind is he who sees nothing more in the 
 liberty thus gained and used than a continued battle 
 for power and place. Not always will freedom 
 thus be abused or neglected. As men struggle one 
 with another, as class battles selfishly with class, 
 as revolutions upheave the strata of society and 
 reorder arrangements among men, we can see 
 always a broadening of the social base and a widen- 
 ing of the barriers of brotherhood. Slowly but 
 surely, with much "groaning and travailing to- 
 
RELIGION OUTSIDE THE CHURCHES 99 
 
 gether," freedom is making its way to fellowship, 
 and both to the community ideal. Democracy is 
 not here, but is coming ! Some day there shall be 
 among us a free fellowship of free men, to the end 
 of the common service of the common good. 
 
 This it is which Paul foresaw when, in his first 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, he wrote, ^^We being 
 many are one body in Christ, and every one mem- 
 bers one of another/' Nobler still is that modern 
 statement of democracy which is given to us by 
 Edward Carpenter, in his great book entitled 
 Towards Democracy, "In the deep eaves of the 
 heart,'' he writes, "far down, running under the 
 outward shows of the world and of people, running 
 under continents, under the fields and the roots of 
 the grasses and trees, under the little thoughts and 
 dreams of men, and the history of races, I see, I 
 feel and hear wondrous and divine things. I seem 
 to see the strands of affection and love, so tender, 
 so true and life-long, holding together the present 
 and past generation. ... I dream that these are 
 the fibres and nerves of a body ... a network, 
 an innumerable vast interlocked ramification, 
 slowly being built up; all dear lovers and friends, 
 all families and groups, all peoples, nations, all 
 times, all worlds perhaps, members of a body, 
 archetypal, eterne, glorious, the center and perfec- 
 tion of life, the organic growth of God himself in 
 time." 
 
 Here is our final word in interpretation of democ- 
 racy. Here is democracy become the religion of the 
 
100 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 people, of which we spoke in the beginning. Democ- 
 racy is fellowship. It is the love of free men one 
 for another in a community of experience and 
 service. It is God revealed in the comradeship of 
 human hearts. It is indeed the "organic growth of 
 God himself in time.'' 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 
 
"I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races ; 
 I advance from the people in their own spirit; . . . 
 
 '^I, following many, and foUow'd by many, inaugurate 
 a Religion — . . . 
 
 "I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough ; 
 None has ever yet adored or worshiped half enough ; 
 None has yet begun to think how divine he himself is, 
 and how certain the future is. 
 
 "I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these 
 States must be their Religion ; 
 Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur. 
 
 "Know you ! solely to drop in the earth the germs of a 
 greater Religion, 
 The following chants I sing.'' 
 
 ,Walt Whitman, in 
 
 Starting From Paumanok 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 
 
 Democracy, thus conceived in its highest terms 
 as fellowship, constitutes the transcendent reality 
 of modern times. It is life as we know it today. 
 Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is just this reality 
 which the churches, so hopelessly obsessed with the 
 ideas and practices of other days, will not or cannot 
 recognize. Is it any wonder that they have fallen 
 into a state of collapse from which there is appar- 
 ently no recovery! 
 
 But why should the churches recognize democracy, 
 or take its world of secular activity for their own 
 particular field of operations? Democracy, in its 
 political, economic or even ecclesiastical expressions 
 of social endeavor, can hardly be identified with 
 religion. In religion we expect to find God, and 
 here we have gone no higher nor farther than 
 men — men in fellowship, to be sure, but still men. 
 We recall that Carpenter calls this evolution of free 
 society ^^the organic growth of God in time"; but 
 by virtue of what thought does he rise to such a 
 conception, and by what syllogism can he prove it? 
 Is religion suddenly to be interpreted in a different 
 
104 NEW CHUKCHES FOE OLD 
 
 way from what it has ever been before? Is God to 
 be regarded not as a being but as a process? Are 
 men, after all, their own gods; are their social 
 institutions churches ; is their fellowship one with 
 another, grace? If so. Where is the basis of 
 religion? What new foundations can be planted 
 for the old? 
 
 II 
 
 The answers to these questions must be sought in 
 an analysis of the meaning of religion, as this mean- 
 ing has been modified by the influences which have 
 been at work in the world since the period of the 
 Kenaissance. 
 
 According to classic definition, religion may be 
 said io constitute a relation between the two 
 fundamental factors of spiritual reality, God and 
 the soul. Thus Kant defines religion as "a knowl- 
 edge of all our duties as divine commands'' ; Tylor, 
 as "the belief in spiritual beings" ; Schleiermacher, 
 as "a sense of dependence upon God.'' More pop- 
 ular definitions are seen in Lyman Abbott's state- 
 ment that "religion is the life of God in the soul of 
 man," and Minot J. Savage's evolutionary formula 
 that "religion is man's endeavor to get into right 
 relations with God." 
 
 In the past only one of the two factors in this 
 relationship has been emphasized — ^the divine and 
 not the human. The accepted basis of religion, in 
 the churches at least, has always been God. Just 
 how this idea of God originated, how it has been 
 
THE NEW BASIS OP RELIGION 105 
 
 modified through the ages (polytheism, henotheism, 
 monotheism) J by what means it has been verified, 
 are problems which cannot be discussed in this 
 place. Sufficient is it for us to note that, wherever 
 in the past religion has come to the point of organ- 
 izing itself in the form of temples, priesthoods, 
 sacred books and holy days, central to the whole 
 system of institutions has been a preconceived 
 abstraction known as deity. God is here regarded 
 as an absolute — the absolute from which all reality 
 in time and space derives its being. Just how there 
 can be any derivation from an absolute is one of 
 the riddles on which theologians have most persist- 
 ently exercised their wits. Some have sought an 
 answer in the conception of all things existing in 
 God, as oxygen exists in water ; others have thought 
 of God as casting off emanations of his being as a 
 fire throws out sparks into the darkness, or a planet 
 flings its vortex rings into the void; the popular 
 mind has satisfied itself with crude pictures of God 
 as a creator, fashioning the world and its inhab- 
 itants as a savage moulds clay images, or a watch- 
 maker manufactures watches. But always at the 
 heart of all these speculations has been the thought 
 of God as an absolute, and, therefore, a being apart. 
 God is the maker of time, and yet himself outside 
 of time! He fills, or at least controls, space, and 
 yet himself is beyond and above all space — "an 
 absentee deity," to quote the familiar phrase of 
 Carlyle! He is the source of all change, and yet 
 himself unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable! 
 
106 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 He is revealed "in miracle and sign/' and yet him- 
 self unsearchable, unseen, remote! Here is the 
 factor which is central in religion as it has always 
 been understood and interpreted in the past. God 
 is the beginning and the end of the whole phenom- 
 enon. Eeligion centers about the deity, as the earth 
 centers about the sun. Religion and theism are 
 synonymous, as, per contra^ religion and atheism 
 are antithetical. 
 
 What this exclusive stress upon God has meant 
 to the other factor in the relationship — namely, 
 man — is shown by the whole history of organized 
 religion. Man's duty in life has been conceived as 
 of a three-fold nature. In the first place, he must 
 find God — discover not by hearsay but by experi- 
 ence that God is the central reality of life. Sec- 
 ondly, he must know God — understand his will as 
 formulated in laws which are the commandments 
 of the soul. Lastly, he must obey God — give alle- 
 giance to his will as a good citizen gives allegiance 
 to the statutes of his country, or as a good soldier 
 to the orders of his captain. Upon his fulfillment 
 of these obligations to the divine depends his salva- 
 tion in eternity. If he would live, in the true spir- 
 itual sense of this great word, he must surrender 
 himself utterly unto God. How this shall be done, 
 man is not left helplessly by himself to discover. 
 On the contrary, God has inspired prophets, writ- 
 ten scriptures, performed miracles, established 
 churches, worked out and revealed an ordered 
 (system of redemption, that man might be left in 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 107 
 
 no doubt as to where and what is the way of life. 
 But it is for him to say whether or not he shall 
 walk in this way, and thus know God alone. 
 
 From this standpoint, religion represents the 
 sharpest possible distinction between the world 
 and God. The religious life must be understood 
 as something altogether apart from life as we live 
 it in our every-day affairs. It is an experience 
 which enters into no other relationship of men. 
 To be faithful to wife and children, to be honest 
 in business, to be loyal to country, to love one's 
 neighbor, to serve humanity — these things are 
 excellent in themselves, and, from the point of 
 view of earth, are duties. But they are secular 
 duties, and not sacred. They are ethical and not 
 spiritual fidelities. They are not, in other words, 
 religion! For religion has to do not with family, 
 or business, or nation, or mankind, but with God; 
 and our duty to God is discharged only by those 
 special observances of faith and worship which the 
 churches have so carefully formulated as a help 
 to man in his quest of the divine. Hence the 
 importance of creeds and rituals, of prayers and 
 sacraments, of scriptures, sabbaths and "holy 
 church"! Of course, to the worldly man these 
 things are vain, for this man does not know nor 
 care about God. He is "of the earth, earthy," and, 
 therefore, the moralities of earth seem to him to be 
 enough. But to the religiously minded man, these 
 things are all in all, for they are the way, and the 
 only way, to God. 
 
108 NEW CHURCHES FOK OLD 
 
 III 
 
 This understanding of religion remained un- 
 shaken until the Renaissance, when there came 
 changes which were revolutionary in character. 
 
 These began with what we have already noted 
 as the distinctive feature of the Renaissance — 
 namely, the rediscovery of man. For a thousand 
 years and more, under the obsession of theistic 
 absolutism, the race had been lost in a kind of 
 theological slumber. Through all this time, fit- 
 tingly known as the Dark Ages, human interest 
 was focussed on questions of the Trinity, the 
 person of Christ, the Atonement, the nature of 
 transubstantiation, the authority of the church, 
 the reality of heaven and hell. The minds that 
 led the thought of the world, from Augustine to 
 Albert Magnus, concerned themselves with nothing 
 but the explanation and interpretation of Chris- 
 tian dogma. There was no art but that of Biblical 
 legend and ecclesiastical tradition, no literature 
 but that of theologian and copyist, no philosophy 
 but scholasticism, no science but magic, no social 
 movements but monasticism and the crusades. 
 The world was as completely forgotten as though 
 it had never existed; man was remembered only 
 as a single factor in a mystic formula of salvation. 
 Alone in all this period of darkness was Roger 
 Bacon, greatest of Europeans, who, as one curious 
 not of heaven but earth, not of godhead but of the 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 109 
 
 soul, was a modern man born centuries before 
 his time. 
 
 For what was native to the mind of Roger 
 Bacon came to Europe only through that Revival 
 of Learning, which brought men fresh acquain- 
 tanceship with the ancient Greeks, who felt so 
 keenly "the wild joy of living," studied so curiously 
 the mysteries of man and of his universe, and 
 registered their testimony in so beautiful an art and 
 literature, so profound a science and philosophy. 
 In the Greek mind, "man (was) the measure of all 
 things," and not "fear of the Lord" but knowledge 
 of self "the beginning of wisdom." The renais- 
 sance of such a culture among the people of the 
 Middle Ages was like the entrance of the Prince 
 into the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. Instantly 
 there came that awakening which marks the birth 
 of modern times. Touched by the magic of the 
 classic spirit, men shook off their dream-like 
 abstractions of deity and visions of eternity, and, 
 for the first time in centuries, looked at themselves 
 and their world. Petrarch climbing a mountain to 
 view the landscape, Galileo fashioning his telescope 
 and hanging his pendulum, Columbus turning the 
 prow of his Santa Maria into the Atlantic, Gassendi 
 and his atoms, Newton and his apple, Harvey and 
 his circulation of the blood, Descartes and his 
 "cogito ergo sum" — these are symbols of an age 
 which shook the world. Exploration and discovery, 
 science and philosophy, art, literature and music, 
 came to their own again. Men looked upward, and 
 
110 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 watched the stars; looked outward, and searched 
 the seas ; looked downward, and analyzed the earth ; 
 looked inward, and knew the soul ; looked backward, 
 and traced history; looked forward, and prepared 
 prophecies. Not inferno, purgatory and paradise, 
 but ^^this goodly frame, the earth'' ; not angels and 
 demons, but men and women, nations and peoples ; 
 not abstract problems of theological salvation, but 
 vast works of discovery, research and social libera- 
 tion — these now monopolized attention. Man was 
 at the center of the stage. His life in this present 
 world, life within his soul and among his fellows, 
 was the theme of the drama. The principle laid 
 down by Pope for his later age, that "the proper 
 study of mankind is man," was but a restatement 
 of what the race now knew for the first time since 
 the proud days of Socrates and Aristotle. 
 
 IV 
 
 Second only to the new center of interest is the 
 new method of thought characteristic of modern as 
 contrasted with medieval times. The old method, 
 typically theological, was what is known as deduc- 
 tive. It took its start from certain ideas, universal 
 and absolute. Which were accepted without verifi- 
 cation in the belief that they were revealed to man 
 by the divine consciousness, or were themselves 
 innate in the human consciousness as the condition 
 of all thought. In either case these ideas were 
 "given,'' like the factors of a geometrical propo- 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 111 
 
 sition, and all other truths were arrived at by a 
 process of deduction from these original axioms of 
 reality. Thought, in other words, was a process of 
 intellectual movement from above downward, of 
 inference from things eternal to things temporal. 
 In asking what were the facts in a given situation, 
 nobody thought of doing such a thing as observing 
 or investigating. Rather did they ask what the 
 •^first principles" of thought, either as revealed or 
 innate, made necessary in this situation, and then 
 accepted the deduced conclusion without question. 
 If facts which men could not avoid observing, 
 seemed to contradict the deductions from these 
 ideal truths which were "before all worlds,'' then 
 they could not be facts. They must be chopped off 
 forthwith from the body of reality, like the limbs 
 of unhappy victims who did not fit the famous bed 
 of fabled Procrustes. Facts were nothing as com- 
 pared with "ideas," to use the Platonic phrase. 
 Facts were in all cases to be adapted to thought, 
 and not thought to facts. 
 
 In Christianity, of course, the basic ideas were 
 those inwrought in that great system of dogma, 
 which began with Paul, was elaborated by 
 Augustine, and was completed by the great school- 
 men of the later Middle Ages. The Triune God, 
 the created world, fallen man, atonement achieved 
 by the sacrificial blood of Christ, the resurrection 
 and ascension, the last day — ^these were the truths 
 which were revealed from out the mind of God, and 
 therefore subject not to inquiry but to acceptance. 
 
112 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Whatever else men desired to know must be in- 
 ferred or deduced from these dogmas of the church. 
 These things stood, like the Ptolemaic earth; and 
 round them as a center swept the lesser spheres of 
 truth. 
 
 With the opening of the Renaissance came a 
 reversal of method as revolutionary as the Coper- 
 nican theory of the universe. The new method, 
 which was coincident with the birth of modern 
 science, and which may therefore be known as the 
 scientific, in contrast to the theological, method, is 
 inductive in process. It takes nothing for granted ; 
 accepts nothing as necessarily true; knows nothing 
 either of revelations or innate ideas. It simply 
 finds itself confronted with certain realities of 
 experience, inquires as to the nature of these 
 realities, induces from the facts observed and tested 
 certain hypotheses or postulates of reason, and 
 holds these general propositions to be true until 
 discovery of new facts enforces revision. This 
 method, as can be seen, is the exact opposite of the 
 deductive method. It moves from below upward, 
 from particulars to universals, from things tem- 
 poral to things eternal. Its adaptations are of 
 ideas to facts, instead of facts to ideas. It knows 
 no certainties, but only possibilities and probabili- 
 ties. Especially is its spirit investigative rather 
 than assertive, agnostic rather than dogmatic. The 
 inductive method of thought is by no means' uni- 
 versal in application. Deduction still has place, as 
 witness its use by Hegel in his idealistic specula- 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 113 
 
 tions, and by Herbert Spencer in his Synthetic 
 Philosophy. But this place is hardly more than 
 corrective or confirmatory of inductive processes. 
 We think today in terms of facts; are willing to 
 think only as far as these facts can take us. 
 
 What this new method of thought means to 
 religion, must be evident. In the Middle Ages, as 
 we have seen, God was taken for granted. So were 
 his attributes, his acts, his purposes! These were 
 known by processes of revelation, were not to 
 be questioned (this was heresy!), and stood per- 
 manently as the beginning and the end of knowl- 
 edge. The world, the life of man, the destiny of 
 man, were what the revelation of God permitted 
 them to be, and nothing other. Today, however, 
 we claim to know nothing of God in the beginning 
 at all. We know only what we see about us or feel 
 within us — in other words, what we experience, and 
 what this experience may reasonably be taken to 
 mean. Our starting point is the world, the human 
 beings who are in the world, above all the souls or 
 spirits which seem to be resident in these human 
 beings. If these realities lead us to inductions of 
 experience which seem to suggest or reveal God — 
 well and good ! We will accept him, worship him, 
 serve him. But it is man first, and not God! It 
 is as much of God only as man may seem to suggest 
 or prove! Above all, is it God revealed by man, 
 and not man by God! Our revelation today is 
 from earth to heaven, from clod to God — not vice 
 versa, as in old days ! 
 
114 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 That this inductive or scientific process of 
 thought brings us God more surely than any reve- 
 lation of inspired scripture or infallible church, 
 there are many to assert. But it is a deity very 
 different in character from the being known to the 
 theologians of the Middle Ages. The contrast may 
 be best summed up in the two words, "transcendent'' 
 and "immanent.'' The immanent God was not 
 unknown before the Renaissance, but he was in- 
 variably an outcast. He was the deity of heretics — 
 theologians like Scotus Erigena, mystics like 
 Abelard and Eckhart. The transcendent God 
 was necessarily the deity to live with the deductive 
 processes of medieval thought. By the same token 
 is the immanent deity the God for a scientific or 
 humanistic age. We know God today only as we 
 seem to find him present in nature and in the heart 
 of man. If he lives at all, therefore, he lives here 
 among us, and not there above us. 
 
 "Closer is he than breathing, nearer 
 than hands and feet," 
 
 says Tennyson. And yet, strangely enough, the 
 measure of his proximity in spirit is likewise the 
 measure of his indefiniteness in character. In the 
 days of his transcendence, God was as definite a 
 person as any king or emperor. No one felt any 
 shock when Michael Angelo presented the Divine 
 Being in precise pictorial form in his Sistine 
 frescoes. How great the shock, however, when in 
 our day Sargent painted God upon the walls of the 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 115 
 
 Boston Public Library! However intimately we 
 may feel the Divine Presence in our lives, we can- 
 not see this presence with any distinctness in our 
 mind's eye. God seems to be like the cloud in the 
 sky. Afar, the cloud takes a definite shape, like 
 Hamlet's "camel" or "weasel." Close at hand, it 
 is only a fog which envelops and holds us. Thus, 
 when God was far away, "on the rim of the 
 Universe," as Carlyle put it, we knew something 
 about him, could see him as well as feel him. 
 Now that he is close at hand, an immanent presence 
 within us and about, we know little of what he is. 
 So do we turn the nearer to earth's realities, and 
 seek in them the "God who is our home" ! 
 
 But there is a third change, incident to modern 
 times, which is still more important than any yet 
 mentioned. We refer to that revolution in man's 
 whole attitude toward the world which is incidental 
 at once to the new center of attention, and to the 
 new method of inquiry, which are characteristic of 
 the present age. What man saw in medieval days, 
 when the transcendent God of revelation was at the 
 heart of things, was a miracle; what he sees today, 
 as he follows through that scientific study of the 
 present world which may, or may not, lead to 
 conscious intellectual recognition of the God 
 immanent in all things, is a natural process. This 
 change had its beginning, of course, in the dis- 
 
116 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 covery of what we know today as natural law — ^the 
 truth, in other words, that the operations of the 
 universe are all parts of an unbroken system of 
 order, subject to no chance or accident from within, 
 and no intrusion from without. It reached what 
 may be regarded as its triumphant vindication in 
 the doctrine of evolution, which presents all 
 phenomena as manifestations of a single principle 
 of creative life — an elan vitale^ to quote Bergson, 
 which flows in its upper and human reaches as a 
 river in which "souls are continually being created 
 . . . (as) little rills into which the great river of 
 life divides itself, flowing through the body of 
 humanity. ... As the smallest grain of dust is 
 bound up with our entire solar system ... so all 
 organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, 
 from the first origins of life to the time in which we 
 are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence 
 a single impulsion. . . . All the living hold 
 together, and all yield to the same tremendous 
 push.'' ^ 
 
 At once the universe became a closed circuit. 
 The supernatural was eliminated, the natural made 
 inclusive of everything. If a phenomenon appeared 
 which seemed to be outside of, or contradictory to, 
 the natural order, this was no longer attributed to 
 divine or supernatural agencies. It was simply 
 assumed that, in this particular case, observation 
 was defective, or knowledge incomplete, and that 
 further inquiry would bring the phenomenon, if it 
 
 ^See his Creative Evolution, pages 269, 271. 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 117 
 
 were real at all, inside "the reign of law." Nor 
 has experience in the last three hundred years ever 
 failed in the end to justify this confidence in the 
 integrity of the cosmic process ! Today the postu- 
 late of the natural, as contrasted with the super- 
 natural, is become an axiom of thought. 
 
 What this change in attitude means to religion, 
 is easily understood. In the old days, religion was 
 uniformly regarded as supernatural in origin and 
 character. Both in the individual life and in the 
 social history of the race, it was an experience 
 which lay altogether outside the area of normal life. 
 Its source was God and not man, and its quality 
 therefore divine in contradistinction to all that we 
 know as human. Eevelation, inspiration, conver- 
 sion, miracles, signs and portents, all these are so 
 many processes or events which indicate the special 
 and abnormal character which religion has borne 
 in all ages preceding modern times, and still bears 
 very largely in this present age. 
 
 The sudden shift from the supernatural to the 
 natural, which was so characteristic of the Renais- 
 sance and after, was inevitably accompanied by a 
 movement of extreme revulsion, representing an 
 antagonistic and even destructive point of view. 
 This found vivid expression in the free thinkers or 
 rationalists of the seventeenth and especially the 
 eighteenth century, of whom Voltaire and the 
 Encyclopedists are the preeminent examples. These 
 philosophers of the Illumination came to think of 
 religion and all its concomitant phenomena as the 
 
118 NEW CHUKCHES FOE OLD 
 
 product of a vast conspiracy, deliberately concocted 
 by the priesthoods of primitive ages for the intel- 
 lectual and moral enslavement of mankind. So out 
 of place did religion seem in a world coming to be 
 interpreted in naturalistic terms that no other 
 explanation of its origin seemed adequate. If not 
 supernatural, it must be artificial. The whole 
 theory of conspiracy, confidently, even passionately 
 adhered to by some of the great social liberators of 
 the race, represented an instinctive reaction of the 
 rationalistic impulses from a theological orthodoxy 
 which was miraculous or supernatural throughout. 
 Today, however, in our better balanced and 
 infinitely better informed time, this supposition of 
 conspiracy as an explanation of religious history, 
 seems as ridiculous as anything that ever appeared 
 in the doctrine of so-called revelation. It also 
 seems unnecessary. For we have come to under- 
 stand, in the light of modern scientific knowledge, 
 that religion is a social phenomenon which, like all 
 other phenomena of the kind, is a natural product 
 of man's adjustment to his world. Modern students 
 of the question are almost unanimous in finding 
 the origin of religion in the social experience of the 
 race, and thereby afllrming its purely naturalistic 
 character. "Religion arises naturally," says Pro- 
 fessor Edward Scribner Ames,^ "being an inherent 
 and intimate phase of the social consciousness" of 
 man. This social consciousness, he continues, must 
 be regarded "as the very essence of religion," thus 
 
 * In his Psychology of Religious Experience, pages 49-50, 110- 
 111, 249. 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF KELIGION 119 
 
 ^^identifying religion with social phenomena." In 
 content religion must be described as only "the 
 most intimate phase of the group consciousness . . . 
 in its first form a reflection of the most important 
 group interests through social symbols and cere- 
 monials based upon the activities incident to such 
 interests." Even the inner personal experience of 
 religion in the single individual "resolves itself into 
 the question of the origin of his social conscious- 
 ness." ^ We are religious, in other words, not 
 because of any fraudulent imposition from without 
 at the hands of cunning priestcraft, but simply and 
 solely because of our natural reaction as human 
 beings to those social experiences and aspirations 
 which are of highest permanent value in the life of 
 the race. In its development, exactly as in its 
 origin, religion never leaves the level of normality. 
 "Religion is subject to the same determining factors 
 as are other social phenomena — such as language, 
 art, domesticity, patriotism. In any society all 
 persons are likely to experience these to some 
 extent, but it is not due to their native endowments 
 alone, nor to accidental circumstances, but to the 
 operation of social forces within the experience and 
 consciousness of each person." ^ There are mystical 
 elements in us all, of course ; but the mystical is as 
 natural as the physical or mental, and is at work 
 as normally in religion as in art, music, or some 
 great movement of reform. Religion is simply the 
 supreme expression of human nature; it is man 
 
 ^Ames, page 197. 
 'Ames, page 214. 
 
120 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 thinking his highest, feeling his deepest, and living 
 his best. 
 
 There is nothing, therefore, miraculous, special 
 or even strange about religion. The church is as 
 natural an institution as the state, the priest as 
 normal an historical figure as the king, worship as 
 inevitable an expression of human life as the drama 
 or the dance. Especially since the coming of 
 evolution, with its transmission of revealing light 
 from biology to history, psychology and sociology, 
 has religion taken its true place in the story of the 
 development of the race. Man's relations with his 
 fellows in the social group, reacting upon the secret 
 forces if his inner nature, give us in religion as 
 native a product of the soul as music, poetry, or 
 family love. Man is essentially religious as he is 
 essentially mystical and social, that is all; and 
 through this channel of spiritual expression, as 
 through other channels of physical, intellectual and 
 artistic expression, his life pours itself forth in 
 resistless flood. There is no mystery, therefore, 
 about religion, save as life in all its forms is 
 mystery. There is nothing terrible about it — 
 nothing unusual, certainly nothing miraculous or 
 strange. What we have here is what we have every- 
 where else — not a miraculous appearance, but a 
 natural process. It is like the stars flaming in the 
 sky — like the grasses springing from the soil. 
 
 "Out of the heart of Nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old ; 
 The litanies of nations came, 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF EELIGION 121 
 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
 Up from the burning core below — • 
 The canticles of love and woe.'' 
 
 Religion is therefore natural, human, in origin. 
 It is the expression, or still better, the creation, of 
 the soul. In this fact is the evidence of its validity. 
 As well question man's tears or laughter, as to 
 question his habit of prayer. To regard a hearth- 
 stone with reverence and an altar with scorn, is to 
 be hopelessly inconsistent. More real than any 
 God revealed from heaven, is the God whom man 
 has found in, or deliberately fashioned from, the 
 raw materials of his experience. For man is his 
 own creator. He makes the world to suit his needs. 
 He cries. Let there be God, and there is God ! The 
 divine undoubtedly existed "before all worlds,'' but 
 God came only with the heart of man. 
 
 VI 
 
 Such were the changes wrought by the forces let 
 loose by the Renaissance. They all meant for reli- 
 gion one simple thing — the substitution of man for 
 God as the center of spiritual consciousness. In due 
 course, these changes proved their presence in the 
 vast upheaval of the Reformation ; but were quickly 
 estopped, first by a Catholicism which committed 
 itself permanently to reaction in the Council of 
 Trent, and secondly by a Protestantism which 
 swung itself back in resistance against the very 
 forces which had given it birth. What was choked 
 
122 NEW CHUKCHE8 FOR OLD 
 
 here, however, forced other channels and over- 
 flowed the world. Little by little, as the tide of 
 intellectual and social liberation swept about its 
 bulwarks, Christianity crumbled, and at last, under 
 the impact of the evolutionary science and phil- 
 osophy, collapsed. Movements appeared on every 
 hand which deliberately offered themselves as sub- 
 stitutes for traditional religion — radical Unitarian- 
 ism, for example, of the Parker type, with its 
 substitution of human nature for divine ; Rational- 
 ism, with its challenge of faith by reason; Posi- 
 tivism, with its enthronement of Humanity in place 
 of God; Ethical Culture, with its offering of ethics 
 in place of dogma! More serious and significant 
 was that vast movement of revolt against all 
 organized religion whatsoever, which in the past 
 two generations has swept the majority of our 
 western world outside the churches, and thus 
 brought these churches face to face with the most 
 critical situation which they have encountered since 
 the day when Luther nailed his theses to the 
 cathedral doors in Wittenberg. Today the shift 
 in values is become complete. Humanism, not 
 theism, is the basis of our thought. Man, not God, 
 is the center of our faith and the object of our hope 
 and love. We have a new religion, which, like 
 St. John's "tabernacle of God,'' is "with men," but, 
 unlike that tabernacle, descends not "out of 
 heaven," but builds itself stone by stone upon the 
 earth ! 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 123 
 
 VII 
 
 But is this religion? Does not this humanism, 
 which we call a shift of emphasis from God to man, 
 accomplish as a matter of fact the elimination of 
 God from his universe, and thus destroy that very 
 relationship of the soul with God which constitutes 
 the essence of spiritual experience? 
 
 So it may seem, to those whose deity is that 
 remote, transcendent, preconceived absolutist ab- 
 straction described in the Nicene Creed as ^^God, 
 the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth, 
 and of all things visible and invisible"; in the 
 Anglican "Articles of Religion" as the "one living 
 and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or 
 passions, of infinite power, wisdom and goodness, 
 the Maker and Preserver of all things visible" ; and 
 finally in the famous Savoy Declaration (1658), 
 as the "only living and true God, who is infinite 
 in Being and Perfection, a most pure Spirit, 
 invisible . . . immutable, immense, eternal, in- 
 comprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, 
 most absolute, working all things according to the 
 Counsel of his own immutable and most righteous 
 Will . . ." This deity is dead. Indeed, it is 
 doubtful if he ever really lived. Is it an accident 
 that he was presented and for ages worshiped in 
 a language not understood of the common people? 
 For the God whom men and women have known 
 and loved is altogether apart from the speculations 
 of theologians and the dogmatic legislation of 
 
124 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 church councils. They have had no more to do 
 with the God of Augustine and Calvin than with 
 the pope or king himself. Unable to see his person 
 or feel his presence, the common folk have sought 
 the divine in Christ, who took on himself the flesh 
 and ^^was tempted even as we are"; in Mary, who 
 at least shared with men the great experience of 
 parenthood ; in the saints, who walked the earth in 
 suffering, and won their sanctity through virtue; 
 in the Bible, which was transcribed by men, and 
 told of the sorrows and sins of men; in the world 
 of Nature, which, in mountain and glen, river and 
 sea, was haunted by spirits of gracious or grim 
 mystery. They have persisted in believing, as by 
 a divine intuition, that God is not distant but near 
 at hand, not unseen but seen, walking the earth as 
 in the garden of old Eden, wrapped in the common- 
 place of human love as in the miracle of incarna- 
 tion. And in this they have been right, as judged 
 at least by the religious geniuses of every age. For 
 these prophets of the soul have distinguished them- 
 selves from priests and theologians and ecclesiastics 
 by nothing so much as their humanization of the 
 divine. Jesus of Nazareth, the supreme exemplar 
 of spiritual vision and understanding, was above all 
 things else a humanist. The Renaissance was as 
 truly a revival of his mind as of the mind of the 
 Greeks. Jesus cared nothing about Jehovah of 
 Zion. He scorned the metaphysical refinements of 
 the Jewish law. He hated, like another Isaiah, the 
 f eastings and fast-days, the sacrifices and offerings 
 
THE NEW BASIS OP RELIGION 125 
 
 of tlie temple. From all these artificialities lie 
 turned away, and concerned himself with man and 
 his world. He looked on the birds of the air and 
 the lilies of the field; he walked with men in 
 the pastures and on the highroads; he taught of 
 righteousness, justice, and love one for another; he 
 prophesied of the day when wars should cease, and 
 poverty be no more, and justice everywhere be done 
 upon the earth. This was his religion — the present 
 scene transfigured into beauty ; the daily task, lifted 
 to the challenge of more abundant life ! This was 
 his God — ^the passion of tenderness, and the love of 
 brotherhood and peace ! This was his heaven — the 
 Kingdom of God interpreted in terms of the com- 
 monwealth of man! Jesus had no theology, he 
 wrote no creed, he built no church. He simply 
 lived and taught that life of love which, binding 
 men to one another, thereby binds them together 
 with God. 
 
 It is this religion, centered thus in man, which 
 was restored and vindicated by the Renaissance. 
 The forces released by this great awakening smote 
 hard upon the church ; but touched, as by a magic 
 wand of life, the human soul. It was as though 
 men had been long hidden away in dungeons, and 
 now, with the opening of great doors, saw again the 
 world and one another. And in both, by sure 
 intuitions of the inner spirit, they discovered God ! 
 Not that divine abstraction which is the monstrous 
 birth of dogma, but that warm, ever-present source 
 of creative energy which is in and through all 
 
126 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 things. Not that transcendent, absolutist deity 
 who is outside the universe, remote from the life as 
 well as the understanding of men, but that im- 
 manent spirit of evolving life which is the inmost 
 center of existence. ^^God is love" — the love that 
 holds the stars, that unfolds the flowers, that binds 
 the creature to his mate. God is the love that 
 stirred in the dark primeval ooze of the undated 
 past; moved through aeons as an unconquerable 
 •^urge'' to higher and yet higher forms of existence ; 
 and now at last possesses man, whom it has grown 
 from out the quickened womb of earth, and lifts to 
 that great fellowship of heart with heart which is 
 the secret of life eternal. God is the love that binds 
 husband to wife, parent to child, friend to friend, 
 patriot to country, the prophet to truth, the martyr 
 to his cause. God is the love that stirs in every 
 crusade for justice, every high endeavor for liberty 
 and right, every transcendent sacrifice for mankind. 
 To love another human soul better than oneself, to 
 love many souls in tenderness and pity, to love 
 humanity with a passion that laughs at death — this 
 is to find God, and to love and serve him. Which 
 means that religion may be defined, from this human- 
 istic viewpoint, as fellowship of man with man in 
 the service of the common life ! The relation of the 
 soul with God, in other words, is indirect and not 
 direct. It is only through their relation of love 
 with one another, that men can find God. For it 
 is this relationship which reveals God. Nay, can 
 we not say that it is this relationship which creates 
 
THE NEW BASIS OF RELIGION 127 
 
 God — that God comes into existence and accom- 
 plishes his will on earth, only as men have love one 
 for another, and consecrate this love in a fellowship 
 of service. Jesus certainly implied as much when, 
 in the mystic formula of his time, he said of God — 
 "Where two or three are gathered together in my 
 name, there am I in the midst of them." ^ H. G. 
 Wells nobly paraphrased this definition of divine 
 reality when he wrote that God is "The King who 
 is present when just men foregather.'' ^ 
 
 VIII 
 
 Such is our new basis of religion ! And what is 
 this but the democracy which we have described as 
 beginning with the discovery of man, and ending in 
 its ideal attainment with the fellowship of men? 
 It is in this humanistic sense that the vast move- 
 ment of democracy. Which has been sweeping the 
 world in the last two hundred years, may be 
 accurately defined as the new religion of our time. 
 Religion in the true sense of the word has left the 
 churches, and entered into the world. Not in 
 Catholicism nor in Protestantism can be found the 
 creative spiritual forces which are fashioning God's 
 Kingdom at this moment. Rather are these to be 
 found where "just men foregather" to advance the 
 cause of democracy by establishing freedom and 
 fellowship in all political, industrial and social 
 relationships among men. This means a new re- 
 
 ^ Matthew 18:20. 
 
 ^Mr. Britting Bees It Through, page 442. 
 
128 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 ligion, a new church. It means that to us is com- 
 mitted the task of fulfilling the spiritual promise 
 which was disclosed, but all too soon betrayed, by 
 the Reformation. Our age, if it be faithful to 
 itself, shall bring that true reformation for which 
 men have labored and still yearn. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 SACRED AND SECULAR 
 
^*We men of Earth have here the stuff 
 Of Paradise — we have enough! 
 We need no other stones to build 
 The stairs into the Unfulfilled — 
 No other ivory for the doors — 
 No other marble for the floors — 
 No other cedar for the beam 
 And dome of Man's immortal dream. 
 
 "Here on the paths of every-day — 
 Here on the common human way 
 Is all the stuff the gods would take 
 To build a Heaven, to mould and make 
 New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime 
 To build Eternity in Time !" 
 Edwin Markham, 
 
 "Earth Is Enough," in 
 
 The Shoes of Happiness 
 
CHAPTER V 
 SACRED AND SECULAR 
 
 What this new basis of religion means from the 
 standpoint of the new structure of spiritual faith to 
 be reared upon it, would require a volume in itself 
 for the telling. Religion thus interpreted in terms 
 of humanism would assuredly reverence truth and 
 not tradition, practice liberty and not bow down 
 before authority, be humble and not dogmatic in 
 temper, have more interest in this world than in the 
 next, trust reason and the heart of man, cling fast 
 to experience as the sole test of reality. To inter- 
 pret all these implications of humanism, however, 
 is not our business in this place. For we are con- 
 cerned not so much with religion in general, as with 
 those particular aspects of religion which are 
 involved in the problem of its social organization. 
 Our subject is the churches and their relation to 
 the vital needs of men. This means that we may 
 consider only those special changes wrought by the 
 substitution of the humanistic for the theistic point 
 of view, which bear directly upon the question of 
 new churches for old. 
 
 131 
 
132 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 II 
 
 First among such changes incident to the 
 humanistic interpretation of religion, is the wiping 
 out of the age-old distinction between what we have 
 learned to call the sacred and the secular. 
 
 This distinction, which divides the world into two 
 "water-tight" compartments, so to speak, had its 
 origin in the traditional absolutist idea of God. 
 This deity, as we have seen, was transcendent in 
 character, and therefore remote, or even wholly 
 separated, from his universe. There were times 
 and places, however, when he came into contact 
 with the earth. There were occasions, in other 
 words, when business was transacted between God 
 and man. Sometimes the initiative in the joining 
 of these occasional relationships was taken by God. 
 Thus, "in the beginning,'' God created "the world 
 and all that therein is." Later on, for the guiding 
 and guarding of humanity, he ordained certain 
 laws, which were formulated into "commandments" 
 or sacred codes. Thereafter, from time to time, he 
 revealed his presence among men and his interest 
 in their welfare, by performing miracles in the 
 natural world, and by inspiring prophets with mes- 
 sages and visions. His supreme act of this kind, 
 of course, was his sending to men "his only begot- 
 ten Son, that they who believed on him might have 
 eternal life." 
 
 On the other hand, initiative in this matter of 
 bringing God into touch with the life of his children 
 
SACKED AND SECULAR 133 
 
 on the earth, was often taken by men. All the 
 activity of our churches, in days gone by, and still 
 very largely at the present moment, may not 
 unfairly be described as an organized and concerted 
 endeavor on the part of men to open up communi- 
 cation with the deity, and persuade him to enter, 
 if only for a moment, into human affairs. Have 
 not men worshiped and offered sacrifice that God, 
 like a king upon his throne, may be well-pleased, 
 and his anger therefore turned away? Have not 
 men prayed that God may be persuaded to send rain 
 upon the dry ground, or still the waves upon the 
 sea, or bring healing to the sick? Have not men 
 trained and supported priests to serve as ambas- 
 sadors to the courts of the Most High, who by their 
 knowledge and experience may gain hearings and 
 win favors which would be denied to ordinary sup- 
 plicants? The whole business of traditional re- 
 ligion — its churches, its priests, its sacraments, its 
 services, its paraphernalia — is nothing more nor 
 less than a persistent attempt to break through the 
 barrier which divides divinity from humanity, and 
 thus "acquaint men at first hand with Deity." 
 
 Now the points where God and man thus come, 
 or try to come, into contact, constitute what is 
 called the "sacred.'' Everything outside of these 
 is called the "secular." The latter area of life 
 comprises men and all relations between men; the 
 former includes only God and relations between 
 God and men. From this standpoint, the sacred is 
 not diflftcult to define. Saturday is a sacred or holy 
 
134 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 day to the Jews, because Jehovah completed the 
 task of creation "on the seventh day"; Sunday is 
 holy to Christians, because Christ rose from the 
 dead on that day. The Bible is a sacred or holy 
 book, because it contains "the word of God" as in- 
 fallibly revealed to prophets and apostles. The 
 ehurch is holy, because it is here that God is wor- 
 shiped and his message heard. The services or 
 meetings in a church are holy, having a saving 
 efficacy not contained in other public gatherings, 
 because in them the name of God is invoked and his 
 presence known. The utensils or instruments of 
 worship, such as images, pictures, robes, crosses, 
 eucharist cups, etc., are sacred, because they are 
 dedicated to holy offices and used only in worship 
 of the Most High. Priests are sacred personages, 
 because they have commerce with God in their 
 official intercessions for mankind. In the same 
 way a spot of ground, on which a miracle has been 
 performed, is regarded as sacred. Palestine, 
 because it was the scene of the life and death of 
 Jesus Christ, is "the holy land." Pieces of the true 
 cross, the bones of saints, an amulet or trinket 
 which has been blessed, even the pages of a Bible, 
 are held sacred, and thus believed to heal disease, 
 insure personal safety, or reveal hidden truths, 
 because of their association with sacred events or 
 persons. 
 
 Anything, in short, is sacred which may be 
 regarded as pertaining to God rather than to men. 
 Even thought concerning God and his works has a 
 
SACRED AND SECULAK 135 
 
 sacred character wliicli holds it apart from thought 
 on any other subject. This is the origin of the idea 
 that the pulpit should discuss only "spirituaP' 
 themes — by which is meant themes which have no 
 conceivable relationship with the burning social 
 problems of the hour; and the church keeps itself 
 altogether apart from the issues of war and peace, 
 capital and labor, women and children in industry, 
 public ownership, etc. These matters, just because 
 they involve preeminently the things of this world, 
 are secular, not sacred; and therefore properly to 
 be considered as outside the province of religious 
 interest and attention. The separation between 
 God and his world, in other words, is absolute ; and 
 absolute, therefore, must be the separation between 
 the phenomena which belong to each. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is interesting to see with what success this 
 distinction between sacred and secular has been 
 maintained. The two-compartment mind, of course, 
 is familiar, although it appears only now and then 
 in a way to attract amazed attention. The case of 
 the great English scientist, Michael Faraday, is an 
 excellent case in point. Faraday was a chemist 
 and electrician, whose discoveries are among the 
 most notable in the history of modern scientific 
 research. In his particular department of electro- 
 magnetism, his immortal discovery was that of the 
 induction of electric currents — which means that 
 
136 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 modern electrical science goes back to Faraday for 
 its beginnings, as modern medical science goes back 
 to Pasteur. In keenness of observation, boldness 
 of experimentation, acuteness of inductive reason- 
 ing, and solid worth of material achievement, he 
 was excelled by few, if any, of his eminent 
 contemporaries. 
 
 Now contrast with this Faraday's religious life ! 
 A member of the greatest scientific societies of his 
 time, he was also a member of the little Sande- 
 manian sect of Christians, an obscure group of 
 English dissenters never more than a few thousand 
 in numbers, and with few exceptions, of which 
 Faraday was the most conspicuous, composed of 
 men and women of the most illiterate type. The 
 theology of this sect, based on an unquestioning 
 acceptance of the Bible as the full, final and infal- 
 lible revelation of God, was crude in the extreme. 
 Its practices were a rough and almost ludicrous 
 attempt to revive the practices of early Chris- 
 tianity. Its rule of life was confession of sin, 
 abandonment of reason in matters of faith, and 
 humble acceptance of the atoning grace of Christ. 
 To the tenets of this peculiar sect, Faraday gave 
 humble allegiance through all his days; and did 
 this by severing his rational and his spiritual life 
 with an absoluteness well-nigh unexampled in 
 human experience. Answering an inquiry of his 
 friend. Lady Lovelace, about his philosophy of 
 religion, he wrote, "There is no philosophy in my 
 religion. . . . Though the natural works of God 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 13T 
 
 can never by any possibility come in contradiction 
 with the higher things that belong to our future 
 existence, still I do not think it at all necessary to 
 tie the study of the natural sciences and of religion 
 together; and in my intercourse with my fellow- 
 citizens, that which is religious and that which is 
 philosophical have ever been two distinct things/' 
 Opening a lecture on Mental Education, he said, "I 
 believe that the truth (of things spiritual) cannot 
 be brought to man's knowledge by any exertion of 
 his mental powers — that it is made known to him by 
 other teaching than his own, and is received 
 through simple belief of the testimony given. . . . 
 It would be improper to enter upon this subject 
 further than to claim an absolute distinction be- 
 tween religion and ordinary belief." A friend 
 writes that "when he entered a meeting-house, he 
 left his science behind, and he would listen to the 
 prayer and exhortation of the most illiterate 
 brother of his sect with an attention which showed 
 how he loved the word from whomsoever it came." 
 It was the characteristic statement of John Tyndall 
 that "when he opened the door of his oratory, he 
 closed that of his laboratory." 
 
 Equally impressive is this two-compartment 
 arrangement as it appears in the life of the world 
 at large. Monasticism was, of course, its complete 
 and triumphant expression during the Middle Ages. 
 The monks were holy men because they withdrew 
 absolutely from contact with the world ; their lives 
 were sacred because they were devoted utterly to 
 
138 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 the service of God. This idea of complete isolation 
 has in our time largely passed away ; but still today, 
 even in the lives of men of potent influence in the 
 world's affairs, this separation between sacred and 
 secular makes significant appearance. John Bright 
 /and John Henry Newman, for example, w^ere as 
 nearly exact contemporaries as any two of the great 
 men of the nineteenth century. The former was 
 born in 1811, and died in 1889 ; the latter was born 
 in 1801, and died in 1890. They lived in the same 
 country, for a time in the same city, followed public 
 careers during exactly the same period. They were 
 preeminent as public speakers, Newman being the 
 greatest preacher, and Bright the greatest platform 
 orator, of the century. What is more, they were 
 men of the same type — idealists who were moved to 
 action by spiritual passion. And yet these two 
 great leaders were as completely separated from 
 each other as though they lived on opposite sides of 
 the globe. The name of Newman does not appear 
 at all in Trevelyan's Life of John Bright^ and the 
 name of Bright is similarly conspicuous by its 
 absence from Ward's Life and Letters of Cardinal 
 Newman. The one, as a churchman, dealt with 
 sacred things ; the other, as a statesman, dealt with 
 secular. Therefore they moved like planets of dif- 
 ferent solar systems, swinging in orbits which never 
 intersected, and each catching no single vagrant 
 beam of light from the other.^ 
 
 ^ See Henry £2. Jackson's A Community Church, page 325. 
 
SACKED AND SECULAR 139 
 
 IV 
 
 The logic of this idea of sacred and secular, how- 
 ever, means not only the separation of these two 
 spheres of life, but also the subordination of the 
 latter to the former. Sanctity, as coming from 
 God, necessarily involves a primacy, uniqueness, 
 authority, to which nothing in the affairs of men 
 can lay claim for a single instant. From this view- 
 point the church is regarded as an institution 
 supreme over all merely human institutions what- 
 soever, even the state. The Bible stands alone 
 among all the literatures of ancient and modern 
 times; what it teaches must be accepted as the 
 revelation of the will of God, and therefore the law 
 for all men in all ages. The priest, as a man 
 occupying a holy office, must be regarded as 
 superior in character and authority to all other 
 men ; hence the distinction which attaches even in 
 Protestant churches to the minister, as signified by 
 his formidable title, "Reverend." The Sabbath is 
 a day which has a worth infinitely greater than that 
 of any other day of the week ; men may do as they 
 please on Saturday or Monday, but on Sunday they 
 must occupy themselves exclusively with "redeem- 
 ing the time." 
 
 Such exaltation of the sacred above the secular 
 has led, of course, to the out-and-out enslavement 
 of mankind. For ages men and women have been 
 debased to the ignominious position of mere instru- 
 ments for the service of ecclesiastical superstition 
 
140 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 and power. Mothers bringing their first born to 
 the altars of the temples, that they may be slain as 
 sacrifices to the gods; Pharisees laying on Jews 
 the yoke of the Mosaic law, that they ma^ prove 
 their righteousness; monks and nuns taking the 
 vow of chastity, that they may be delivered from 
 the "sin" of sexual intercourse and parenthood ; the 
 Emperor Henry standing barefooted in the snows 
 of Canossa, in sign of his submission as head of the 
 state to Pope Gregory as head of the church; the 
 Puritans binding society in the strait-jacket of 
 their rigorous Sabbath; scientists, from Galileo to 
 Huxley, challenged to submit their conclusions to 
 the test of conformity with creeds and Bible — these 
 are only a few illustrations of what we mean by 
 the subordination of things secular to things 
 sacred, and the consequent subjection of mankind. 
 Through all these ages of blank superstition, men 
 and women were mere means to an end extraneous 
 to every interest that pertained to life in this 
 present world. Everything that was merely nat- 
 ural and human was described as wicked, or at the 
 best of no importance. To feel joy in the beauties 
 of Nature, to give free expression to the native 
 impulses and faculties of the soul, to investigate 
 the phenomena of earth and sky, to join association 
 in comradeship with one's fellows and thus estab- 
 lish home and country, the community of the 
 common life — all this was to surrender to the 
 world, and to forget or defy God. Man had no 
 right to live for himself or his fellows; he must 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 141 
 
 resolutely avoid the temptation to laugh and play, 
 practice good works, indulge in the luxury of love 
 one for another; he was a sinner if he busied him- 
 self with such worldly relationships and activities. 
 Man was made not for himself, but for God; and 
 must therefore conform his life to the things of God. 
 He was made, in other words, to obey the church, 
 to believe the Bible, to accept the creeds, to observe 
 the Sabbath. Such subordination of the secular to 
 the sacred was the condition of his salvation. 
 
 Into the gross darkness of this enslavement of 
 mankind to the artificial sanctities of the church, 
 broke suddenly the light of the Renaissance. With 
 the discovery of man which marks the revolution of 
 this epoch as fundamentally a movement of 
 humanism, came an enfranchisement of man which 
 marks it as a movement of secularization. By this 
 we mean that one consequence of man's great 
 awakening at this moment was an immediate sub- 
 stitution of the secular for the sacred as the focal 
 point of human interest and attention. Every- 
 where, as we have seen, men turned away from the 
 church to the world, from the expectation of the life 
 to come to the realities of the life that now is, from 
 the observance of sacred duties to the pursuit of 
 secular activities. Liberated from sacramental 
 bondage, they found themselves free to exercise 
 unsuspected faculties in unexplored areas of ex- 
 
142 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 perience. This is the explanation of the science 
 and philosophy, art and literature which so sud- 
 denly overwhelmed the scholasticism of the Middle 
 Ages, and marked the most gorgeous flowering of 
 human genius that the world has seen since the 
 classic days of Periclean Athens. This is the 
 explanation of the social institutions which every- 
 where sprang up for the service of man's interests 
 in this present world, and in a generation developed 
 to a position of absolute supremacy over the church. 
 This is the reason for the rigid separation of church 
 and state, and that dominance of political over 
 theological issues w^hich so dramatically marks off 
 modern from medieval times. With the awakening 
 of the Renaissance, there came to man a consuming 
 interest in himself and in his world. Nothing could 
 stand in the way of his imperious passion for 
 knowledge, experience, self-expression. He must 
 lay hold on life, though he be damned for it. So a 
 new world was born ! 
 
 Protestantism, in its early stages of development, 
 was a direct expression in the field of religion of 
 this revolting spirit of the Renaissance. In their 
 rejection of the sacred hierarchy, their scorn of 
 sacraments and indulgences, their acknowledgment 
 of the temporal sovereignty of kings and princes, 
 their anarchical proclamation of "the priesthood of 
 the common man," the early reformers seemed to be 
 headed straight for the secularization of religion 
 along with every other human interest. But the 
 reaction, as we have seen, all too speedily set in! 
 
SACKED AND SECULAR 143 
 
 The reformers were amazed and alarmed at the 
 consequences of what they themselves had done. 
 Therefore were new sanctities created to take the 
 place of the old; the Bible supplanted the church, 
 Sunday observances the priestly sacrements. In 
 course of time, in many bodies of Protestantism, 
 the line of demarcation between sacred and secular 
 was drawn more sharply than it had ever been in 
 the heyday of papal power. Protestantism outdid 
 Catholicism in denouncing art and literature, out- 
 lawing science, banning the natural pleasures and 
 pursuits of the secular life as "of the devil.'' The 
 close of the Great War has brought a revival of this 
 reaction, which shows how basic still in the thought 
 of the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, is 
 the sense of the distinction between the sacred and 
 the secular, the religious and the irreligious life. 
 
 VI 
 
 The forces let loose in the Renaissance, however, 
 could not be stayed. They have swept on through 
 the last three centuries to an assertion not only that 
 man has a right to the full enjoyment of his secular 
 interests and activities, but also that this right con- 
 stitutes in itself a sanctification of these interests 
 and pursuits. Boldly they have hitched their 
 wagon to the star of Jesus's gospel, as it blazes in 
 the immortal declaration of the Nazarene that "the 
 Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the 
 Sabbath." Here was a pronouncement by a master 
 
144 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 liumanist of revolt against the artificialities of 
 "sacred" and "secular/' as imposed by the Phar- 
 isaical legalism of his day. Jesus laid his ax at 
 the root of the tree by making man — his needs and 
 desires, his works and dreams — to be the center of 
 spiritual values. He set forth thus early the prin- 
 ciple which Kant laid down, in the true spirit of 
 the Renaissance, that man was not a means to any 
 end, not even those of religion, but was "an end in 
 himself.'' If there is anything sacred in the world, 
 therefore, it is made so not by the tradition of some 
 divine decree, not by association with some so- 
 called holy day or book or institution, but by 
 contact with some phase of human life. Whatever 
 serves man's needs, liberates his faculties, gives 
 expression to the dreams and visions of his soul, is 
 the work of his hand and heart — ^^this is sacred! 
 Sanctity is not something that inheres in any por- 
 tion of time or space. It is not a quality that is 
 native to any section of the cosmos. Sanctity is a 
 creation of man. It is the projection of the human 
 spirit into the world which it inhabits. 
 
 Such doctrine, of course, means a complete 
 reformulation of our idea of the sacred, based now 
 on the concept of man and not of God. It means 
 an immediate and indefinite extension from the 
 particular to the general, from the one to the many. 
 
 Thus Sunday is not sacred, as distinguished from 
 the other six days of the week. All days are sacred 
 because men use them for their good purposes. 
 Therefore what is wrong on one day, is wrong on 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 145 
 
 every other day; anything that is right to do on 
 Monday, is right also to do on Sunday. If Sunday 
 has any particular character, it is because men have 
 given it this character for certain uses and observ- 
 ances to the end of human welfare. It follows 
 unescapably that what has been given can at any 
 time, by common consent, be taken away or 
 changed. 
 
 Similarly the Bible is not a sacred book, save as 
 all great literatures may be deemed, from their 
 origin in human suffering and aspiration, to be 
 sacred. The Bible is, in the Old Testament, an 
 anthology drawn from the writings of the ancient 
 Hebrews; in the New Testament, it is similarly an 
 anthology drawn from the writings of the early 
 Christians. In both cases, it is a collection of 
 books having a distinctive and very precious 
 spiritual character; but, in essence, in no wise dif- 
 ferent from the literatures produced by any other 
 peoples of ancient or modern times. From the 
 beginning of time even until now, men have 
 recorded on stone or parchment or printed page the 
 confessions of their souls. In every country, there 
 are books or documents which express to perfection 
 the national genius, or mark such epochal occasions 
 in the life of the group that they come in time to 
 take on a kind of sacred character. Thus the 
 Hebrews had their psalms and prophecies and 
 Mosaic laws, the Hindus their Vedic hymns, the 
 Persians their Upanishads, the Romans their 
 Sybilline oracles, the Chinese their Confucian 
 
146 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 books of wisdom; and the Americans today the 
 Declaration of Independence, Washington's "Fare- 
 well Address/' Lincoln's "Gettysburg Speech," 
 and Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic" ! The true Bible would be an anthology 
 drawn from all the great literary sources of ancient 
 and modern times, a true spiritual deposit of 
 humanity. For as James Russell Lowell has so 
 well written — 
 
 "Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 
 And not on paper leaves, or leaves of stone. 
 Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it. 
 Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
 While rolls the sea, while mists the mountains shroud. 
 While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
 Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit." 
 
 Are there sacred objects? None save those bap- 
 tized by the spirit of human use and reverence. 
 More sacred than the paraphernalia of any church 
 are the homely domestic articles brought to these 
 shores by the heroic voyagers of the "Mayflower," 
 now collected and guarded by pious hearts in the 
 Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth. More sacred than any 
 priestly vestment or utensil, is the little christen- 
 ing dress blessed by the love and wet by the tears 
 of Barrie's mother, Margaret Ogilvie. Holier than 
 an altar is a hearthstone. Nothing has any holi- 
 ness save that derived from the human lives with 
 which it has been associated. Sacred objects are 
 to be found more often without than within the 
 church. 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 147 
 
 What about the church itself? Is this sacred? 
 Again the same answer — that it has no sanctity 
 apart from its origin and character as a social 
 institution! The church, like the state, had its 
 beginnings in human needs, not divine purposes. 
 As it serves these needs and gathers in time the 
 hoary reverence of age, it tends, like every other 
 such organization, to take on a character which 
 ultimately develops into a hard and fast dogma 
 of authority. We see this process now going on 
 in the case of the American state, which is fast 
 becoming in the eyes of the people a kind of sacred 
 'Object, like the Israelitish Ark of the Covenant, 
 not to be changed nor even so much as touched. 
 We are forgetting that, in the eyes of the founders 
 of this republic, "governments are instituted 
 among men" to "secure" certain human "rights," 
 and that "whenever any form of government 
 becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right 
 of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to insti- 
 tute a new government." What is here only be- 
 ginning with the state, however, has long since 
 been completed with the church. Both processes 
 are the same, and neither has validity. The phrase, 
 "holy church," is a misnomer. The church is not 
 holy by virtue of any quality implicit in either 
 its origin or essential character. It has been made 
 holy, as the home and the school and the state 
 have been made holy, by the lives of the men and 
 women who have served it, and whom it has served. 
 But it still remains, what is was in the beginning. 
 
148 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 an instrument of social use, to be maintained so 
 long as it fulfills its appointed functions, to be 
 changed from time to time in any way that may 
 improve its efficiency, to be cast aside or destroyed 
 so soon as its usefulness is done. When society 
 has developed into a true community, the church 
 as such will disappear, for society will then be in 
 itself the church as God's kingdom on the earth. 
 Even religion must be said to have nothing 
 especially sacred about it. As there are no ^^spir- 
 itual" interests, apart from general social inter- 
 ests, which belong particularly to the church and 
 its pulpit, so there is no one movement in society 
 which is to be characterized in distinction from all 
 others as "religious." What is true is that man 
 is sacred. Which means that any movement which 
 is aimed at the fuller liberty and wider fellowship 
 of the human race, is a sacred undertaking and 
 therefore to be regarded as an expression of the 
 religious consciousness! Was early Christianity 
 in anything more truly a religion than in its strug- 
 gles against infanticide, the gladiatorial games, 
 and the subjection of women? Has the presence 
 of religion in the hearts of men ever more truly 
 proved itself than in the battles, fought in the face 
 of pitiless opposition, for the abolition of the 
 African slave trade, the emancipation of the 
 chattel slave, and the deliverance of men from 
 ecclesiastical and political tyranny? Where is 
 religion to be found now if not in our movements 
 for the conquest of prostitution, poverty, the liquor 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 149 
 
 traflQc, child labor, industrial autocracy, race 
 prejudice, and war? These evils outrage the dig- 
 nity of human nature, defile the sanctity of the 
 soul, deny to millions of men and women that full 
 expression of personality which alone is life, and 
 therefore bring challenge to religion. ^^Here are 
 the beggars and paupers," cried Theodore Parker 
 to the slumbering conscience of his age, ^^a reproach 
 to our civilization. Here are the drunkards, the 
 criminals, the abandoned, sometimes the foe, but 
 oftener the victim, of society. Every almshouse 
 shows that the churches have not done their duty. 
 Every jail is a monument on which is writ in let- 
 ters of iron that we are still heathens. The gal- 
 lows, black and hideous, lifts its arm, a sign of 
 our infamy, an index of our shame. . . . Shall 
 justice fail and perish out of the world of men? 
 Shall wrong continually endure?''^ Not if religion 
 is true to itself ! For religion, as W. E. H. Lecky 
 has well defined it, is that "unselfish enthusiasm 
 uniting vast bodies of men in aspiration towards 
 an ideal and proving the source of heroic virtues." ^ 
 These movements are our present-day crusades for 
 the rescue of that holy sepulchre which is the heart 
 of man. 
 
 In this identification of religion with the larger 
 human interests of secular emancipation, we have 
 a perfect indication of our assertion that democ- 
 racy is preeminently the religion of our place and 
 
 ^ See his sermon, "The True Idea of a Christian Church", in Works, 
 Volume 13. 
 
 'See his History of Rationalism in Europe, Volume II, page 216. 
 
150 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 time. For what is this movement but an attempt 
 to bring utter liberation to the soul? What does it 
 strive for but the realization among men of that 
 divine fellowship of the common life which is God's 
 Kingdom come upon the earth? Democracy, in all 
 its various political, economic and social phases, 
 seeks simply to take the human and, by a process 
 of sublimation, transform it into the divine. It 
 seeks to take things long regarded as "common 
 and unclean'' — that is secular — and prove them 
 to be holy. Its task is the building of this base 
 material of earth into the fair structure of the 
 heaven of our dreams. In any true sense of the 
 word, this is religion. Democracy is nothing other 
 than the spirit of Jesus at work in our time. 
 
 VII 
 
 But if this is the "sacred," w^hat is left of the 
 "secular"? There is nothing left. All is sacred; 
 or, from the orthodox theological standpoint, all is 
 secular! The course of human events since the 
 Renaissance has again and again been described 
 by the church as a process of secularization. It 
 may much more truly be described as a process of 
 sanctification. The real change is not that the 
 sacred has been secularized, but that the secular 
 has been sanctified. In either case, however, the 
 distinction between sacred and secular has been 
 abolished. 
 
 This does not mean materialism or secularism^ 
 
SACKED AND SECULAR 151 
 
 Rather does it mean recognition of reality at its 
 true worth. It means acceptance of the world, 
 faith in the soul, conviction that God lives in 
 men and in man's work. Above all things else, it 
 means religion made coincident with life. "The 
 natural and real ordinance of religion," said Theo- 
 dore Parker, "is in general a manly life. . . . 
 Religion is the sacrament of religion; itself its 
 ordinance. Piety and goodness are its substance, 
 and all normal life its form. . . . My religion 
 is not one thing, and my life another ; the two are 
 one. . . . Care for the bodies and souls of men, 
 that is the real sacrament and ordinance of re- 
 ligion for society, the Church and State."^ 
 
 ^ See his Sermons of Religion, centenary edition, page 22. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 
 
"Whereas in the time of Jesus, and in the ages which 
 grew darker and darker after his death until the dark- 
 ness, after a brief, false dawn in the Reformation, cul- 
 minated in the commercial night of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, it was believed that you could not make men good 
 by Act of Parliament, we now know that you cannot 
 make them good in any other way. . . . Being mem- 
 bers one of another means . . . universal suffrage and 
 equal incomes and all sorts of modern political measures. 
 Even in Syria in the time of Jesus his teachings could 
 not possibly have been realized by a series of independent 
 explosions of personal righteousness on the part of sep- 
 arate units of the population. . . . Christianity, good 
 or bad, right or wrong, must perforce be left out of the 
 question in human affairs until it is made practically 
 applicable to them by complicated political devices. 
 . . . Personal righteousness and the view that you can- 
 not make people moral by Act of Parliament, is, in fact, 
 the favorite defensive resort of the people who, con- 
 sciously of subconsciously, are quite determined not to 
 have their property meddled with by Jesus or any other 
 reformer." 
 
 Bernard Shaw^, Preface to 
 
 Androcles and the Lion 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 
 
 A second phase of the spiritual change which 
 follows upon what we have called the new human- 
 istic interpretation of religion, is the substitution 
 of sociology for theology, of a program of social 
 life for a system of theological dogma. The con- 
 summation of this process marks the end of a long 
 era characterized by three distinct periods of devel- 
 opment. 
 
 First comes, through more than two centuries 
 of time, that organization along theological lines 
 of Protestant orthodoxy, which stands as the first 
 fruits of the Reformation. It is one of the supreme 
 tragedies of history, as we have already seen, that 
 this vast release of energy in the religious world 
 took a course which in the end moved not forward 
 into the light of the new day, but backward into 
 the night which preceded the dawn of the Renais- 
 sance. The Reformation, to be sure, apprehended 
 the spiritual autonomy of man, freed him from the 
 over-lordship of the Roman Church, and boldly 
 made him the agent of his own redemption; and 
 thereby set in motion a tidal wave of change 
 
 155 
 
156 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 which was destined to sweep to the farthest reaches 
 of social life. But what should have followed from 
 the great deliverance in Christendom itself, never 
 came. Alarmed at the awful logic of its own thesis, 
 the fateful consequences of its own action. Protes- 
 tantism swung back upon itself, raised up the Bible 
 in place of the Church, put creeds and confessions 
 in place of papal bulls and synodal decrees, modi- 
 fied the sacraments for its own uses, and in gen- 
 eral went as far back to medieval Christianity as 
 it was able to go without actually losing its 
 identity. 
 
 When the reform movement had run its course 
 and the churches were full-formed, the distinctive 
 mark of Protestanism was seen to be its emphasis 
 upon theology, as contrasted with the Catholic em- 
 phasis upon ecclesiasticism. With the one, the 
 central thing was the creed; with the other, the 
 church. In form at least, the Protestant sects 
 dignified the single man, the individual soul, to 
 an extent altogether unknown to the Roman hier- 
 archy. Responsibility for salvation was now upon 
 each one, and not upon the church as a vicarious 
 instrument of heaven. If a man desired to be 
 saved, he must save himself — not in the sense, of 
 course, that he could dispense with the atonement 
 of Jesus Christ, but in the sense that, by his own 
 acceptance, must the grace of this atonement be 
 received into his life. He must have his own expe- 
 rience of grace, initiate his own act of faith. The 
 mediation not of any church but of his own soui 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 157 
 
 with God, must accomplish his redemption. But 
 when it came to defining this mediation, the Prot- 
 estants were at one with the Catholics in present- 
 ing a process that was external and formal. Faith 
 was not now, as might be supposed, the free adven- 
 ture of a man with his own soul. If no longer a 
 matter of sacraments and priestly offices, it most 
 certainly was a matter of creeds. Exactly as in 
 the medieval days, in other words, religious experi- 
 ence was not produced within but prescribed 
 without. Here were elaborate doctrines about 
 God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, sin and pun- 
 ishment, atonement and salvation, the communion 
 of saints, the resurrection of the dead, the last judg- 
 ment — all revealed, of course, in the Bible, and 
 formulated into articles of faith by holy men 
 acting under divine guidance. All of these, now, 
 must be believed, without question or reservation, 
 as the "open sesame" to God! 
 
 What had happened, of course, was that the 
 reformers, in their quest for the pure and unadul- 
 terated gospel of the Nazarene, had gotten no fur- 
 ther back than the writings of St. Paul. Calvin 
 did over again the work of Augustine in rearing 
 out of the raw material of the Pauline epistles a 
 vast structure of cosmology, anthropology, history 
 and philosophical speculation, and calling it Chris- 
 tianity. In Catholicism this theology never gained 
 ascendency over the rites and offices of the church. 
 In Protestantism, however, it became the central 
 phenomenon of the religious life. If a man be- 
 
158 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 lieved, he had done all and was therefore saved. 
 If he did not believe, he had done nothing, or worse 
 than nothing, and was therefore lost. It seems 
 amazing, with our knowledge today of the ethical 
 and social character of the teachings of Jesus, and 
 of the absence therefrom of all arbitrary elements 
 of theological belief, that such perversion of his 
 spirit could be possible. This substitution of 
 dogmas for a way of life, however, had its begin- 
 ning among the men who lived within a generation 
 of the Master's death, in a perfectly natural desire 
 to exalt his personality and perpetuate his work, 
 and if it was easy for those who knew the Nazarene 
 thus to be misled, how much easier for those who 
 lived centuries later, in an age still undelivered 
 from traditional habits of mind! The result at 
 any rate was full-fledged identification of religion 
 with theology. Hence our description of this first 
 span of spiritual development in modern times, as 
 the theological period ! 
 
 II 
 
 The second period, which is characterized by the 
 advent of liberalism as a movement of rebellion 
 against the dogmatic rigors of orthodoxy, began 
 vaguely in the eighteenth century, and reached its 
 culmination in the last half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Sometimes the movement embodied itself in 
 separatist groups which were unrecognized, save 
 for purposes of denunciation and persecution, by 
 any authentic Christian power. More often, espe- 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 159 
 
 daily as time went on and independent thought 
 came to be regarded as not wholly a disreputable 
 thing, the liberal tendency worked inside the 
 church and established definite centers of progres- 
 sive influence. From the beginning it represented 
 the interplay of a great variety of influences. On 
 the one hand, as in Deism and later Rationalism, 
 it was the protest of the human reason against the 
 manifest absurdities and incongruities of Christian 
 theology. On the other hand, as in the case of the 
 Friends and all mystic groups, it was the souFs 
 assertion of the validity of its own "inner light," 
 as opposed to all outward authorities whatsoever. 
 Again, as with the Universalists, it was a revolt 
 of the conscience against the essential immorality 
 of a theology which began with total depravity 
 and ended with eternal punishment. Frequently, 
 from the early days of Methodism to these latest 
 days of liberal evangelism, it has been a veritable 
 passion to strip away the theological and ecclesias- 
 tical encumbrances of the gospel, and get "back to 
 Christ.'' 
 
 At heart, however, as seen in such early antici- 
 pations as the heretical sects of the Reformation, 
 and in such extreme and therefore typical develop- 
 ments as Unitarianism, Ethical Culture and free 
 religions generally, this liberal movement is prop- 
 erly to be understood as nothing more nor less than 
 an attempt to recover and restore what was lost 
 in the later developments of the Reformation. 
 "One sublime idea has taken strong hold of my 
 
160 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 mind," wrote Dr. Channing, the veritable incarna- 
 tion of the liberal spirit in religion. ^^It is the 
 greatness of the soul, its divinity, its union with 
 God."^ Implicit in the Renaissance, and all that 
 sprang from its fecund womb, was this discovery 
 and sublimation of man "as a free being created 
 to form himself, and to decide his own destiny."^ 
 It is this conviction, as we have seen, which liber- 
 ated man's intellect, and therewith made possible 
 the wonders of modern science and philosophy, 
 exploration and invention, art, literature and juris- 
 prudence. It is this which freed man's will, and 
 revealed to him at once his responsibility and 
 capacity for creative achievement. It is this which 
 taught man of his dignity and rights, and stirred 
 him to those great battles for democracy which 
 have shaken the world. What was done in these 
 other fields, should have been done in religion also ; 
 church and creed alike should have been dethroned 
 in favor of the soul. What the Reformation failed 
 to do, however, liberalism has achieved by bringing 
 back into Christianity the forces of enlightenment 
 and deliverance at large in the outer world, and 
 thus opening a distinctive period in the develop- 
 ment of the modern religious consciousness. Three 
 things are to be noted as characteristic of the lib- 
 eral attitude in religion. 
 
 First of all, is confidence in man, and an un- 
 shakable belief in his prerogative of freedom. "I 
 
 1 See The Life of William Ellery Channing, by William Henry 
 Channing, page 445. 
 
 2 William Ellery Channing, in "The Elevation of the Laboring 
 Classes," see Works, page 48. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 161 
 
 do and I must reverence human nature/' says 
 Channing;^ ^^nothing will disturb my faith in its 
 godlike powers and tendencies. I bless it for its 
 kind affections, for its strong and tender love. I 
 honor it for its struggles against oppression, its 
 achievements in science and art, its examples of 
 heroic and saintly virtue.'' Here is liberalism in 
 its best estate! It places man at the center of 
 things; ^^the highest dwells with him . . . the 
 sources of nature are his own."^ It trusts man in 
 the unrestrained activity of his powers; "within 
 (him) is the soul of the whole, the universal 
 beauty, the eternal One."^ It demands for men 
 free opportunity for development, and challenges 
 him, "encompassed by a thousand warring forces, 
 to contend with all, and perfect himself by the 
 conflict."^ It is this confidence in man which has 
 made liberalism the friend of science and art, and 
 the champion of all cultural and humanitarian 
 movements of reform. Interested in man for his 
 own sake, it has sought to foster whatever would 
 ennoble his life and enlarge his spirit. Its con- 
 cerns, in other words, have been preeminently 
 human concerns; and its work, therefore, one of 
 the great humanizing influences of modern history. 
 It is obvious that liberalism finds validity for 
 its attitude toward human nature in its recogni- 
 tion of the moral sentiment as of central im- 
 portance in the life of man. This leads to the 
 
 * See his sermon, " Likeness to God," in WorJcs^ page 299. 
 ' Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay. The Over-Soul. 
 •See Channing, as above. 
 
162 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 second of the three factors notably characteristic 
 of liberal religion — namely, its substitution of the 
 ethical point of view for the ecclesiastical and 
 theological. What is important in religious expe- 
 rience, says the liberal, is not rites and ceremonies 
 as talismans of salvation, not creeds and covenants 
 as media of grace, but those fundamental virtues 
 of the inner life which distinguish if not the be- 
 liever from the infidel, at least the good man from 
 the bad. The vital thing, in other words, as the 
 evidence of salvation, is not faith but character; 
 not acceptance of dogmas, but fulfillment of the 
 moral law; not conformity to theological tenets, 
 but glad and free allegiance to the best ideals of 
 the soul. The liberal is distinguished by nothing 
 more precisely than by his utter indifference to 
 what a man believes or does not believe about the 
 being of God, the person of Jesus, the resurrection 
 of the body, or the inspiration of the Scriptures. 
 Loyal himself to the most rigorous standards of 
 the truth, clear in his own mind as to what he 
 thinks upon these questions of theological dispu- 
 tation, eager to state his reasons for his belief and 
 to commend these reasons to other minds, he yet 
 respects in others that right of independent judg- 
 ment which he conserves for himself, and finds not 
 in what a man thinks but in how he lives the ultima 
 ratio of the soul. Purity in the inner life, justice 
 and generosity in human relations, integrity of 
 mind, quick sympathy of heart, sincerity of con- 
 viction and purpose, and, above all, a love that 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 163 
 
 knows no bounds and fears no sacrifice — ^this is 
 the true test of religion. Liberalism, in the last 
 analysis, is interested in virtue — in that moral 
 beauty which is the sign of health in human nature. 
 Finally, as a consequence of this emphasis upon 
 the moral sentiment and its essential worth in 
 human nature, liberalism is notably characterized 
 by an acceptance of education as the method of 
 individual salvation. Implicit in the whole ortho- 
 dox concept of religion is a distrust of human 
 nature, a belief that it is corrupt and must be 
 changed. To accomplish this change was the pur- 
 pose of Christ in his great act of the atonement; 
 and all the devices of the church, whether they be 
 incorporated in sacraments or creeds, are aimed 
 at conveying the efficacy of this sacrifice to men. 
 Now with this idea, the liberal breaks utterly! 
 Eeverencing human nature as in essence, at least, 
 divine, he questions the whole system of salvation 
 as it has been presented in the past by Catholic 
 and Protestant alike. The problem of religion, 
 from the liberal standpoint, is not that of remaking 
 human nature at all, but of reordering it. The 
 elements of good are all present in the soul just 
 as it is. The native forces of life are themselves 
 good, if only they be delivered from the entangle- 
 ment of perversions and repressions which are the 
 circumstance of birth. Men need salvation, as 
 they have always needed it, but salvation not from 
 the past but from the future. They need to be 
 saved not in the sense that they are already lost, 
 
164 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 but in the sense that they may at any time be lost 
 through ignorance, misunderstanding, weakness, 
 or neglect. To be lost is to be imperfect, incom- 
 plete; to have powers wasted by inward conflict 
 and disorder ; to fall short of the full development 
 of the possibilities of virtue that are within us. 
 To be saved, on the other hand, is to fulfill our 
 being, to order and release our powers for efficient 
 action. To be >saved is to be moral by being 
 normal. Salvation of this type requires self-mas- 
 tery; and self-mastery, in turn, requires knowl- 
 edge — knowledge of oneself, of the world, and of 
 the experience of men. It is for this reason that 
 liberalism has always emphasized education as the 
 one sure means of "saving'' humankind. 
 
 The general note of such emphases as these, is 
 undoubtedly that of humanism; in this sense the 
 liberal movement in religion is a true child of the 
 Eenaissance and early Reformation. As com- 
 pared, however, with the Protestant orthodoxy 
 into which it broke so rudely with its heresies, this 
 liberalism is more particularly an ethical phenom- 
 enon. It was not content merely to attack the con- 
 tent of Christian theology from the standpoint of 
 new scientific and historical researches. It was 
 not interested in revising creeds to match the 
 claims presented by geology, biology, archeology, 
 and the higher criticism of the Bible. What it 
 did was to make a complete sweep of the theo- 
 logical method, and substitute therefor the moral 
 sentiment. Human nature is divine, because it 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 165 
 
 has capacity for virtue! Character is salvation, 
 because it is the evidence of virtue ! Moral train- 
 ing is the method of salvation, because it is the 
 cultivation of virtue! In these propositions, the 
 liberal movement put moral idealism definitely to 
 the forefront of the religious life. It identified 
 religion absolutely with ethics. Wherefore may 
 this second span of spiritual development in 
 modern times be not inaccurately described as the 
 ethical period! 
 
 Ill 
 
 That liberalism was a prodigious advance over 
 everything that had preceded it goes without 
 saying. The movement marked the definite en- 
 trance into the religious field of those emancipat- 
 ing humanistic influences which were elsewhere 
 remaking modern society; and the beginning, 
 therefore, of that new basis of religion which is 
 even now still in process of being laid. In its 
 nineteenth century forms, however, it fell short of 
 the full implications of its message by reason of 
 its adherence, as was perhaps inevitable at the 
 time, to that individualistic interpretation of spir- 
 itual experience which from the beginning was so 
 characteristic of Protestant thought. Its dis- 
 covery of the moral sentiment and its place in 
 human nature, called for a complete reordering of 
 human nature. Its substitution of character for 
 faith in the process of salvation, demanded a fresh 
 study of the whole problem of the soul and its 
 
166 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 redemption. This liberalism did not give. On the 
 contrary, it accepted in toto the classic philosophy 
 of the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and 
 asked only that it be restated in terms ethical in- 
 stead of theological. 
 
 The individualistic character of this philosophy 
 is familiar, as it has long been prevalent. For 
 centuries, and especially since the Renaissance, 
 man has been regarded strictly as an individual — 
 i. e.^ in isolated personality, having no essential 
 connection with any other individual, nor with the 
 natural or social environment of the world in which 
 he lives. Man has been conceived, that is, as 
 though he were utterly and forever alone, uninflu- 
 encing and uninfluenced by anything else in all the 
 universe. Even the several parts which together 
 make up his individuality, organic and functional, 
 have been torn asunder as though they were sepa- 
 rate and disconnected units, and surveyed not in 
 relation to one another or the whole, but apart by 
 themselves. Thus physiology has studied the indi- 
 vidual man as a physical body; psychology, as a 
 soul, or psyche; logic, as a mind; metaphysics, as 
 an incarnate absolute. Ethics has discussed the 
 right conduct of the individual; aesthetics, his 
 instincts and aptitudes for beauty; political 
 economy, that amazing animal ^^the economic 
 man." The whole purpose of inquiry in the past, 
 says Francis 6. Peabody,^ seems to have been to 
 
 * See his The Approach to the Social Question, page 9. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 167 
 
 detach the person from the mass, ^^as though he 
 occupied a little universe of his own.'' 
 
 What this individualistic habit of thought has 
 meant in religion, is clearly shown in the whole 
 content of Christian orthodoxy. In medieval but 
 more especially in Protestant theology, the single 
 man has been regarded as a separate spiritual 
 entity, confronted with a problem of salvation 
 which involves himself alone. Whether he be 
 white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, 
 born of pure or tainted blood, the denizen of a 
 palace or a slum or the open countryside, makes 
 no essential difference. As regards religion he is 
 simply a soul, without color, race, mental condi- 
 tion, or social status. He is like every other soul 
 in the fact that he exists in a state of sin, and is 
 therefore in desperate need of salvation. But he 
 is apart from every other soul in the fact that there 
 is no dependence, nor even connection, between 
 souls. Men exist, that is, not like the cells of a 
 body, but rather like grains of sand, the particles 
 of an aggregate. Like God himself, they have no 
 relations, save as each is related to God. It is this 
 relationship, with all of its implications of duty 
 and destiny, and not any relationship between one 
 another as members together of the human family, 
 which constitutes, as we have seen, the meaning of 
 religion. A man's business, spiritually speaking, 
 is to "get right with God," to quote the familiar 
 revivalistic phrase. The business of the churches, 
 in turn, is to show how this is to be done. The 
 
168 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 crass indiyidualism of the whole philosophy and 
 process is admirably summed up in the classic cry, 
 What shall / do to be saved? 
 
 Now the liberal movement broke with Christian 
 orthodoxy in many things, but not in this ! Liber- 
 alism also is individualistic. It also sees the soul 
 in isolation, so far at least as its personal destiny 
 is concerned. It also defines religion in terms of 
 personal salvation; salvation by character, to be 
 sure, and not by faith, but the objective is the 
 same! Of course, its humanistic attitude toward 
 life, its interest in man as a moral creature, its 
 whole understanding of religion in terms of ethics, 
 gives to liberalism an awareness of contacts, one 
 man with another, which is practically unknown 
 in orthodoxy. But it is contacts which the liberal 
 sees, and not relationships. It is the bumping and 
 rubbing of one grain of sand against another, and 
 not the functioning of two interdependent cells in 
 the service of an organism which includes them 
 both as constituent elements of the one reality! 
 The individual, in other words, remains basic. If 
 these contacts have value, it is only because they 
 compose the raw material out of which is wrought 
 the fibre of individual character. If they have 
 meaning, it is only the meaning created by the 
 souls who occasion and then use them. All social 
 phenomena— institutions, laws, customs, political 
 and economic systems — are fortuitous and ephem- 
 eral. They gain even an appearance of reality only 
 as they reflect and record, and thus objectify, the 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 169 
 
 struggles of men to gain, through their moral at- 
 tainments, that right personal relationship with 
 God which constitutes the fulfillment of their 
 lives. Liberalism, therefore, says Prof. Ephraim 
 Emerton,^ speaking more especially of Unitari- 
 anism, "fixes its attention primarily upon the indi- 
 vidual. ... It has its own lofty conceptions of 
 the function of the family, the state, the church, 
 mankind even, in bringing about that development 
 which is to it the ultimate goal of humanity. It 
 feels the force of the reaction of all these upon the 
 individual in fixing his aims, setting his limita- 
 tions, giving him his opportunities; but still more 
 powerfully it feels that these larger entities have 
 meaning and value only as they are fixed by the 
 character of the individuals who compose them.'' 
 The practical consequence of this individualistic 
 interpretation of life, is an absorption in the prob- 
 lem of personal salvation quite as intense on the 
 part of the liberal as of the orthodox Protestant. 
 That stress is laid on character instead of faith, 
 on the moral instead of the theological process, 
 does not alter the fact that it is personal salvation 
 that he is after. The Unitarian, or Universalist, 
 or Ethical Culturist, exactly like the Methodist or 
 Presbyterian, cries. What shall / do to be saved; 
 and while he does not find his answer in sacra- 
 ments and creeds, confessions and conversions, he 
 does find it in the ancient law of justice, mercy 
 and good faith. This is the explanation of the ex- 
 
 ^ See his Unitarian Thought^ page 199. 
 

 
 170 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 elusive importance attached to education, which is 
 essentially the retail method of taking one indi- 
 vidual after another in home and school and 
 church, and training each to the knowledge, love 
 and practice of the right. The result of such train- 
 ing, if it be successful, is character, and character 
 is the condition of salvation or the end of life 
 attained! This is the explanation, also, strange 
 as it may seem, of the very quick and generous 
 interest of the liberal in what we know as "social 
 ^ problems." How frequently his religious activi- 
 \ ties take the lovely altruistic form of philanthropy 
 y and social service! He seems characteristically to 
 /I forget himself in the love of others. And so he 
 I does, so far as his own individual feelings are con- 
 cerned; for man, delivered from theologizing, is 
 as truly made for love as the stars for shining! 
 But this involves no inconsistency, for the phi- 
 losophy back of his activities remains as individu- 
 alistic as ever. The liberal is kindly, sympathetic, 
 serviceable primarily because he has learned to 
 believe that such qualities constitute character. 
 This is what it means to him to be good. All the 
 while in his altruism he has in view, consciously 
 or unconsciously, not a far-flung, impersonal, 
 social end at all, but a very narrow, intimate and 
 personal end. He is practicing his moral law, 
 flattering his sense of virtue, sustaining his self- 
 respect. Hence the superficiality of much of the 
 social work that is done by our so-called "best 
 people"! Hence also the ease with which such 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 171 
 
 work takes on a patronizing air, and all too often 
 degenerates into the disgusting hypocrisies of 
 Pharisaism ! 
 
 It is the doctrine of social work deliberately pro- 
 fessed by religious liberals which offers the con- 
 clusive demonstration of the nullifying individu- 
 alism implicit in the entire movement. What the 
 liberal sees in society, as we have said, is a mere 
 aggregate of individuals. Society, according to / 
 his argument, can be saved, ethically speaking, , 
 only as the individuals who compose this aggre- \ 
 gate are themselves saved. The problem of social ' 
 redemption, in other words, is the old problem of 
 individual redemption writ large. What we have 
 to do is to concern ourselves not with reforming 
 political or economic conditions, not with altering 
 social arrangements of any kind, but simply and 
 solely with making individual men and women to 
 be morally what they ought to be. To save society, 
 that is, we must first save men; and we can save 
 men only through the redemptive force of personal 
 character. Our social task naturally begins with 
 ourselves, for we contribute to and share in social 
 salvation when, in the struggles and conflicts of 
 our inner lives, we come out victorious. But the 
 quickest road to such victory, is service of others. 
 There is a reciprocal relationship, in other words, 
 in social service. We save others as we save our- 
 selves; and we save ourselves as we save others. 
 But this does not alter in any way the undeviating 
 individualistic viewpoint of the whole. Even in 
 
172 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 the noblest struggles for mankind, there is present 
 always the element of personal reward. The 
 process of service, sacrifice and death for others' 
 sakes is, in the last analysis, nothing but the process 
 of our own salvation. Naively, almost accidentally, 
 this truth comes out in the familiar couplet of 
 John Greenleaf Whittier, a favorite motto of lib- 
 eral Christianity — 
 
 "Heaven's gate is closed to him who comes alone ; 
 Save thou a soul and it shall save thine own J' 
 
 IV 
 
 But is individualism thus wrong, as a spiritual 
 motive, if it can rise to such self-forgetting heights 
 as this? 
 
 Not wrong, perhaps; but certainly inadequate! 
 There is something far more involved here than 
 mere individualism. This reciprocal relationship 
 of service confounds the very doctrine which it pre- 
 tends to illustrate and practice. There are sugges- 
 tions here of the teachings of the Hebrew prophets. 
 There is an irresistible reminder of Jesus's im- 
 mortal declaration, "He that findeth his life shall 
 lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall 
 find it." Paul is brought immediately into memory 
 with his noble dictum that "no man liveth unto 
 himself." Man is more than an individual if, by 
 "individual," we mean a separate, isolated soul. 
 However it may be theologically, from the moral 
 Tiewpoint, at least, man's life is inextricably 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 173 
 
 interwoven with his fellows. He joins not merely; 
 contacts with them, but relationships. Through 
 these relationships, which are unescapable, he 
 forms an organism which is society, itself a body 
 with many members. Man is a social creature, 
 his life is a social phenomenon. His problem of 
 salvation leaps the bounds of personality, and 
 becomes at one with the problem of the race. 
 
 It is this affirmation of solidarity as contrasted 
 with individuality, which constitutes the new 
 spiritual truth of this age, and marks the third 
 or sociological period in the history of the 
 religious development of modern times. What 
 has been the inspiration of all prophets and 
 apostles from Amos and Hosea to Wesley, Parker 
 and Walter Rauschenbusch, is now become the 
 science, so to speak, of man. Even as science, it is 
 not new. Aristotle saw the truth when he laid 
 down in his Politics ^ the proposition that "man is 
 by nature a social animal. The individual, when 
 isolated, is not self-sufficing, and therefore is like 
 a part in relation to the whole. He who lives not 
 in society, who has no need because he is sufficient 
 for himself, must be either a beast or a god.'' But 
 we have the material to handle this problem of 
 society today, as Darwin in his day had the material 
 to handle the problem of biological evolution, 
 known so many centuries before to Heraclitus and 
 the later Greek philosophers. Our thought, there- 
 
 ^Book I, chapter 2, 
 
174 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 fore, is not a surmise nor yet an inspiration. It is 
 a demonstration. 
 
 At bottom is the fundamental proposition that 
 there is no such thing as an individual per se. "A 
 separate individual/' says a modern scientist, "is 
 an abstraction and not known to experience." ^ 
 For the individual lives at all only in his relations. 
 An individual is identifiable as an individual only 
 by virtue of certain personal qualities which make 
 him a member of a larger or smaller social group. 
 Thus it is not enough to know that John Smith is 
 John Smith. If we would distinguish this John 
 Smith from other John Smiths, and from myriads 
 of men who swarm the world — if we would know 
 him, that is, in his own separate individuality as a 
 person — we must know his residence, his business, 
 his family, his nationality and race, the one hundred 
 and one ties which bind him to society, and which 
 together make up the essence of his individual 
 existence. Cut off a man from all political, 
 economic and social relations, and he is no longer a 
 man, but an impersonal abstraction, a mere "ego'' 
 signifying nothing that is human. But unite him 
 with his fellows — make him a husband, a father, a 
 merchant, a citizen, an American — and instantly he 
 becomes an individual. Indeed, the more numerous 
 his contacts, the more of an individual he is. The 
 abundant life is the distinctive life! Theodore 
 Roosevelt was the outstanding personality of his 
 generation for no other reason than that he touched 
 
 * Professor C. H. Cooley, in Human Nature and the Social Order, 
 page 1. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 175 
 
 life at more points, identified himself with a larger 
 number of human interests, than any other of his 
 contemporaries. Relations, therefore, are what 
 constitute the man. It is our membership in the 
 one body that makes us what we are. 
 
 The social nature of individuality has its begin- 
 ning with heredity. We are inextricably bound to 
 the forbears from whose loins we have sprung, and 
 again to the descendants who spring in turn from 
 us. Our natures are a recapitulation of the mil- 
 lions who have preceded us ; and this recapitulation 
 we gather up, modified by our use of it, and pass on 
 to the millions who come after. Past, present and 
 future, in other words, constitute a single flow, like 
 the current of a river, in which each drop takes the 
 color and direction of the whole. A biologic neces- 
 sity is upon us which determines within narrow 
 bounds the physical and psychological range of our 
 experience. The white man is not the black man, 
 nor the Englishman the Chinaman, nor the moron 
 the intellectual. Each belongs by birth and in- 
 heritance to a social group, into which the other 
 cannot enter even in imagination. And it is 
 inherent qualities of body, mind and spirit which 
 belong to this group and to no other, which give to 
 each the distinctive elements of his being. 
 
 More important, however, than heredity as an 
 aspect of sociality, is environment. Heredity was 
 displaced as the primal factor of existence when 
 the science of evolution came to the fore and demon- 
 strated that the substance of life was not something 
 
176 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 permanently given, but something constantly under- 
 going change from one form to another. Life con- 
 tinues, of course, only as it is passed on by the 
 process of inheritance. But what is thus trans- 
 mitted is not a constant but an ever-changing 
 reality; and the fundamental cause, or at least 
 control, of this process of change, is the influence of 
 environment. What life is, or how it began, we do 
 not know. We are conscious only of that creative 
 force which has been pushing itself forward from the 
 beginning, and making the path which we know as 
 evolution. But this force has not been working in a 
 vacuum. Always it has been enmeshed in an en- 
 vironment which has determined all that it has done. 
 Each separate organism, or embodiment of life, in 
 other words, is at every moment inextricably tied up 
 with what is about it — first, its natural habitat, and 
 secondly, the other organisms with which it shares 
 this habitat. Life is only a process of adjustment 
 between organism and environment — ^^the continu- 
 ous adjustment of internal relations and external 
 relations," to quote the familiar definition of 
 Herbert Spencer/ Changes in the environment are 
 followed by inevitable changes in the organism, as a 
 necessary condition of its successful adjustment to 
 the environment, and therefore of survival. It is 
 this, and not the extravagant hypotheses of creation, 
 which explains the innumerably various forms of 
 life upon our planet. Even the basic and appar- 
 ently fixed characters of race and genus, passed on 
 
 » See his Principles of Biology, Volume I, page 99. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 177 
 
 by inheritance through unnumbered generations, 
 have all had their origin in this experience of 
 adjustment, and have become stabilized only as a 
 result of relationship with a stabilized environment. 
 Relationship is again our central fact. The indi- 
 vidual lives not in himself but in the whole. 
 
 Now what is true of organisms in general is true 
 of man in particular. We also are creatures of 
 environment. The abiding racial, national and 
 class distinctions of this world are not to be 
 accounted for on the basis of different inward 
 qualities of human nature, but primarily on the 
 basis of different outward conditions of social life. 
 What is commonly attributed to heredity is only 
 the transmission of early consequences of environ- 
 mental influence. We are molded permanently in 
 speech, in manners, in habits, in abilities, in morals, 
 in ideals, by the external circumstances which wrap 
 us round, as the head of a Flathead Indian is flat- 
 tened by the stone which is bound from infancy to 
 the top of his plastic skull, or the feet of the Chinese 
 women are distorted by the unyielding bandages in 
 which they are tightly wrapped. The great ma- 
 jority of men and women are bound in the fetters of 
 material conditions which make impossible a 
 healthy body, an active mind, or a pure soul. 
 Climate, food, clothing, political rule, economic 
 status, hours and conditions of labor, all have their 
 determining influence on the character and moral 
 destiny of the individual. How many of us do not 
 know that we are what we are today because we 
 
178 NEW CHUKCHES FOE OLD 
 
 were born in the nineteenth century, in the United 
 States of America, in material comfort and not in 
 poverty, were given care and education and not 
 neglect, were guarded by economic security from 
 exhausting labor, unwholesome living conditions, 
 vicious enticements, and acquaintance with im- 
 moral standards — that we are what we are, in short, 
 because of the political, industrial and social 
 environment in the midst of which we have always 
 lived! Change this environment in any decisive 
 particular ! Make us a Eoman slave, a feudal serf, 
 a Kussian peasant, a slum denizen of East-end 
 London, a sweat-shop worker in East-side New 
 York, a "hunkie'' steel- worker in the blast-furnaces 
 of Pittsburgh, a negro plantation hand in Alabama ! 
 And what would there be left of the refinement, 
 grace and straight-out moral worth which we flatter 
 ourselves are basic elements in our native indi- 
 viduality? It is environment which is the secret 
 of being and becoming. It is social conditions 
 which make us in the end what we really are, even 
 as it is the tides which make sweet or noisome the 
 shores of the sea. "How little does heredity count 
 as compared with conditions," says Henry George.^ 
 "Change Lady Vere de Vere in her cradle with an 
 infant in the slums, and not all the blood of a hun- 
 dred earls will give you the refined and cultured 
 woman." 
 
 If demonstration of this thesis were needed, we 
 have it today in the multiplying complexities of 
 
 * See his Progress and Poverty, page 468. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 179 
 
 modern industrial society, and the uses to which 
 they are put in reducing the single man to impo- 
 tence and misery. In the old days, especially in 
 this country, when there was a frontier on the out- 
 skirts of civilization, it was possible for a man to 
 live his own life, fashion his own environment, and 
 thus fulfill the promise of his individuality. If 
 society pressed too closely upon him, and denied 
 him reasonable opportunity for free expression of 
 personality, the door of escape was always open. 
 He could set sail across the seas, or march sturdily 
 across the border, out into the wilderness of new 
 lands. But today the frontier is gone. It disap- 
 peared generations ago in Europe, and is now in 
 process of disappearing in America. Everywhere 
 society has expanded, until men live together, 
 whether they will or no. At the same time has 
 there developed within society, that stupendous 
 mechanism of capitalistic industry which has 
 mobilized the race to a social dependency and 
 discipline more terrible in peace than the military 
 machine effects in war. The economic organization 
 of the modern world is one of the miracles of his- 
 tory. Its systems of transportation and communi- 
 cation, its vast enterprises of industrial and social 
 activity, its complex machinery of production, dis- 
 tribution and exchange, its enormous expansions of 
 knowledge, efficiency and interdependent life, com- 
 bine to make mankind more truly a unit than it has 
 ever been before. Society has become what 
 Herbert Spencer anticipated as the "social organ- 
 
180 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 ism." But to what ends is this organism adjusted? 
 To ends of service or exploitation, of liberation or 
 enslavement for mankind? Look upon the world 
 as it has developed during the amazing years of the 
 nineteenth century, and what do we see but the 
 progressive subjection of the race? To the remotest 
 ends of the expropriated earth, we see the millions 
 caught in the entanglements of this awful system of 
 property and profits. They swarm in coal mines 
 and copper fields, in steel foundries and textile 
 mills, in sweat-shops, tenements and slums. They 
 labor terribly and live miserably in the best of 
 times ; and when scourges of commercial depression, 
 like old-time pestilences, sweep the world of indus- 
 try, they live as best they can in beggary or die in 
 squalor. Can these who have no homes, possess no 
 books or pictures, enjoy no influences of gentleness 
 and care, be men in any spiritual or even deeply 
 human sense? They can exist, if the wage be good 
 and the work not slack; but can they live as God 
 intended that his sons of earth should live? These 
 unhappy mortals have no chance in such environ- 
 ment. They are subdued to their factories and 
 gutters, as the hand of the dyer to the medium in 
 which it works. The moral problem of the indi- 1 
 vidual in such case altogether disappears before the | 
 prior problem of the social order. 
 
 But how about the human will — ^that power of 
 creative imagination and activity which sets off 
 man from all other earthly organisms as merely 
 creatures? Is this not present in the lowest and 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 181 
 
 most unfortunate of men, and free to lift him above 
 the environment which despoils him? 
 
 So it may seem to those well and safely born, out 
 of and above the miry ruck of life ! But no will is 
 really free which is "cribbed, cabin'd and confin'd'' 
 by the economic determinism which is the over- 
 whelmingly decisive factor in modern industrial 
 society. Or if it be free by virtue of inherent 
 strength or fortunate release of circumstance, it 
 can rightly act not to save itself, but to save others 
 by remaking conditions of life and labor which 
 doom men to wastage, misery and decay. What we 
 are confronted by is a social order which is destruc- 
 tive and not helpful to human welfare. The very 
 cruelty and injustice of such a system as now pre- 
 dominates, should stir our souls to some such 
 wrathful indignation as the prophets of every age 
 have voiced against the social outrages of their 
 time. But beyond this is the purely practical ques- 
 tion of a technique for delivering mankind from 
 spiritual death. And the cold matter of fact is 
 that the complex organization of modern industry 
 has so changed and at the same time fixed relation- 
 ships between men, that individuals can no longer, 
 if they ever could, be saved apart from the con- 
 ditions of the environment in whic<h they live. To 
 save a slum population from physical degeneration, 
 moral corruption and spiritual atrophy, we must 
 seek not to educate and redeem persons, but to wipe 
 out slums. To save the children who crowd our 
 juvenile courts and reformatories, we must seek not 
 
182 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 to punish, teach or even inspire boys and girls, but 
 to change their gutters into playgrounds, their 
 tenement abodes into decent homes, their scanty 
 food into abundant nourishment, their wretched 
 pleasures into wholesome recreation. To save our 
 drunkards, prostitutes and gunmen, we need not to 
 rear mission houses and rescue stations, though 
 these are useful for the ambulance service of the 
 soul, but to close saloons, abolish cruel and indecent 
 conditions of labor, train hands and brains to 
 skilled occupations, establish the minimum wage, 
 solve the vexed problem of unemployment, and in 
 general end the intolerable scourge of poverty. The 
 problem of morals today is the problem of com- 
 mercialized vice, corrupt politics, selfish business, 
 inequitable taxation, labor, capital, imperialism 
 and war. The challenge of the soul today is the 
 challenge to a new moral and social order which 
 shall revolutionize existing institutions of govern- 
 ment and property. If the masses of men and 
 women are ever to be anything more than drudges, 
 robbed of vision, hope, love and high adventure, a 
 new society must be created — a society which shall 
 put cooperation in place of competition, public 
 service in place of private profit, solidarity in place 
 ^ of class consciousness and struggle, communal 
 responsibility in place of corporate privilege and 
 exploitation. For sudh task of social creation, we 
 need new virtues. Not the old "sweetness and 
 light,'' the conventional gentleness, kindness and 
 good- will ; but courage, faith, patience in struggle, 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 183 
 
 heroic loyalty to justice, ruthless hatred of evil, love 
 for men that never fails ! These virtues will give 
 us character, if we are concerned with character. 
 For character is not being good but doing good. It 
 is not inward sanctity but outward sacrifice. 
 Character is the by-product of service. 
 
 Such is the logic of that humanism which consti- 
 tutes our new basis of religion. Our shift of 
 spiritual viewpoint from God to man, has carried 
 us straight from theology, through ethics, to 
 sociology. For the individual is not an individual 
 at all, but a social being; morality is not a science 
 of personality but of solidarity; salvation is the 
 problem of fellowship in a righteous social order. 
 Religion, in other words, is the task of bringing in 
 the Kingdom of God upon the earth ! 
 
 Religion has ever thus been recognized by the 
 prophetic souls of history — preeminently by Jesus ! 
 His gospel was wholly a gospel of solidarity. He 
 sought no salvation of man apart from the common 
 group. His teachings constitute not dogmas of 
 theology, nor yet rules of ethics, but principles of 
 sociology. But the church would never have it so ! 
 It has proclaimed with an authority that has passed 
 persistently into intolerance, that religion was an 
 experience not in but apart from life. It has set 
 the church over against the world ; and challenged 
 with its creeds the science, philosophy and arts of 
 
184 NEW OHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 men. It has created the autonomy of individual 
 and society, and thus found a doctrine of human 
 interests that are separate and not identical. It 
 has made religion a narrow, selfi^, private emotion, 
 which drives the Christian to his solitary pilgrim- 
 age of salvation, while leaving the City of Destruc- 
 tion and its unhappy people, his fellow-citizens, to 
 their fate. 
 
 But as the church has heeded not its prophets, so 
 men in turn have heeded not the church. Within 
 themselves they have found instincts of association 
 more potent far than papal bulls or synodal creeds. 
 For man is made for love. He is drawn and held 
 to his fellows by a force as irresistible as the gravi- 
 tation which binds the atoms and holds together the 
 stars within their courses. If he goes apart from 
 them, he is pulled back by the very necessities of his 
 being. If he hates, it is but for a moment ; he loves 
 eternally. Man cannot help loving, even if he 
 would. For love is a natural and not an artificial 
 force. It "flows from creature to creature, as elec- 
 tricity from iron to iron. . . . It is a force which 
 does not require either momentary exaltation or 
 habitual elevation in order to manifest itself. It is 
 a force which discloses itself whenever people come 
 together, and it is at work every day and every- 
 where in society, as steadily and usefully as any 
 of the grosser forces which man hitches to his 
 wagon." ^ It is this which explains the phenome- 
 non of "Society and its progress. That man is not 
 
 ^Henrj D. Lloyd, in Man the Social Creator, pages 6, 7. 
 
THEOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 185 
 
 a savage wandering lonely upon the earth, but a 
 tribesman, a clansman, a citizen, is due not to any 
 divine leadership from above, but to an instinct of 
 his inner nature which has its origin in cosmic 
 sources. Love fuses men into families and nations, 
 as earlier it fused animals into flocks and herds. 
 It creates social forms, and laws, and institutions 
 for its expression; and then destroys them when 
 they would bind the flow of its inexhaustible tide. 
 Eevolutions are but the vast upheavals of love, 
 rending the crust of custom and tradition which 
 would confine its holy fires. Man cannot live 
 alone; the self-interest of the individual is his 
 destruction. "The horrors of our Reign of Terror 
 and Armenian massacres evidence the price men 
 are willing to pay for more and better love.'' ^ 
 
 History is the love story of humanity. It is the 
 tale of man's struggle to find and know his fellows, 
 and learn the lesson of their common life. From 
 the first emergence of the race upon this planet 
 until now, man has been engaged in this single 
 adventure of solidarity. Democracy is the last and 
 greatest chapter of the narrative — ^the democracy 
 that seeks to free men from the institutions that 
 hold them apart as prisoners in dungeons ; and then 
 to unite them in a fellowship of faith and order that 
 shall endure. In his eternal quest, man has suc- 
 ceeded greatly, and failed more greatly. He has 
 builded deep and wide and high the structures of 
 his universal hope, only to see them fall and all but 
 
 * Henry D. Llojd. in Man the Social Creator, page 7. 
 
1S6 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 crush him in their ruins. But each failure has 
 marked but the beginning of a yet greater under- 
 taking — as nowj amid the wreckage of the Great 
 War, man rises bruised, broken, but undismayed, to 
 gird himself for the task of remaking this sorry 
 scheme of things, that men at last may be united in 
 a world order that shall be permanent. 
 
 H. G. Wells, in closing his The Outline of 
 History y ventures "to prophesy that the next chap- 
 ters to be written will tell, though perhaps with 
 long interludes of set-back and disaster, of the final 
 achievement of world-wide political and social 
 unity." This, we take it, is a religious message, for 
 the struggle of man for fellowship has been from 
 the beginning his true religion. It is the recog- 
 nition of this fact that marks the transition from 
 theology to sociology. The churches which will 
 sanctify this recognition are alone the temples of 
 the living God. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 CHUECH AND STATE 
 
"In losing sight of the connection between religion 
 and nationality, we lose the clue to the struggle between 
 Church and State, which is the capital fact in the de- 
 velopment of Europe. As in the first part of the struggle 
 we overlook that the Church is but another aspect of the 
 Empire, so in the later stages of it, we are blind to the 
 fact that under the so-called State, there lurks a new, 
 undeveloped Church. 
 
 For State and Church belong together. ... As the 
 Church without the State becomes a mere philosophical 
 or quasi-philosophical sect, so the State without the 
 Church is a mere administrative machine, the feebleness 
 of which has been brought to light in the revolutions 
 of the nineteenth century. . . . The modern States 
 which boast so loudly of their absolute secularity, or 
 even of their hostility to religion, are not content in 
 practise to be merely secular. . . . They study to form 
 out of their own separate nationalities a new religion. 
 
 Sir John Seeley, in 
 
 Natural Beligion 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 CHURCH AND STATE 
 
 The elimination of the distinction between sacred 
 and secular, and the transformation of religion 
 from a system of theology to a program of social 
 life, are alike phases of spiritual change which have 
 been long discussed and found wide acceptance. 
 Very different is the discussion of the problem of 
 church and state, since this raises into controversy 
 a question which was apparently settled some cen- 
 turies ago. For this very reason it is more im- 
 portant to our argument than either of the others, 
 since it opens up to our view the whole prospect of 
 what is involved in our belief that we are today in 
 need of new churches for old. 
 
 There can be no dissent from the proposition that 
 the separation of church and state constitutes one 
 of the supreme achievements of modern civilization, 
 and is the foundation on which stands that great 
 structure of spiritual liberty which is today so 
 dearly prized. Furthermore, it must be agreed 
 that, if church and state are to be in the future what 
 they are today, and have always been in the past, 
 
 1S9 
 
190 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 their separation must be guarded as a necessary 
 condition of human welfare and happiness. But 
 are they always to remain what they are today? 
 Who can answer this question with any confidence 
 in the aflBirmative? For three hundred years or 
 more, democracy has been at large in the world. 
 In the name of liberty, it has challenged the most 
 ancient laws, institutions and customs ; and built a 
 new society for the service of man's needs. Today, 
 in the quest of that higher liberty which is fellow- 
 ship, it is speaking a new challenge, even of those 
 institutions which it has itself conceived and made. 
 In the light of what has transpired since the vast 
 upheaval of the war, and is now transpiring the 
 world around, there would seem to be no institution 
 more unstable than the state, save only the church. 
 Both of these institutions are now in process of 
 radical transformation at the hands of the demo- 
 cratic spirit; and this means inevitably a drastic 
 change in relations between the two! In the old 
 days, as we shall see, it was necessary, as a con- 
 dition of spiritual liberty, that the church should be 
 separated from the state, and the state from the 
 church. Today, however, as a condition of that 
 fellowship which is the fulfillment of liberty, it may 
 well appear that church and state, as remolded by 
 the new democracy of our time, must be no longer 
 sundered but joined. The reunion of church and 
 state in the common service of the common life, is 
 a consummation which is now immediately in 
 prospect. 
 
CHUECH AND STATE 191 
 
 II 
 
 When history was young, church and state be- 
 longed together; religion and politics were one and 
 the same thing. The faith recognized by the king 
 or ruling house was the faith imposed upon the 
 people; it was as necessary for a subject to worship 
 the gods of his sovereign, as to follow this sove- 
 reign into battle or accompany him on the chase. 
 Eeligion, in other words, w^as a function of the state 
 and heresy was synonymous with treason. If a 
 king for any reason changed the character of the 
 religious rites of his country, the change had to be 
 immediately recognized and adopted by the people 
 as a condition of their continued allegiance to the 
 state. If the king found it advisable to import 
 from abroad the gods of some neighboring country, 
 then it became the duty of each citizen of the realm 
 to add these gods to the already recognized native 
 deities. If the country was overrun by some 
 foreign invader, then was the citizen obliged to 
 transform his allegiance not merely to his military 
 conqueror but also to the gods which were w^or<^ 
 shiped by this conqueror. Thus when Josiah, as 
 told in the Old Testament, forbade the worship of 
 Jehovah on the so-called high places of the king- 
 dom, and ordered men to pay their vows in the 
 temple on Mount Zion, the people as good citizens 
 found it necessary to tear down their beloved high 
 places, and turn their minds and hearts to Jerusa- 
 lem. So also when Manasseh imported into 
 
192 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 Israel the gods of the Syrians and Philistines, his 
 obedient subjects opened their altars and hearths 
 to the influence of these alien deities. And when 
 Nebuchadnezzar conquered the kingdom and turned 
 Jerusalem to destruction, the unhappy captives by 
 the waters of Babylon found that they must do 
 obeisance to the divine being of this heathen land. 
 God, in other words, belonged to the king, and 
 obedience to the latter involved worship of the 
 former. 
 
 This identity of church and state, of religion and 
 politics, made impossible, of course, any such thing 
 as spiritual freedom. Liberty in religion was un- 
 known in ancient times, for the very reason that 
 church and state were one, and religion therefore a 
 mere accompaniment or expression of political 
 allegiance. To be a good citizen of the state in- 
 volved being a faithful worshiper of the gods of 
 the state; and in the one case as in the other, the 
 king was the arbiter of his subjects' lives. 
 
 Only in the case of Eome do we find a suggestion 
 of what we now mean by spiritual freedom. In the 
 republic, as later in the empire, there was practiced 
 a certain tolerance of foreign cults and religions 
 which constituted one of the most remarkable fea- 
 tures of ancient civilization. When the legions of 
 Rome overran the territory of some foreign country, 
 it was demanded, of course, that the conquered 
 population should not only recognize the over- 
 lordship of Rome, but also the supremacy of the 
 gods who sat enthroned upon the Seven Hills of the 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 193 
 
 great city* But when such recognition had been 
 offered, and pledged in some act of formal obeisance, 
 the people were given the freest opportunity to 
 worship their own gods and maintain the rights and 
 ceremonies of their own religion. Later on, in the 
 days of the empire, the devotees of foreign gods 
 were freely permitted to bring their altars to the 
 Eternal City itself, and there set them up side by 
 side with the altars of the Roman deities. Even 
 the Jews were permitted to build their synagogues 
 and conduct their extraordinary worship of the one 
 God, Jehovah. Rome, at this time, came nearer to 
 being a genuine congress of universal religion than 
 any other place which the world has known. It 
 was this tolerance not only of native customs, but 
 of religious superstitions, which helped to make the 
 Romans the most successful of ancient conquerors, 
 and to build the structure of their empire upon 
 foundations which promised for a time to endure 
 forever. 
 
 How far this tolerance came from being what we 
 mean today by religious liberty, was promptly 
 demonstrated when the Christian religion made its 
 appearance in the empire. Here, for the first time 
 in the history of the world, was proclaimed the 
 principle that there was a power at work among 
 men which was superior to that of the state. To 
 the Christians the church was one thing, and the 
 state was another; and these disciples of the 
 Nazarene boldly proclaimed that when it became 
 necessary to make choice between the two, it was 
 
194 NEW CHUEOHES FOR OLD 
 
 the church and not the state which must have their 
 allegiance. It is diflficult for us to realize the sig- 
 nificance of this revolutionary declaration of the 
 emancipation of the soul of the individual from the 
 dominant control of the government. To assert 
 that obedience was due first to God and only 
 secondarily to Caesar was to challenge the 
 supremacy of government, and this was something 
 which was new in the experience of mankind. 
 What such assertion meant both to the individual 
 and to the state, was very soon made manifest. The 
 Christian, for example, refused to lay upon the 
 altars of the Eoman gods the offerings which were 
 required by the government in recognition of their 
 sovereignty, and thus made themselves not merely 
 heretics but traitors. They refused to participate 
 in the great religious festivals of the state, and 
 thus put themselves altogether outside the political 
 pale. When ordered to take up arms and do their 
 share in defending the borders of Rome from the 
 Germanic invasions on the Rhine and Danube, the 
 Christians refused to become soldiers, on the 
 ground that their religion forbade them to kill, and 
 commanded them to love and not to hate their 
 enemies. The issue here joined was absolute — no 
 compromise or escape was possible. Immediately, 
 in the case of these Christians, at least, the toler- 
 ance of the Roman government was transformed 
 into the most determined and cruel persecution! 
 Such spiritual freedom as was claimed by the 
 Christians, was regarded by the Romans as impos- 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 195 
 
 Bible, if the government was to stand and the empire 
 to endure. It is significant that it was in nearly 
 every case the best emperors and not the worst who 
 persecuted the Christians most savagely. Those 
 rulers who were most keenly conscious of their 
 duties to the state and their obligation to strengthen 
 and maintain the government, were the very ones 
 who regarded the Christians as enemies of society 
 and a menace therefore to the commonweal. 
 
 It might be imagined that all this would have 
 been changed when the Christians gained control of 
 the empire in 313, through the conversion of the 
 Emperor Constantine. Surely these people who 
 had themselves been so dreadfully persecuted, 
 would now recognize and grant to others that 
 spiritual freedom which they had claimed so per- 
 sistently for themselves ! But as has happened so 
 often both before and since that time, the perse- 
 cuted now became, with their accession to power, 
 the most ruthless of persecutors. From the begin- 
 ning of the fourth century, down to the opening of 
 the Protestant Reformation, religious liberty was 
 as impossible as ever it had been in the classic 
 period of history. The leaders of the Roman 
 church proclaimed their religion to be universal, 
 and visited indescribable tortures upon those who, 
 for any reason, dared to dispute this universality. 
 Church and state, in other words, now became more 
 closely joined than ever they had been in ancient 
 days. Quarrels between the two were frequent; 
 and as we turn the pages of medieval history, w^e 
 
196 NEW OHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 are tempted to believe that the struggle between 
 church and state in this era presents a real issue of 
 religious liberty. But we should not be deceived 
 into thinking that any such question was involved. 
 The Eoman church, during all these centuries, was 
 not a church at all, as a matter of fact, but a great 
 political government which had succeeded to the 
 empire of Eome and was now exercising the proud 
 functions of that great state. If there was a 
 struggle between the Eoman church and what came 
 to be known as the Holy Eoman Empire, it was not 
 a struggle between two separate and competing 
 powers, but only a competition between the two 
 parties of a single contract. The question at issue 
 between church and state in the Middle Ages was 
 only the question as to whether the church or the 
 state should be the party of the first part in the 
 working out of the contract which had been joined 
 between the two. That religion should be separated 
 from politics, that the church should leave to the 
 state the business of government and the state leave 
 to the church the business of religion, all this was 
 never dreamed of for a moment. Least of all was 
 it imagined, either by pope or emperor, that the 
 soul of any single man or woman was to be allowed 
 to live its own life apart from external dictation. 
 When the pope was at the head of things, the con- 
 trol of politics and religion alike was in his hands : 
 and the same thing was true when the emperor was 
 on the throne. Each was contending with the other 
 
CHUECH AND STATE 197 
 
 for the single mastery of the two great realms of 
 the world and the spirit. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What had been so valiantly asserted by the 
 primitive Christians, only to be lost with the 
 triumph of the church save as certain heretical and 
 sorely persecuted sects kept alight in dark ages the 
 torch of freedom, was now proclaimed in trumpet 
 tones by the Reformation. The Renaissance, as we 
 have seen, started the democratic movement of 
 modern times with a revolt against institutional 
 authority, founded upon the doctrine of liberty for 
 the individual soul; and the immediate result in 
 the religious field was the assertion, over wide 
 areas, of "the liberty of the Christian man." All 
 too soon the reformers, alarmed by the consequences 
 of their own teaching, called a halt. But it was too 
 late ! Democracy had begun its work ! The politi- 
 cal unity of the Empire was crumbling, the power 
 of Rome was shattered, men were everywhere run- 
 ning at large, there was no central authority to 
 exercise dominion. Above all, the Bible was loose ! 
 Men were now turning the sacred pages, and read- 
 ing for themselves what they regarded as the direct 
 revelation of the Most High. Little groups began 
 to gather themselves together into churches, to 
 establish religious rites and practices, to prepare 
 and publish creeds. Great leaders appeared, who 
 started popular movements of revolt. Within half 
 
198 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 a century there were scores of Protestant sects 
 established in different parts of Europe. The whole 
 religious world was in ferment, and at the heart of 
 the storm was the solitary soul brought face to face 
 with the authority and majesty of God. 
 
 The result of this emancipation of the individual, 
 as regards the relation between church and state, 
 was nothing short of revolutionary. The kings and 
 princes of the various European countries suddenly 
 found themselves confronted by subjects who dared 
 to assert their independence of the spiritual dic- 
 tator on the throne. Everywhere they saw churches 
 into which they were not allowed to enter and in 
 which their political over-lordship was neglected or 
 defied. Men and women, through the spiritual 
 deliverance which they had won, were now all at 
 once become traitors; so it seemed, at least, to the 
 sovereigns to whom they were pledged to give 
 allegiance. When the king of France, for example, 
 looked upon his kingdom in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, he saw it swarming with Huguenots who 
 refused to recognize his authority as a political 
 representative of the pope, or to accept at his hands 
 the doctrines and principles of the Catholic faith. 
 In England an exactly opposite situation was 
 present. Here a Protestant sovereign. Queen Eliza- 
 beth or King Edward VI, for example, saw thou- 
 sands of subjects who persisted in being Catholics, 
 and thus paying their primary spiritual allegiance 
 to the hated Roman pope. In other countries there 
 were other varieties of trouble of this same general 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 199 
 
 type. Thus in Germany, Protestant princes of the 
 Lutheran persuasion were horrified to discover in 
 their realms people who would not be Lutherans, 
 but persisted in establishing some peculiar Prot- 
 estant sect of their own. 
 
 It was a strange confusion. And the rulers, as 
 though by common agreement, met the situation by 
 resolute assertion of the old principle of union of 
 church and state. If a subject did not like the 
 religion of his ruler, he must nevertheless submit or 
 suffer the penalties of treason. Thus did the 
 Catholic sovereigns of France harry the Huguenots 
 out of the land, in vindication of their royal dignity 
 and power. In the same way did Protestant 
 sovereigns of England pursue the Catholics; and 
 Lutheran princes in Germany set upon Anabaptists, 
 Calvinists and all nonconformists whatsoever. 
 Even those who themselves suffered the torments of 
 persecution, visited these same torments upon 
 others the instant they gained the seats of power. 
 Thus when the Puritans were driven out of 
 England, and crossed the wintry seas of the 
 Atlantic to these unknown shores, to find refuge 
 where they might be free to worship God, they 
 immediately established a union of church and state 
 which was one of the most oppressive ever known 
 in the annals of humankind. From the beginning 
 in the early Puritan settlements of Boston, Dor- 
 chester, Salem, Dedham, etc., citizenship was 
 limited to those who were regular members of the 
 established Congregational church. Any man who 
 
200 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 desired to be free of the dominance of this church, 
 as the Puritans themselves had desired to be free of 
 the dominance of Anglicanism in the old country, 
 was refused all rights of citizenship and thus 
 excluded from the social family. In the case of 
 those whose nonconformity was conspicuous, as for 
 example the Quakers, our Puritan forefathers 
 proved themselves to be ruthless persecutors. One 
 has only to read such a book as Mr. Brooks Adams's 
 The Emancipation of Massachusetts to discover 
 what the union of church and state, in the Massa- 
 chusetts Bay Colony, meant in terms of tyranny. 
 The reformers believed in liberty as little as the 
 rulers; intolerance was still the accepted practice 
 of the times. 
 
 The consequence of these events was the develop- 
 ment of leaders who held fast to the early democ- 
 racy of the Reformation, and saw with clearness 
 that if liberty, which was the touchstone of this 
 democracy, was to be recognized, there must be 
 absolute separation between church and state. 
 Religion must be taken out of the control of the 
 government, and left to the exclusive care and 
 service of the individual heart. Thus appeared 
 that "separation of church and state" which has 
 been one of the watchwords of democracy from that 
 day to this. Everywhere appeared valiant men 
 and women who showed themselves willing to lay 
 down their lives for the sake of vindicating the 
 right of the soul to live out its religion in entire 
 independence of the state. Hundreds of thousands 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 201 
 
 gladly took the name of traitor that they might 
 thereby prove their fidelity to the things of God. 
 Christ and Caesar, as in the early days of Chris- 
 tianity, came again into conflict, and this time it 
 was Christ and not Caesar who was triumphant. 
 The Anabaptists in Germany, the Huguenots in 
 France, the Mennonites in Holland, the Independ- 
 ents in England, the Quakers everywhere — ^these are 
 gome of the noble groups of Protestants who dared 
 the power of the state that they might free their 
 churches for the true service of religion. In this 
 country, the separation of church and state, as a 
 condition of religious liberty, was first proclaimed 
 by the immortal Roger Williams, who went forth 
 gladly into untrodden wildernesses that he might 
 establish a new settlement where men might be free 
 to worship God in their own way. When Provi- 
 dence was founded, the first chapter of true relig- 
 ious liberty in America, if the story of Plymouth 
 be excepted, was written. Thanks to these noble 
 heretics, the principle of the separation of church 
 and state became one of the central principles 
 of Protestantism. Through the blood of martyrs 
 and the slow but sure growth of understand- 
 ing, this principle came gradually to be recog- 
 nized. Finally, with the writing of the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States, which provided for the 
 absolute freedom of all churches from government 
 recognition or control, this principle was estab- 
 lished as one of the foundation stones of modern 
 democracy. Nearly everywhere, now, in our 
 
202 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Western world, is church separate from state, and 
 state from church; and thus the spiritual freedom 
 of the individual guaranteed/ 
 
 IV 
 
 The importance of this separation of church and 
 state to the cause of democracy, as expressed in the 
 ideal of liberty, must be manifest to all who are 
 familiar with conditions in the past and as they 
 exist very largely at the present moment. It must 
 be conceded, however, that liberty has been pur- 
 chased in this case as in other cases, at a great 
 price. Separation of church and state, in other 
 words, involves embarrassments and difficulties as 
 well as advantages. Certainly it brings with it 
 some conditions which seem fatal to any final work- 
 ing out of the religious idea. 
 
 In our discussion of the distinction between 
 sacred and secular, for example, we discovered that 
 the whole development of religious thought these 
 days is tending toward the necessary reconciliation 
 of these two arbitrary divisions of human experi- 
 ence. We have come to the point where the sacred 
 must be merged with the secular, as the condition of 
 true spiritual democracy. Yet here, in this sep- 
 aration of church and state, do we find perhaps the 
 sharpest division between things sacred and things 
 secular, of which we have experience. 
 
 ^ It may be well to note that the issue was presented afresh by the 
 so-called ** conscientious objectors " to war. Many of these objected 
 on sincere religious grounds, and yet were conscripted or imprisoned. 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 203 
 
 The same holds true of the problem involved in 
 the socialization of religion. For is not this an 
 explanation of the reluctance of men to apply vigor- 
 ously to social conditions those ethical and spiritual 
 standards which they reverence and in so large 
 measure regard in their individual lives? Is this 
 not one of the facts which explains the strange 
 insistence of most men that religious ideals are 
 impracticable, and cannot therefore be utilized in 
 affairs of state? Is there any other one thing which 
 takes us so far into the heart of the mystery of the 
 prevailing immorality of politics and business? 
 Does anything reveal more clearly the reason of 
 diplomatic intrigue and general international dis- 
 order? The state, it is agreed, is something apart 
 from the church ; industry and politics have nothing 
 to do with religion ; therefore may social affairs be 
 legitimately controlled by principles not of right 
 but of expediency. So also, on the. other hand, in 
 the matter of persuading the church to act effi- 
 ciently and uncompromisingly as an agent of social 
 change! Is it not the separation of church and 
 state which has helped to convince men that re- 
 ligion should concern itself only with private and 
 not with public matters? More and more em- 
 phatically, in recent years, enlightened teachers 
 have tried to persuade the churches to grapple at 
 first hand with social reform — to lead in crusades 
 for the emancipation of labor, the abolition of 
 poverty, the establishment of international peace, 
 in general the reconstruction of the present social 
 
204 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 order on lines of justice and good will; and always 
 have these prophets found themselves confronted 
 by the tradition that the church has properly 
 nothing to do with these problems of social rela- 
 tionships. The separation of church and state has 
 done more than any other one thing to paralyze the 
 churches as instruments of reform ; and thus robbed 
 society of the tremendous ethical reinforcement 
 which under other circumstances the churches 
 might well have brought to the task of healing 
 social ills. 
 
 It is a heavy price which we have paid for our 
 boon of religious liberty. The separation of church 
 and state was a step in evolution which had to be 
 taken ; and when it was achieved, the greatest epoch 
 in history began. But it is not the final step. 
 Other things still remain to be done if man is to be 
 truly free. Our task today is certainly to conserve 
 the liberty which we have won, but also to remedy, 
 if possible, those accompanying weaknesses and dis- 
 advantages which its winning has brought upon us. 
 How can the evil consequence of the separation of 
 church and state be obviated, and the liberty of the 
 individual soul be still preserved? 
 
 The answer to this question is to be found in our 
 new interpretation of democracy in terms of fellow- 
 ship. What does this mean to our ideas of church 
 and state? 
 
CHUECH AND STATE 205 
 
 The state, as it has long been constituted, and is 
 still very largely constituted at the present time, 
 may be defined not unfairly as a private corpora- 
 tion, or group of individuals, organized for the con- 
 trol and exploitation of the people. Louis XIV, 
 of France, is the classic personification of this 
 definition. "L'etat, c'est moi'' was his proud 
 declaration when his rule of the French people was 
 brought into momentary question. The govern- 
 ment of France, that is to say, was his private pos- 
 session, to be utilized for the exploitation of the 
 French people and to the advantage of himself and 
 his underlings. Thomas Carlyle was referring to 
 this fact when he drew the pathetic picture of "the 
 widow (who) gathers nettles for her children's din- 
 ner, and a perfumed seigneur lunching in his 
 palace (who) hath an alchemy whereby he will 
 extract from her every third nettle and call it rent." 
 Our American forefathers understood this concep- 
 tion perfectly when they organized the Revolution 
 against George III. They knew that the English 
 state was owned by this monarch, and was used 
 against them through the pretence of Stamp Acts 
 and Navigation Laws for purposes of private rob- 
 bery and exploitation. So clearly did they see this 
 fact that when they sat down to write the Constitu- 
 tion of the new government which they established 
 on this side of the Atlantic, they were moved pri- 
 marily by a conception of the state as something to 
 be feared and guarded against. Every possible 
 means was resorted to for taking away as much 
 
206 NEW OHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 power as possible from the national government 
 and distributing this power among the several 
 states, and through these states to their indi- 
 vidual citizens. To this end, the most elaborate 
 system of "checks and balances'' was established, 
 with the idea of enabling any one branch of the 
 government to interfere successfully with the oper- 
 ations of other branches and thus prevent them 
 automatically from controlling the people. They 
 had seen the state, as in France, used by feudal 
 barons to pile up riches and corruption. They had 
 seen the state, as in England, owned and controlled 
 by landlords and merchants for the exclusive bene- 
 fit of their private fortunes. They had seen the 
 state, as in Prussia and Eussia, used by a military 
 class for purposes of war, conquest and military 
 glory. And these forefathers of ours did not pro- 
 pose that the state here in America should thus be 
 seized and employed against the people. And they 
 builded better than they knew! For since that 
 Constitution was written, the great power of 
 modern capitalism has arisen. Behind our visible 
 government, as Theodore Roosevelt taught us in the 
 days of the Progressive Party, has gradually grown 
 up "the invisible government" of great manufac- 
 turers, industrial magnates, corporation monop- 
 olists, which has for years used the state in this 
 country as a private machine for the economic 
 exploitation of the people. Throughout the whole 
 range of human history, down to within the last 
 hundred years of our own time, the state has thus 
 
CHUKCH AND STATE 207 
 
 been a private corporation, established and main- 
 tained for purposes of public exploitation ; and it is 
 the discovery of this fact which has led to the great 
 democratic revolutions of modern times. First in 
 the political realm and now in the economic realm, 
 the people have risen in revolt against those who 
 have used the state for their private advantage ; and 
 are now proposing to take possession of the state 
 for themselves, and use the powers of this vast 
 machine for public benefit. It is this work of 
 transforming the state from a private to a public 
 corporation which constitutes what we mean by the 
 democratization of society. Democracy is fellow- 
 ship — cooperation in the common service of the 
 common life! It signifies therefore the outlawry 
 from the state of the private individuals, kings and 
 monopolists alike, who use the state to rob the people. 
 It means the rising of the people for the conquest 
 of the state that it may be shifted from private to 
 public hands and thus devoted exclusively to uni- 
 versal human ends. That the state may be owned 
 by the people, controlled by the people, and used for 
 the people to the end of fellowship, is the high pur- 
 pose of every democratic movement of our time. 
 
 If this be the definition of the state as it has 
 existed always in the past, and very largely still in 
 the present, what shall we say as to the church? 
 Has this not also been a private corporation, used 
 by private individuals for private purposes? There 
 can be no question about this fact in the Middle 
 Ages, for in those years the Eoman church was 
 
208 NEW OHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 simply and solely a vast machine for plunder and 
 exploitation. There never was a corporation more 
 closely bound, more selfish, more corrupt than that 
 organization of priests and prelates who owned the 
 papacy and handed it along as a private inheritance 
 from one generation to another. The Protestant 
 Reformation ended this reign of iniquity and 
 through the establishment of innumerable sects and 
 denominations delivered mankind from bondage to 
 this single ecclesiastical hierarchy. But when w^e 
 look at those Protestant bodies, what do we find 
 again but a set of private corporations? These 
 churches are no longer corrupt in the medieval 
 sense of the word ; they are most of them moved by 
 a fine spirit of piety, and are serving the cause of 
 God and humanity as they truly understand it. 
 But they are by nature institutions of private profit 
 rather than of public service. Certainly in almost 
 none of them is there any true spirit of democracy. 
 Inside some few of these churches there are con- 
 ditions of organization which are democratic, both 
 in spirit and method; but the test of democracy is 
 to be found not inside the church but at the portals 
 of the church. What are the conditions of admis- 
 sion? What must a man do to become a member of 
 this corporation? Ask this question, and imme- 
 diately it is discovered that there are restrictions 
 and obligations which make it impossible for other 
 than a comparatively small fraction of the body of 
 any community to enter into the life of any single 
 church. Our American democracy, for example. 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 209 
 
 has to all intents and purposes repudiated every 
 Protestant church by reason of the fact that the 
 people have refused to join, in any large majority, 
 these organizations. They insist that these 
 churches make use of a tolerant democracy for the 
 service, in each and every case, of their own private 
 interests and advantages. Hence the attack upon 
 the church as well as upon the state, by the new 
 democratic spirit of our time ! Just exactly as this 
 spirit is seizing upon the state, that the state may 
 be delivered from the hands of a few and passed 
 over into the hands of all, so is this spirit making 
 ready to seize upon our churches that they also may 
 be delivered from the hands of the few and passed 
 over to the hands of all. The purpose of the demo- 
 cratic movement of our time is fellowship. Which 
 means the democratization of every social unit, 
 which means in turn the transformation of all 
 private corporations into public bodies, which 
 means again in turn the mastery by the people of 
 the social institutions which they have created and 
 maintained ! 
 
 VI 
 
 It is this changing character both of church and 
 state, under the influence of the new democratic 
 spirit, which is destined to end the separation of 
 church and state as no longer necessary for the pro- 
 tection of religious liberty or for any other noble 
 purpose. A democratized state will mean simply 
 an organization owned and controlled by the people 
 
210 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 for the transaction, in the highest and most efficient 
 way, of social business. A democratized church 
 will mean in the same way an organization owned 
 and controlled by the people for the transaction, in 
 the highest and most efficient way, of spiritual busi- 
 ness. In both cases they will be coordinate 
 branches of a single fellowship in which the people 
 are at work for the expression and service of their 
 common lives. The state, in other words, will be 
 the community functioning politically; the church 
 will be the community functioning spiritually. 
 They will together be coordinate branches of the 
 one all-inclusive community. 
 
 Take, for example, a little town in the northern 
 part of New York ! Suppose we went to this town 
 on a certain Wednesday night, when the town meet- 
 ing was being held. There we would see some two 
 or three hundred persons gathered together as citi- 
 zens for the consideration and transaction of the 
 social business of the community. Now suppose 
 we stayed over in this town until the following 
 Sunday, and went to church. We would then dis- 
 cover that this town had a single church which was 
 not denominational but "community" in character. 
 The Methodist, Baptist, Universalist and Congre- 
 gationalist churches, which once existed in the 
 town, have been disbanded and their people have all 
 come together into the one common church. When 
 we entered this gathering on the Sunday morning 
 and looked about us, we would discover that we 
 .were in the midst of exactly the same two or three 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 211 
 
 hundred persons whom he had seen in the town 
 meeting on the previous Wednesday night. This 
 church, in other words, is simply the community 
 gathered together on Sunday morning for the 
 fostering of the common religious life of the people, 
 as the town meeting (the state) is the community 
 gathered together on a Wednesday night for the 
 consideration of the common political interests of 
 the town. The members of this church are mem- 
 bers not because they are Baptists, or Methodists, 
 or Universalists ; they are members of the church 
 for the same reason that they are members of the 
 town meeting — because they are citizens! In the 
 one place as in the other, we have an institution 
 belonging to all, used by all, and directed to the 
 service of all. The community has found its com- 
 mon life through the realization of that fellowship 
 which is at the heart of democracy, and has built 
 these institutions of church and state which are 
 necessary for the service of this life. 
 
 VII 
 
 In such an illustration do we see what is meant 
 by the union of church and state through the opera- 
 tion of the democratic spirit. So long as the state 
 is a private corporation, it cannot be joined to the 
 church lest it exploit the spiritual needs of the 
 people for private gain. So long as the church is 
 also a private corporation, it cannot be joined to the 
 state le^ it exploit the social needs of the people for 
 
212 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 private gain. But when both church and state 
 alike have been transformed by the process of 
 democratization into a free fellowship of the public 
 life, each is joined to the other by a kind of divine 
 necessity. 
 
 It is this which brings us to the crown and climax 
 of our argument, which is the declaration of the 
 reunion of church and state in the democratic era 
 which is now before us ! Church and state are to 
 be absorbed, so that the one shall be indistinguish- 
 able from the other. This does not mean that the 
 church shall absorb the state, or that the state shall 
 absorb the church. It means rather that church 
 and state alike shall he absorbed by the community. 
 They shall be reunited not by directly joining the 
 one to the other, but by joining both to that common 
 life of the people of which they are each the expres- 
 sion. The state, in any true fellowship of democ- 
 racy, is simply the people working out the problems 
 of social life. The church, in any similar fellow- 
 ship of democracy, is again the people working out 
 the problems of spiritual life. We are leaving 
 behind us our worn out and corrupt institutions. 
 We are ending the reign of individuals or groups 
 of individuals. We are bringing in the day of the 
 people. And in and through the people shall the 
 social institutions, most conspicuously church and 
 state, be joined together for the service of what the 
 people want and need. 
 
 Zechariah had the vision of what we are now 
 dreaming when he saw the "man with the measur- 
 
CHURCH AND STATE 213 
 
 ing line in his hand" preparing to measure Jerusa- 
 lem, "And behold, another angel went out to meet 
 him," who proclaimed unto him that Jerusalem 
 should be a city without walls, "for Jehovah will 
 be unto her a wall of fire roundabout and ... be 
 the glory in the midst of her.''^ St. John, on 
 Patmos, saw something of the same thing when he 
 beheld the New Jerusalem "coming down out of 
 heaven from God." And he also saw one who was 
 about to measure the city. And when he looked 
 upon the city, he tells us that "he saw no temple 
 therein; for the Lord God (was) the temple 
 thereof."^ Here, from Old Testament prophet and 
 New Testament seer, is the picture given of that 
 "holy city" which is the city of the Lord. The 
 city — that is the temple; the presence of God, the 
 light and glory of the city ! State is become church ; 
 church is become state; the people are God, and 
 God is the people ! Needed no longer are our old 
 divisions and distinctions, for the freedom of the 
 one is sanctioned by the fellowship of all, and the 
 glory of God's presence become the salvation of 
 mankind. 
 
 1 Zechariah II, 
 
 2 Revelation XXI. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE COMMUNITY CHURCH : PRINCIPLES 
 
"It must be done, sir! It must be done! Our re- 
 ligion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has 
 been Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is 
 at hand when it must be Americanized 1 Now, sir, you 
 see what Americanizing is in politics; it means that 
 a man shall have a vote because he is a man. . . . 
 Just so a man's soul has a vote in the spiritual com- 
 munity; and it doesn't do, sir, or it won't do long, to 
 call him ^schismatic' and ^heretic' and those other wicked 
 names that the murderous Inquisitors have left us to 
 help along ^peace and goodwill to men.' 
 
 "It won't be long, sir, before we have Americanized 
 religion as we have Americanized government, and then, 
 sir, every soul God sends into the world will be good in 
 the face of all men for just so much of his inspiration as 
 'giveth him understanding.' " 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 
 
 The Professor at the Breakfast Table 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 
 
 Our argument brings us at last to the threshold 
 of the new church which shall be the institutional 
 embodiment of our new religion of democracy. We 
 have seen the collapse which has come upon the 
 Protestant churches^ because of that reaction from 
 the liberating influences of the Renaissance, which 
 has ended in the intolerance, trivialities and basic 
 private interests of the denominational order.^ 
 Coincident with this, we have seen that great move- 
 ment of democracy springing first from the influ- 
 ences of the Reformation, and then breaking loose 
 from the bonds of Protestantism, and sweeping on 
 from the attainment of liberty to that farther goal 
 of fellowship which is the "coefficient'' and thus the 
 guarantee of liberty.^ That this democracy in its 
 political, economic and social phases is itself the 
 true religion of modern times, the definite fulfill- 
 ment of the gospel of the Nazarene prophet, we 
 have found in that new basis of religion uncovered 
 by the revolutionary upheavals of the Renaissance, 
 
 ^ See Chapter I. 
 »See Chapter II. 
 •See Chapter III. 
 
 217 
 
218 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 the Illumination and later periods of intellectual 
 and spiritual awakening.^ The implications of this 
 discovery we have traced out in the relations of the 
 sacred and secular/ the individual and society,^ 
 church and state,* as definite religious problems. 
 The conclusion brings us to a concept of a society 
 of free men, dedicated to the end of fellowship, 
 developing out of its own needs and for the service 
 of its own purposes, those native institutions which 
 are the incarnation of its life. The state, the 
 school — and now at last the church ! 
 
 This new church has been anticipated, in one 
 incidental feature or another, by nearly all the 
 progressive religious movements of our time, for 
 these have been feeling their way more or less 
 unconsciously toward the attainment of that very 
 goal which seems now to be at hand. Thus the 
 new church of democracy is like all union and 
 federated churches ^ in reacting against the denom- 
 inational divisions of Christendom. It shares with 
 institutional churches^ their emphasis upon the 
 social aspects of religion. It is at one with Uni- 
 tarian and other liberal groups^ in freedom from 
 dogma, reliance upon reason as the guide to truth, 
 and insistence upon the worth of the life that now 
 is. It follows the Positivist movement of Auguste 
 Comte,® which made so stirring an appeal to the 
 
 1 See Chapter IV. 
 
 2 See Chapter V. 
 •See Chapter VI. 
 *See Chapter VII. 
 "See Page 68. 
 
 • See Page 70. 
 
 »See Pages 67, 122. 159, 16©. 
 
 •See Page 122. 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 219 
 
 leading intelligences of Victorian England, in its 
 reverence for the scientific method and its delib- 
 erate exaltation of humanity. It sees in the 
 Ethical Culture Society ^ a forerunner in such vital 
 matters as the rejection of creeds as a bond of 
 union and the interpretation of life exclusively in 
 terms of moral idealism. 
 
 Furthermore, this new church of the new democ- 
 racy is like all churches in possessing those spe- 
 cific functions which distinguish a church per se 
 from other social institutions. It is no mere 
 secular agency. It is a church in the sense that 
 it assembles the people on Sunday mornings for 
 fellowship and communion in the high things of 
 the spirit. It is a church in the sense that its 
 ministers teach and preach, and thus lead the 
 public counsels to heights of vision and under- 
 standing. It is a church in the sense that it sol- 
 emnizes matrimony, christens little children, invests 
 with dignity the last rites of the dead, and thus 
 sanctifies in every way the permanent relation- 
 ships of human life. It is a church in the sense 
 that it serves as a school of moral idealism, a 
 refuge from hardship and distress, a fountain of 
 good works, a power-house for the generation of 
 spiritual energy. It is a church in a thousand dif- 
 ferent ways in which men have understood and 
 supported churches from the beginning of the 
 world. 
 
 Yet is this church as new as the socia? democracy 
 
 1 See Pages 122, 159. 
 
220 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 in which it has its origin ! Apart from the funda- 
 mental features of religious expression which are 
 universal, this church represents a complete re- 
 versal of all former values, a new beginning in the 
 field of spiritual organization. Other churches are 
 churches J in the old traditional sense of being insti- 
 tions apart for the salvation of mankind. The 
 most progressive of them represent only cautious 
 and uncompleted adaptations to the idea of man 
 himself, preeminently in his social relationship, 
 as the source of spiritual experience and hence 
 the seat of spiritual authority. But this church 
 is di£ferent! It is not a church at all, in the old 
 sense of the word. It is itself the community^ 
 functioning in this instance spiritually, as in other 
 instances it functions politically or educationally. 
 For this reason we call it the Community Church, 
 and define it in terms of its character as an expres- 
 sion of community idealism. 
 
 II 
 
 The Community Church is first of all to be 
 described as undenominational. In this particular 
 it offers the sharpest kind of contrast to the exist- 
 ing churches which it is so surely destined to sup- 
 plant. These churches, as we have seen, are de- 
 nominational institutions. They are identified pri- 
 marily, that is, with a certain historical movement 
 in theological thought or ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion, and only secondarily with those basic commu- 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 221 
 
 nity or social interests which comprise the funda- 
 mental life of the people. Thus as we walk the 
 streets of any city or town, and look at the churches 
 which we pass, we observe that this church is 
 Methodist, that that church is Presbyterian, that 
 this other church is Unitarian or Christian Sci- 
 ence, and so on through all the long catalogue of 
 Protestant sects. Each church, in other words, 
 is a representative in the community of a certain 
 organized religious movement which had its origin 
 in a more or less remote age, perhaps in a foreign 
 country, and which has its headquarters, so-called, 
 in another city and sometimes even in another land. 
 It stands here not as something which has grown 
 up out of the community from within, as a spiritual 
 expression of community life, but as something 
 which has been imposed upon the community from 
 without, as an expression of a form of thought and 
 a way of life which may be as alien as the philoso- 
 phies of India or Peru. 
 
 What has actually taken place a thousand times 
 in new communities established on the frontier, or 
 in new suburban or residential districts opened up 
 on the outskirts of a great city, is an illustration 
 of what we mean. Immediately after the people 
 have begun to plant their homes in this community, 
 the denominational representatives or field-secre- 
 taries begin to appear, along with merchants, drug- 
 gists and real-estate agents ; and each one proceeds 
 to set up his own particular place of ecclesiastical 
 business, and engage in feverish competition with 
 
222 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 his rivals for business. To the extent that he suc- 
 ceeds in his work, he draws off little groups of 
 people from the general life of the community, 
 and identifies them religiously with interests which 
 lie almost wholly outside the boundaries of the 
 locality in which they live. The nearest that any 
 of these denominational churches ever comes to 
 growing up naturally out of the community, is 
 when a few townspeople come together of their 
 own accord, and undertake to organize a Bap- 
 tist or a Methodist institution as an expression 
 of the theological views and purposes which 
 they hold in common. But even in this case, we 
 have people going outside the community for help 
 and association, and imposing upon the commu- 
 nity, as an agent of propaganda, an institution 
 which nobody wants but themselves. 
 
 The denominational church in any city or town 
 is thus not only divisive, but dispersive in its influ- 
 ence. It comes into and abides in a community, 
 frequently supported by outside capital, for the 
 purpose of converting the people to some peculiar 
 brand of religious thought; and when it has done 
 this in the case of a few scores, it proceeds forth- 
 with to separate these men and women from their 
 neighbors, and identify their interests with those 
 of an outside and perhaps very alien organization. 
 Thus the members of a denominational church 
 enjoy fellowship not primarily with their fellow- 
 townsmen whom they know, and with whom they 
 are associated in every other social activity, but 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 223 
 
 with their fellow-Baptists or Episcopalians or 
 Greek Orthodox in some other part of the country 
 or the world, whom they do not know, and with 
 whom otherwise they are not in contact. As a Uni- 
 tarian clergyman, for example, in a Massachusetts 
 town, I was associated in spiritual fellowship not 
 with my Congregational neighbor whom I saw 
 daily, and with whom I worked intimately in other 
 community affairs, but with Unitarian clergymen 
 in Seattle, or Moosejaw, or Kalamazoo, whom I met 
 not at all, or casually at some church conference. 
 My church had for more than three-quarters of a 
 century enjoyed an intimacy with denominational 
 headquarters in Boston, which it had never en- 
 joyed with its nearest neighbor, the Baptist church, 
 located just across the street. For the first alle- 
 giance of a denominational church is not to its 
 community but to its denomination! It deliber- 
 ately cuts through the life of the community, and 
 thus divides upon religious lines a citizenry which 
 is otherwise united. 
 
 Now it is just this division, or dispersion, of 
 religious life which the Community Church, faith- 
 ful to its name, seeks earnestly to avoid. The Com- 
 munity Church sets itself apart from all other 
 churches as they exist today, primarily because 
 it accepts as the basis of its organization no denom- 
 inational affiliation of any kind, but simply and 
 solely the community in which it stands. It comes 
 into being not as something imposed upon a town 
 from without, but as a natural and spontaneous 
 
224 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 outgrowth of the life of the town itself; and it 
 represents not the particular ecclesiastical inter- 
 ests of any outside organization, but those uni- 
 versal human interests which bind the people of 
 a town together as members of the same commu- 
 nity. It holds the same relation to a town or city, 
 as regards its origin and character, as any other 
 public institution. When a new community is 
 established, and the citizens come together to 
 organize their common life, they establish a public 
 school, a public library, a social or community 
 center; and some time also they will establish a 
 public, or community, church! All of these insti- 
 tutions, the church exactly like the school, belong 
 properly to the people, serve the people, and 
 express the democratic aspirations of the people. 
 They are works of fellowship ; and are true to their 
 appointed function only as they express and serve 
 ideals of fellowship. 
 
 It is because of its identification in this way with 
 the general interests of community life that the 
 Community Church is called a community church, 
 and not a Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Universalist 
 church. It is a community church because it draws 
 its life directly and exclusively from the commu- 
 nity in which it is placed. It is a community 
 church because it turns back into the community, 
 in forms of leadership and public service, the life 
 which it has thus developed. Its influence is not 
 dispersive, but concentrative. It gathers all the 
 people of a single community into a single organi- 
 
COMMUNITY CHUKCH : PRINCIPLES 225 
 
 zation of this community, and dedicates them pri- 
 marily to the welfare of this community. Its mem- 
 bers pledge no allegiance, and seek no end, but 
 that of the community in which they live and those 
 ever widening concentric circles of community life 
 of which the local community is the beginning. Of 
 course as the community church movement devel- 
 ops, there will be many community churches in 
 many cities and towns; and in the larger cities, 
 there will be different community churches in dif- 
 ferent neighborhoods. These churches will be cer- 
 tain to seek association with one another in some 
 form of fellowship and brotherhood. But this fel- 
 lowship will never be a denomination; will never 
 seek to impose itself upon any community; and 
 will never draw to itself that primary devotion of 
 the individual member, which properly belongs to 
 the community alone. The people of a neighbor- 
 hood, gathered together in a church for work and 
 worship, as their children are gathered together 
 in a school for education — ^this is the first picture 
 of the Community Church which we would present. 
 Incidentally, also, it may be said that this is 
 the one idea which offers any prospect of a solu- 
 tion of the problem of denominationalism. Patheti- 
 cally strenuous efforts are now being made on every 
 hand, as we have seen, to end the scandal of secta- 
 rian division. The cry of "church unity" is heard 
 today more often than any other slogan. Confer- 
 ences are being held, organizations formed, pro- 
 grams formulated, all to the end of. briuging to- 
 
226 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 gether into a single body the churches which have 
 so long been severed from one another. Nothing, 
 however, seems to be accomplished, for what should 
 be the obvious reason that the only basis proposed 
 by anybody inside the churches for their reunion, 
 is that congeries of theological ideas and purposes 
 which has from the beginning been their occasion 
 of division. What is needed is a wholly new basis 
 of organization, a unit of integration altogether 
 outside the area of old-time controversy and intol- 
 erance. And where can this be found save in that 
 community which is now gathering to itself all 
 the activities of our modern social democracy? We 
 shall get rid of denominationalism, with all its 
 waste, inefficiency and unbrotherliness, only when 
 we have resolutely shifted the center of gravity 
 in religion from theology to life, from the church 
 to society. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If we turn back now to the type of church with 
 which we are ordinarily familiar, we discover that 
 a second characteristic is its nature as a private, 
 in contrast to a public, institution. This church 
 stands in the community as the representative of 
 a certain kind of theology, a certain habit of wor- 
 ship, or even a certain spirit or point of view in 
 matters religious. As such it is supported and 
 governed as a private corporation for the propa- 
 gation of a private kind of theology, or worship, 
 or point of view. Every attempt, of course, is made 
 
COMMUNITY CHUKCH: PEINCIPLES 227 
 
 to reach the public, and the church has every ap- 
 pearance of being a genuinely public institution. 
 Thus it opens its doors freely on Sunday mornings, 
 welcomes all who would come to its services of 
 worship, and usually today places free seats at 
 their disposal. Furthermore it makes a practice 
 of inviting the public to join its ranks, and thus 
 assumes a fine and usually sincere attitude of 
 democratic hospitality. But the test of a church's 
 character in this regard is the organization not 
 of its congregation but of its membership. When 
 we come to the question of actually "joining a 
 church," as it is called, we find at once that there 
 are conditions of admission. These conditions 
 may involve acceptance of a creed, confession of 
 faith in Christ Jesus, conformity to prescribed 
 practices of worship, in general, sympathy with 
 certain theological or spiritual habits of mind. 
 They may be said to run these days all the way 
 from the most rigid tenets of orthodoxy to the more 
 tenuous and intangible principles of liberalism. In 
 essence, however, they all mean the same thing — 
 that u candidate for membership must "belong'^ 
 before he can be received. The church, in other 
 words, is exactly like a club — i. e., a private insti- 
 tution controlled by a private group of persons 
 for the service of private interests. In this, there 
 is nothing illegitimate ; a club is a perfectly proper 
 type of organization in a democracy. But a club, 
 be it said, is a club^ whether it be religious or 
 secular in character, and is not to be confused 
 
228 KEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 with a church which should include the whole and 
 not a fragment of the community. 
 
 The inevitably private character of the churches 
 we know today, is explained by the fact that cen- 
 turies of tradition have taught us to regard re- 
 ligion as a private afifair. We look upon it as a 
 matter which concerns the individual — what is 
 more, concerns those intimate inner experiences of 
 an individual's life into which no other person is 
 able, or should properly be willing, to intrude. 
 What is more natural, therefore, than that religion 
 should be held apart from the public gaze, and pro- 
 tected by 'Shrines and sanctuaries? What more 
 can we ask than that devout souls, who have organ- 
 ized a temple for the cherishing of their own par- 
 ticular faith, shall be willing to share it with others 
 on terms which will guarantee its security from 
 profanation? If the church is thus a private insti- 
 tution, it is only because religion is by its very 
 nature a private experience. To ask a church to 
 be public, in the sense that a school or community 
 center, for example, is public, is to ask it to be some- 
 thing less, or at least other, than it is. 
 
 With this interpretation of religion, as applied 
 to the problem of its social organization, the Com- 
 munity Church takes decisive issue. What is es- 
 sential in religion, it declares, is not what is 
 peculiar to this or that individual life, but what 
 is common to all. Religion is a universal instinct 
 of the soul. It is "the property of every liuman 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 229 
 
 being/' says William Ellery Channing/ Rooted 
 deep in the soul of human nature, it is rightly to 
 be described as a racial characteristic. Men are 
 in nothing so much alike as in their experience of 
 religion, unless it be in their search for fellowship 
 on the basis of this experience. It is this search 
 which produced the church, which "grew," says 
 Channing again, "out of the principles and feel- 
 ings of human nature. Our nature is social. We 
 cannot live alone. We cannot shut up any great 
 feeling in our hearts. We seek for others to par- 
 take it with us. ... In this law of our nature 
 the church has its origin."^ Religion, in other 
 words, is "the most social of all our sentiments.'^ 
 The church, therefore, is properly to be regarded 
 as the community, or the common life, functioning 
 m the higher ranges of its endeavor; and any 
 church which is faithful to the impulse which pro- 
 duced it, must by that very token be universal. 
 
 It is this which makes the Community Church 
 to be distinctively a public institution. It refuses 
 to take on the aspects oi a club, or a chapel, or a 
 guarded shrine; rather does it seek analogy with 
 the public school, the public library, the social 
 center, or the courts of law. Today in spirit, to- 
 morrow in legal fact, this church belongs to the 
 people, for them to use as their own. The Commu- 
 nity Church, in other words, makes its member- 
 ship coincident with citizenship in the community 
 in which it is planted. It has no terms of admis- 
 
 1 See sermon on " Spiritual Freedom " in Works ^ page 179. 
 ' See sermon on " The Church " In Works j page 431. 
 
230 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 sion to its fellowship, theological or otherwise. 
 Any man or woman who is a citizen, or even a resi- 
 dent, of the community, is by virtue of that one 
 fact alone a member of the church. He is as free 
 to come to the church and exercise his rights of 
 membership, as he is free to take his child to the 
 public school to receive the advantages of an educa- 
 tion, or himself to go to the library to read its 
 books, or to the ballot-box to cast his vote. Every 
 man, of course, will not want to exercise his right 
 of membership in the Community Church, as every 
 man does not choose to exercise his rights of citi- 
 zenship in the state. This is a matter of individual 
 choice. The point is that any man who wants to 
 do so, can do so. Nobody can say him nay. If he 
 is excluded from the church, he must exclude 
 himself. 
 
 The Community Church is thus the community 
 functioning spiritually. It is democracy expressing 
 itself socially in terms of moral and spiritual ideal- 
 ism. It is the people at work together in the realm 
 of their own souls. It is this conception which 
 brings us face to face with the prospect of the 
 reunion of c^hurch and state; but in this there is 
 no peril, as we have seen, provided that the state 
 is free, and the church unbound by theological 
 dogmas or ecclesiastical tyrannies. \Says Prof. 
 Durant Drake, of Vassar College, "The union of 
 church and state was dangerous so long as the 
 church was autocratic and dogmatic; make it 
 democratic, a federation of free local organizations; 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 231 
 
 make it undogmatic, a place where thought may 
 be free and fearless, and we can again let it become 
 an institution belonging to the community as a 
 whole.''^ 
 
 lY 
 
 This brings us to a third point of definition! 
 The churches, as we know them today, are identi- 
 fied with some kind of creed, or statement of belief, 
 which constitutes an essential part of their organ- 
 ized life. They take pains to indicate their con- 
 viction that theology, to some extent or other, is 
 a necessary constituent of religion. Thus most 
 churches have elaborate creeds, and offer these as 
 a condition of admission to their fellowship. In 
 recent years, especially in the so-called liberal 
 churches, these creeds have largely been done away 
 with ; but even here there is left an affirmation or 
 understanding which would exclude from fellow- 
 ship any member of the community who was an 
 atheist or non-Christian. Even those radical 
 churches, which have freed themselves from all 
 theological bonds, have gone to the other extreme 
 of setting up a structure of denial which is as 
 exclusive as any of the creeds of Christendom. 
 The so-called People's Churches, which sprang up 
 in the days of the free-thought controversy, were 
 so dogmatic in their repudiation of every accepted 
 doctrine of Christian faith, that it was quite im- 
 possible for any conservative person to enjoy^ 
 
 1 See his book, Shall We Stand hy the Church? page 151. 
 
232 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 fellowship among their members. Thus either 
 positively or negatively, theology has intruded, and 
 has made the church a partisan of orthodox, lib- 
 eral, or radical interpretations of religious thought. 
 Now the Community Church divorces itself abso- 
 lutely from theology and the theological point of 
 view. Neither the acceptance nor the rejection of 
 a creed is recognized as having any significance. 
 What a man believes or does not believe is a matter 
 of no concern to the church as a churchy for the- 
 ology in all its aspects, both positive and negative, 
 has no place in the life of the institution. Theology 
 belongs properly to the individual, who must be- 
 lieve something about the universe in which he 
 lives, and must formulate his beliefs into some 
 kind of a theology. But a church as such cannot 
 have such a theology, save as a group of individuals 
 impose their ideas upon their fellows, or all of 
 them together engage in the nefarious business of 
 compromise for the sake of an agreement. The- 
 ology, by which we mean religious philosophy, has 
 no more place in the church than political phi- 
 losophy in the state. What would we think, for 
 example, if men should suddenly undertake to 
 impose the creed of the Republican Party upon 
 the nation, to the end that all citizens would have 
 to be Republicans as a condition of retaining their 
 citizenship? What did we think when, in New 
 York State in 1920, attempt was made to identify 
 the commonwealth with the orthodox political 
 philosophy of the Democratic and Republican 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 23^ 
 
 parties, to the extent at least that Socialists were 
 not allowed to send their chosen representatives 
 to the Assembly at Albany? Such an act, of 
 course, we recognize in our sober moments as a 
 flat betrayal of the ideals of our national life. 
 America is not a Republican, or a Democratic, 
 or a Socialistic state. It is altogether outside of 
 existing philosophies of politics. Individual men 
 can be Republicans, Democrats, or Socialists, if 
 they will; but the state itself can know no party. 
 The essence of democracy is the free spirit — the 
 right of every citizen, without jeopardizing his 
 citizenship, to think as he will upon matters politi- 
 cal ; and the incarnation of this spirit in universal 
 fellowship. 
 
 The application of this principle to the church 
 involves the relegation of all matters of theology 
 where they properly belong — to the unfettered 
 thought and conviction of the individual. What 
 holds the members of the Community Church to- 
 gether is not identity of belief on any religious 
 issue — not the doctrine of the soul, nor the hope 
 of immortality, nor even the concept of a Divine 
 Being; but the sense of a common need, the desire 
 for common welfare, the consciousness of mem- 
 bership one with another in all the things of life. 
 If a man is a citizen of the community, we have 
 said, he is by reason of that fact a member of the 
 churdh. It would be as absurd and unjust to shut 
 him out because he is a materialist, a theosophist, 
 a spiritualist, a Unitarian, or a Methodist, as it 
 
234 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 would be to exclude him from society because he 
 is a Republican or a Socialist. The Community 
 Church, like the democratic state, is inclusive. 
 Membership in the one, like citizenship in the other, 
 is extended to all on the basis not of ideas but of 
 human nature. Which means again that the Com- 
 munity Church is the community! 
 
 A fourth point of importance in the definition 
 of the Community Church is its social character 
 and purpose. Religion, as we have seen, is essen- 
 tially social in its nature. It has its origin in the 
 sympathies of men, in their passion for one an- 
 other. Yet are the traditional churches all about 
 us preeminently individualistic in temper. In this 
 the liberal churches are identical with the ortho- 
 dox, for while the former have indeed substituted 
 ethical for theological standards of activity, yet 
 like the latter they still make the individual soul 
 the prime object of concern, and in the cultural 
 perfection of the soul, find the attainment of 
 their end. 
 
 The Community Church, per contra^ substitutes 
 the social group for the separate individual. It 
 interprets religion primarily in terms of social 
 reconstruction, and dedicates its members pri- 
 marily to the fulfillment of social idealism. So 
 distinctive to the community church movement 
 of our time is this note of creative service in so- 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 235 
 
 cietj, that it is not uncommon to find churches 
 described as "community churches'' for no other 
 reason than that they accept community or social 
 welfare as the first article of their creed, and 
 develop social machinery for the practice of their 
 faith.^ Much more than this is required, as we 
 are just now seeing, to make a genuine and fully- 
 developed community church; but this aspect of 
 social consciousness and activity is none the less 
 indispensable. No church which lacks the social 
 vision can qualify as a community church. Any 
 church which catches this social vision, is to that 
 extent already become a community church. Pro- 
 grams of social change, therefore, rather than 
 methods of individual regeneration, take first place 
 in the life of this type of church. It seeks pri- 
 marily to save society whic^h is "the one body," 
 and the individual only as a "member'' of this 
 "body." Thus does it mark its recognition of the 
 transition in religion from theology to sociology, 
 and its acceptance of that humanistic interpre- 
 tation of life which is the basis of this religion! 
 
 VI 
 
 A final question pertains to the relation of the 
 Community Church to Christianity. Is the Com- 
 munity Church a Christian church, like the 
 churches with which we are familiar; or does it 
 
 ^ " The Community Church includes any church which maintains 
 an adequate program of service for the community as a whole " — 
 Orrin W. Auman, in The Community Churchman^ July 1921. 
 
236 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 put Christianity away and seek to present itself 
 as not merely an undenominational, but a universal 
 church? 
 
 In answer to this inquiry, it must be stated that 
 the overwhelming majority of community churches 
 which are appearing today, are Christian churches. 
 This is an inevitable corollary of the fact, so often 
 cited in these pages, that the Community Church 
 is to be understood fundamentally as that type of 
 religious institution which exists for the purpose 
 of giving organized expression to the spiritual life 
 of the society in the midst of which it is placed. 
 It is first and foremost the community seeking to 
 express and organize itself in terms of religious 
 experience. In this sense the Community Church 
 must represent, in the beginning at least, that 
 which is already present in the hearts and minds 
 of the people who comprise the community. In 
 addition, of course, it attempts to develop, as well 
 as to express, the higher realities of the spiritual 
 life. But the Community Church is distinctive 
 from all other churches in this particular — that it 
 begins where the people are, and gathers them 
 together at that point where they have already 
 learned to stand together as neighbors and fellow- 
 citizens. In a community, therefore, which is 
 already Christian, the Community Church is itself 
 a Christian institution. Where the citizens all 
 accept Jesus as their saviour or leader, the church 
 which they sustain as fellow members is naturally 
 dedicated to the service of the Nazarene. As he 
 
COMMUNITY CHUECH : PEINCIPLES 23T 
 
 is already, in the individual experience of the men 
 and women concerned, the personal incarnation of 
 spiritual idealism, so is he naturally to them as 
 well the headstone of the church edifice. Nothing 
 else is possible if the Community Church is to be 
 true to itself as the embodiment of the religious 
 side of the community life. As well expect a 
 public school to teach Hebrew to the children of 
 the Gentiles, or the public library to gather French 
 books for the reading of an English-speaking town, 
 as to expect a community church to remove Jesus 
 from the high pinnacle of his unique spiritual 
 eminence in a community where no other prophet 
 of the free spirit is known or adored. In most 
 communities, therefore, at present, the Community 
 Church is naturally and inevitably a Christian 
 church. Nothing else is to be expected, or indeed, 
 from the standpoint of true democratic idealism, 
 to be desired. 
 
 In its ultimate form, however, the Community 
 Church cannot be a Christian church. On the one 
 hand, such identification with Christianity would 
 constitute a betrayal of the idea of religion as a 
 universal instinct of human nature. All men, as we 
 have seen, are naturally religious, and seek to give 
 expression to the spiritual impulses which move 
 within their souls. It is this fact which has 
 produced the great variety of religions which 
 have appeared iu different ages and places, and 
 under the inspiration of different prophets. All 
 of these religions must be regarded from this view- 
 
238 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 point as, within their limits, sound and good. All 
 are surely to be recognized as integral parts of 
 the sum total of human experience in the spiritual 
 realm. Christianity at its best is only one par- 
 ticular expression of the one spirit, determined by 
 prophetic leadership, by historical accident, by 
 intellectual modes of thought, by great crises in 
 moral and social life. The same thing is true of 
 Judaism, as of Confucianism, Buddhism, Moham- 
 medanism. Back of all these faiths is the soul. 
 When the great Parliament of Religions gathered 
 in Chicago in 1893, the world saw therein the 
 promise of the one religion which should some 
 day end all differences of sect and creed, and unite 
 mankind in the one great family of God. Now 
 the Community Church, if faithful to itself, is but 
 an attempt to embody in a single church what was 
 embodied universally in that Parliament. It seeks 
 to take men where they are already gathered to- 
 gether and living the common life, and lead them 
 to the spiritual fulfillment of this social promise. 
 On the other hand, the Community Church 
 cannot be in any exclusive sense a Christian church, 
 for the reason that it must be faithful to the ideal 
 of the community as the unit of spiritual integra- 
 tion. Now the community, as we know it at least 
 in this country, has citizens who are not Chris- 
 tians. Here in our civic family are Jews, Bahaists, 
 Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists. Shall the dis- 
 tinction between Episcopalians and Unitarians, 
 between Catholics and Protestants, now be denied; 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH: PRINCIPLES 239 
 
 and this distinction between Christians and so- 
 called pagans be acknowledged? If so, where is 
 our community? If the non-Christian is fit to be 
 a citizen of the state, why should he not also be 
 fit to be a member of the church? What I see in 
 Jesus, my Jewish brother sees in Isaiah, my 
 Bahaist brother in Baha O'lla, my Buddhist 
 brother in Buddha. But behind the prophet, who 
 means the most to each, there stands the one 
 supreme ideal of truth and love; and we unite, if 
 not in the person, then in the spirit of which the 
 person is the incarnation. 
 
 The Community Church, therefore, must be 
 more than a Christian church. If it is to reflect 
 with any accuracy the life of the community, it 
 must recognize spiritually every citizen. Take the 
 situation in our large cities, for example, where 
 Christians no longer constitute the whole or even a 
 predominant part of the population. In the Bor- 
 ough of Manhattan in Greater New York, in a 
 population of less than three millions, there are 
 considerably more than one million Jews. In other 
 words, one person out of every two or three in this 
 great area has no connection of any kind with 
 Christianity. By tradition, and in certain cases 
 by personal conviction, these men and women are 
 members of another race, children of another cul- 
 ture, the followers of prophets known to Chris- 
 tianity only as the forerunners of the Christ. 
 These persons, it is to be noted, are members of the 
 community; they are recognized on equal terms 
 
240 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 with Christians as neighbors and citizens. They 
 vote, they do business, they walk the streets, they 
 rear families and sustain homes, just as their 
 Christian contemporaries do. They are admitted 
 in every way into the community life of their city. 
 Indeed, in many of the institutions of the city, as 
 in the theatres and newspapers, they have long 
 since become the predominant factors. Now what 
 shall the Community Church do, if these people 
 desire to be members of such a church, as they are 
 already members of such a community? If it is 
 true to itself, must not the Community Church, 
 under such circumstances, organize itself on lines 
 which are not exclusively Christian? Already it 
 proclaims itself as distinctive from all other 
 churches in the one great fact, among others, that 
 its doors are flung wide open to all who live in and 
 contribute to the community life. Fidelity to this 
 proclamation surely means that in such a place as 
 Manhattan, Jews must be made as welcome as 
 Christians ! And let it be noted that this welcome 
 must be offered to them as Jews^ for our Hebrew 
 comrades have as much right to preserve fidelity 
 to Israel as Christians have to remain loyal to 
 Christianity. 
 
 The logic of community religion, in other words, 
 involves ultimately an escape from Christianity, 
 as it has already involved an escape from Presby- 
 terianism or Congregationalism. There can be no 
 stopping short of the far and high goal of universal 
 religion. In saying this, let it be noted with all 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH : PRINCIPLES 241 
 
 emphasis that the Community Church is not to be 
 regarded in any sense as anti-Christian. We have 
 already learned that, in eschewing denomination- 
 alism, the Community Church is not anti-denomi- 
 national. It has no quarrel with Presbyterianism, 
 or Unitarianism, or any other Protestant sect. It 
 recognizes them all as having played their part in 
 history, and as representing important aspects of 
 thought and moral aspiration; and then seeks to 
 "nite them on that high plane of spiritual vision 
 where they properly belong. So in its attitude 
 toward Christianity! The Community Church 
 seeks not to oppose Christianity, or to weaken it, 
 or even to ignore it. On the contrary, it would 
 receive it as one of the noblest and most beneficent 
 of world religions, and build it into the structure 
 of the new universal religion which is some day to 
 capture the imagination and hold the allegiance 
 of mankind. The Community Church, so far from 
 being anti-Christian, is to be regarded as Chris- 
 tianity plus. It takes Christianity for what it is, 
 and then adds to it those contributions of experi- 
 ence and idealism which can come from other 
 races and other faiths. The main thing is that 
 the altar of community religion shall be so wide 
 and beautiful that all men will come to it gladly, 
 and find there companionship alike with God and 
 man. Like Jesus himself, the Community Church 
 will thus seek not to destroy Christianity but to 
 fulfill it. 
 
 In this sense of the word, may it not be sug- 
 
24t2 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 gested that to just the extent that the Community 
 Church transcends the limitations of Christianity, 
 it becomes truly Christian? May we not dare to 
 assert that the Community Church, which has a 
 welcome alike for "Jew and Gentile, bond and 
 free," is the one church which really represents 
 today that spirit which was in Jesus? We search 
 the Gospels in vain to find any evidence that the 
 circle of Jesus's disciples was closed to any man 
 who would enter it in the spirit of love. It is 
 impossible to carry back into his day the sectarian 
 differences which now divide the Protestant 
 world. Equally difficult is it to recognize in his 
 spirit or practice any distinction between Chris- 
 tian or Jew or pagan. Indeed, the word 
 "Christian" did not appear in the lifetime of Jesus 
 at all. It was only later, when men and women 
 had begun to narrow their minds, and open their 
 hearts to prejudice and fear, that a certain group 
 of those who followed Jesus came to be known in 
 Antioch as "Christians." Certainly if Chris- 
 tianity is to be what Jesus intended it to be, it 
 must be at least as inclusive as his own spirit. 
 And this, as we know, was as wide as the circle of 
 humanity and as deep as the depths of human woe. 
 We are inclined to believe, therefore, that a uni- 
 versal religion marks the ultimate fulfillment of 
 the true Christian religion; and that the Com- 
 munity Church, therefore, in this one distinctive 
 aspect of universality, may be regarded in the 
 highest and best sense of the word as "Christian." 
 
COMMUNITY CHUKCH: PEINCIPLES 243 
 
 VII 
 
 Such are some of the principles and purposes 
 which distinguish the Community Church from 
 the typical institutions of religion with which we 
 are familiar. Is it not possible to summarize this 
 contrast by stating that the Community Church 
 acts upon the idea that the community and not the 
 church is the central thing — that the community is 
 "the real presence" of God; the repository of his 
 truth and the realization of his Kingdom? The 
 ordinary church of our time, and every time, 
 regards itself as a basic, a holy thing. It thinks of 
 itself as "coming down out of heaven from God," 
 and thus bringing revelation and salvation unto 
 men. The more liberal churches, of course, do not 
 speak of themselves in this way. But these 
 churches still believe that they have something 
 indispensable to give to the community, that men 
 and women should come to them for instruction 
 and conversion, that without their ministrations 
 the world would be without religion and therefore 
 without redemption. To some extent or other every 
 church, orthodox and liberal alike, is guilty of the 
 fundamental blasphemy of believing that society 
 was made for the church and not the church for 
 society. 
 
 Now the Community Church does the revolu- 
 tionary thing of avoiding this exaltation of itself. 
 It makes the community the primary thing, and the 
 church the secondary ! Emerson once said that the 
 
244 NEW CHUKCHES FOE OLD 
 
 Bible might be destroyed from cover to cover, with- 
 out loss; for in such case, men would write it again 
 from out their own inspired souls. Similarly may 
 we say of the churches, that they also might be 
 destroyed without loss; for if this were done, the 
 people would straightway rear new churches to give 
 voice to their needs and service to their ideals. 
 Indeed there would be gain in this process in the 
 end; for, in place of institutions which represent 
 ideas and methods which have not died out with the 
 generations which produced them, we should have 
 institutions instinct with the life of this time, and 
 vital therefore with its hopes. 
 
 It is something of this desired substitution of new 
 for old which is now proceeding in the present com- 
 munity church movement. This phenomenon rep- 
 resents the creative spirit of democracy at work in 
 the chaotic field of religion. It is the people pro- 
 claiming their native spiritual power, recognizing 
 that God is "in the midst of them," building anew 
 tall altars on which he may be worshiped and 
 made known. The Community Church is proud of 
 the fact that it comes not "down out of heaven,'' but 
 up from the earth. It rejoices iu the assurance that 
 its roots are deep in the soil of human hearts. It 
 acknowledges that it is from the people that it 
 draws its life, and to the people, therefore, that 
 it must make return. The Community Church is 
 rightly named. It is not primarily a church at all ; 
 rather is it the community in spiritual action. 
 Like every other democratic institution — the state, 
 
COMMUNITY CHURCH : PRINCIPLES 245 
 
 the school, the social center — it is the work of men's 
 hands, the instrument of men's hearts, the expres- 
 sion of men's souls. Not the people for the church, 
 but the church for the people — ^this is the secret of 
 this new hope. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Such in principle is the Community Church, 
 which is destined so surely to succeed the tradi- 
 tional churches of Protestantism. These churches 
 are dead, or are now dying. The new democratic 
 spirit of the times has made these institutions as 
 impossible as vehicles of the contemporary religious 
 consciousness, as the medieval church of Rome. A 
 new Renaissance is upon us which makes inevitable 
 a new and greater reformation. And the church of 
 this reformation is the church not of another Luther 
 or John Calvin — not of any man or Bible or creed — 
 but of the people. Democracy is coming at last 
 into its own, in religion as in politics and industry; 
 and the church of democracy is none other than this 
 which we are learning now to call the Community 
 Church, 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE COMMUNITY CHURCH: 
 ORGANIZATION, MESSAGE AND WORK 
 
'^You miist understand, this is no dead pile of stone 
 and unmeaning timber. It is a living thing. . . . 
 When you enter it you hear a sound — a soun^ as of some 
 mighty poem chanted. Listen long enough, and you will 
 learn that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, 
 of the nameless music of men's souls — ^that is, if you 
 have ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the 
 church itself — a looming mystery of many shapes and 
 shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome. . . . The 
 pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of heroes : the 
 sweet human flesh of men and women is moulded about 
 its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces of little 
 children laugh out from every corner-stone : the terrible 
 spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades; 
 and up in the heights and spaces there are inscribed the 
 numberless musings of all the dreamers, of the world. 
 It is yet building — ^building and built upon. Sometimes 
 the work goes forward in deep darkness: sometimes in 
 blinding light: now beneath the burden of unutterable 
 anguish : now to the tune of a great laughter and heroic 
 shoutings like the cry of thunder. Sometimes, in the 
 silence of the night-time, one may hear the tiny ham- 
 merings of the comrades at work up in the dome — ^the 
 comrades that have climbed ahead." 
 
 Charles Rann Kennedy, in 
 
 The Servant in the House 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE COMMUNITY CHUECH: 
 ORGANIZATION, MESSAGE AND WORK 
 
 In turning to the discussion of such problems as 
 those pertaining to the organization, message and 
 work of the Community Church, we come face to 
 face with matters of prophecy. The principles of 
 the Community Church are already evident as a 
 present reality of thought. These more practical 
 questions, however, have yet to be worked out in 
 terms not of abstract speculation but of concrete 
 experience. We have here phenomena which are 
 subject to development, and therefore wait for the 
 future for their answer. 
 
 II 
 
 We may be fairly definite, however, in our fore- 
 cast of the organization of the Community Church, 
 for the reason that this represents simply the task 
 of extending into the religious field those ideas and 
 practices of democratic relationship which have 
 already been made familiar to us in the field of 
 politics. Three hundred years of Congregational- 
 
 249 
 
250 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 ism which, ecclesiastically speaking, is democracy 
 applied to the problem of church government, have 
 done much to point us the way. 
 
 From this point of view, we may say that the 
 Community Church, after the pattern of the com- 
 munity out of which it springs, will be controlled 
 on the basis of a universal franchise. All members 
 will have equal voice in the management of the 
 church, in other words, just as all citizens have 
 equal voice in the management of the municipality 
 or the state. There will be no priestly offices of 
 any kind — no bishops or presbyters, deacons or 
 elders — and therefore no centralized authority. 
 There will be no division between church and parish, 
 except as such division may be made necessary by 
 the laws of the state. There will simply be the one 
 body of the congregation inside the church, as there 
 is the one body of the citizenry outside the church. 
 This body will do business on the basis of the town 
 meeting idea; it will elect its own officers, manage 
 its own finances, own and control its own property 
 until such time as it is taken over by the community, 
 discuss and determine its own policy and practice. 
 In one word, the Community Church will act as the 
 community acts, for the church is the community 
 functioning in the religious field. 
 
 The executive direction of the Community Church 
 will be placed in the hands of a popularly elected 
 board of managers, composed of men and women 
 chosen by vote of the people for comparatively short 
 terms of office. There will be no qualifications for 
 
OEGANIZATION AND WORK 251 
 
 membership on this board, financial or otherwise, 
 save such personal qualifications of character, 
 ability, and interest in the church, as would nat- 
 urally commend themselves to the judgment of a 
 popular constituency. There will be standing 
 committees, as for example a finance committee, 
 chosen by the people and responsible to the people ; 
 and special committees appointed on frequent 
 occasions for special work. The autocratic control 
 of a self-perpetuating vestry, or an independent and 
 irresponsible board of trustees, will be altogether 
 unknown. The Community Church will control its 
 officers as directly as a town meeting controls its 
 selectmen and its clerk. 
 
 The financial support of the Community Church 
 will be democratic to the core — which means that it 
 will be established on the basis of individual volun- 
 tary subscriptions! That ancient and hoary 
 abomination, the pew-rental system, will be swept 
 out of the Community Church as Jesus swept the 
 money-changers out of the Temple at Jerusalem. 
 It is by no means one of the least of the merits of 
 this institution that it tends to end forever • the 
 separation in the Lord's house of rich and poor, of 
 those able and those not able to pay. Many of our 
 existing churches, of course, have "free seats," as 
 they are called; but hospitality extended to the 
 general public, however graciously, by a private 
 group of persons owning and controlling a church, 
 is one thing, and the organization of this church on 
 a basis of public ownership and control is another 
 
252 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 and very different thing. The Community Church 
 abolishes pew-rentals not as an act of hospitality 
 or patronage merely, but as a step in the sweeping 
 process of socialization. The door is open to any- 
 body who will enter, not merely to the pew at the 
 services of worship on Sunday, but to the governing 
 constituency of the organization at the annual 
 business meeting on Monday. Every citizen, as we 
 have said so often, has equal rights of ownership, as 
 well as use, in the Community Church ; and the sign 
 or symbol of his exercise of this right is his sub- 
 scription, large or small, to the institution's 
 support. 
 
 Lastly, it should be emphasized that the real 
 Community Church will have an equipment ade- 
 quate to meet the needs of community, and not 
 merely the traditional parish, life. This does not 
 mean the waste and extravagance involved in the 
 erection of elaborate institutional buildings. It 
 means simply a church house with offices, class 
 rooms, assembly rooms, libraries, and a theatre 
 recognized as important in every way as the audi- 
 torium for Sunday worship. Such equipment, of 
 course, implies a "faculty ministry" — not one 
 clergyman worked to death, degraded to the indig- 
 nities of a Jack-of-all-trades, handy at everything 
 and too tired and distracted to be preeminently 
 good at anything; but a group of men, each one 
 trained to the practice of a single profession — 
 preaching, religious education, personal ministra- 
 tion, social service, general management — and each 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 253 
 
 one a leader in his department. Such a ministry 
 will be easy to maintain when one community 
 church has taken the place of ten or a dozen com- 
 peting denominational churches, and resources 
 therefore have been pooled. The Community 
 Church is intended to be what all too few churches 
 have ever been in the past — efficient! It will be 
 adequately equipped for the great task of the 
 Kingdom. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In our discussion of the message and work of the 
 Community Church, we can be much less definite 
 and confident than in our discussion of the various 
 aspects of its organization. For organization, like 
 principles, is bound to be much the same wherever 
 in a democracy the new type of religious institution 
 makes its appearance. The message and work of a 
 Community Church, however, will vary according 
 to the needs of the community in which it is placed, 
 the character of the people who compose its mem- 
 bership, and the kind of leaders which it develops. 
 A Community Church in a prosperous suburban 
 town is likely to speak a somewhat different mes- 
 sage to the world than a Community Church 
 located in a grimy and poverty-stricken factory 
 village. A Community Church in a rural district, 
 where farming is the occupation of the people, is 
 likely to undertake a different work from that 
 attempted by a Community Church planted in the 
 heart of a great municipality. There can be no 
 
254 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 uniformity in matters of this kind — nor should 
 there be! For the very virtue of the Community 
 Church is the fact that it is an institution growing 
 out of the soil of the community and therefore giv- 
 ing expression to the peculiar character and needs 
 of the community. 
 
 The ordinary denominational church, with which 
 we are familiar, comes to a city or a town with a 
 message and work that are definitely prepared 
 beforehand, like the play produced by a group of 
 strolling players. An Episcopal chapel in a little 
 seaside village goes through the same performance 
 as a great cathedral in the city. A Presbyterian 
 church speaks the same message to a group of day 
 laborers on the lower East Side as to a group of 
 prosperous idlers on upper Fifth Avenue. If the 
 word and work are by some chance adapted to the 
 community to which they are offered ^ the church 
 enjoys some measure of prosperity. If they are 
 not adapted, however, the church languishes and 
 ultimately dies, like an exotic plant, or is delib- 
 erately kept alive by the hot-house ministrations of 
 the "home office.'' Seldom does the denominational 
 church think of making itself over to suit the needs 
 of the particular people whom it has come to serve, 
 and thus become an accurate expression of their 
 lives. The whole idea is that the people must be made 
 over, or converted, to the church, not the church to 
 the people ! The ordinary sectarian church would 
 rather die, or abandon a community as though its 
 
 *As by the great Labor Temple In New York, a community church 
 in all but name I 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WOEK 255 
 
 people had no religion to be cultivated or directed, 
 than abate one jot or tittle of its Methodism, Episco- 
 palianism or Unitarianism. With the Community 
 Church, however, it is different. This institution, 
 as we have said so many times, is a product of the 
 community's life, and therefore as sensitive as an 
 organism to its environment. It is as native to the 
 soil as the pine tree to the state of Maine, or the 
 palm tree to the state of Florida. A Community 
 Church at any one time will be what its community 
 is at that same time. And as there are various 
 communities, so also will there be various com- 
 munity churches. The principles and organization 
 of these churches must necessarily be very much the 
 same; but their message and work can conform to 
 no one type, and measure up to no one standard. 
 Just as it takes all kinds of people to make a world, 
 so must it take all kinds of community churches to 
 make a religion ! 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties involved 
 in the matter, there are certain things that may be 
 said about the message and work of a Community 
 Church. There are uniform characteristics that 
 are bound to appear, just because the Community 
 Church is a community church, and not specifically 
 a Baptist, or Methodist, or Universalist church. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the first place, as regards the message of the 
 Community Church, it must be conceded that it 
 
256 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 will be characterized by a freedom which is un- 
 precedented in the history of Christianity. This 
 emancipation of thought and speech will come 
 about, not because of any superior virtue in the 
 people who compose the Community Church ; they 
 will be the same persons that they were when they 
 were Presbyterians or Congregationalists. It will 
 come about simply as a result of the shift of alle- 
 giance from the particular denomination to the 
 whole community. The pulpit will be delivered 
 because it will be responsible to a public sentiment 
 which represents all elements of opinion, and not to 
 an ecclesiastical orthodoxy which represents but 
 one. 
 
 The trouble in this matter of freedom in our 
 churches can be traced straight back to the simple 
 fact that the typical church is a private institution, 
 supported by a selected group of persons for the 
 propagation of a sectarian interpretation of re- 
 ligion. The clergyman, under ordinary conditions, 
 is not a timid or hidebound person ; he expresses his 
 opinion at the town meeting, or at the ballot-box, 
 or in the newspaper columns, as freely as any other 
 man. The members of the church are not bigoted 
 persecutors ; in the every-day affairs of life they are 
 tolerant of differing opinions. Put these people 
 together in the normal relations of community 
 activity, and there is freedom for the formation and 
 expression of individual opinion. But in the 
 church the relations are not normal, but abnormal. 
 When minister and people enter the church on 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 257 
 
 Sunday morning, they are no longer citizens 
 together but — Presbyterians, let us say ! What it 
 is to be a Presbyterian has been determined by 
 centuries of tradition and practice. It is written 
 down in creeds, and published in sacraments and 
 rites of worship. The very moment that Presby- 
 terians assemble for any purpose as Presbyterians, 
 and not as citizens, they are conscious of a certain 
 standard to which they must conform, as the mem- 
 bers of an orchestra are conscious of a certain pitch 
 to which they must tune their instruments. The 
 same people assembled by accident as citizens of the 
 community, would practice entire freedom of utter- 
 ance and conviction ; but assembled by intention as 
 Presbyterians, they become bound at once by the 
 standard of the faith "once committed to the 
 saints," and now imposed upon themselves. Every 
 one is mindful of a standard to be maintained — of 
 truth not to be discovered but preserved. Any 
 deviation from the pitch, so to speak, is instantly 
 detected, and awakens loyalty to defensive action. 
 Not public sentiment, with its large varieties of 
 opinion, but the orthodoxy of the inner circle, is 
 here in control; and freedom, therefore, banished 
 from the sanctuary. 
 
 Now in the Community Church, of course, all this 
 will be changed. When the members of a 
 Community Church come together on a Sunday 
 morning, they assemble not as members of a 
 denomination but as citizens of the community. 
 They represent all varieties of theological opinion 
 
258 NEW CHUKCHES FOR OLD 
 
 in the church, exactly as they represent all varieties 
 of political opinion in the town; and naturally 
 enough, they expect the minister to "say his say" on 
 the questions under discussion in the pulpit with 
 the same freedom and candor that they expect the 
 mayor or the governor, or any other political leader, 
 to exercise on the platform. Public sentiment, in 
 other words, is the controlling factor inside the 
 Community Church as w^ell as outside; and as this 
 public sentiment includes all elements of opinion, it 
 will, naturally, be tolerant of these elements. Of 
 course, in every community, there are prevailing, 
 or majority, opinions; and if the minister of 
 the Community Church sets himself deliberately 
 against this opinion on any burning issue, he will 
 inevitably suffer. But he will suffer not in free- 
 dom, but in popularity! So also there are occa- 
 sions, as for example in war times, when public 
 sentiment runs high, and under provocation be- 
 comes as intolerant and cruel as any inquisition of 
 the Middle Ages. It is probable, for example, that 
 under the conditions current here in America since 
 1917, the freedom of an ideal Community Church 
 would have suffered as terribly as the freedom of 
 the public schools. But this is an abnormal con- 
 dition of hysteria and panic, from which it is unfair 
 to draw conclusions. Furthermore it is distinctly 
 to be noted that, in this terrific period, it was 
 the denominational churches which went under 
 first, and the public institutions last. Freedom 
 disappeared from the churches long before it did 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 259 
 
 from the state. But it must be frankly admitted 
 that the Community Church cannot escape the 
 frailties of human nature. It will always suffer 
 from the same diseases that prey upon the com- 
 munity at large. But the Community Church will 
 at least be as free as the community in which it is 
 placed; and to this extent freer than the great 
 majority of private institutions. When a church is 
 responsible not to a selected group of persons, who 
 have but one opinion on any issue which concerns 
 their life as a sect, but to all the people who have all 
 sorts of opinions on all the issues which concern 
 their life as a community, we shall have at last a 
 free church, worthy of the democracy of which it is 
 the highest spiritual expression. 
 
 Again, in speaking of the message of the Com- 
 munity Church, we would emphasize that this mes- 
 sage will have a great deal to do with matters of 
 theological discussion. It has already been made 
 plain that the Community Church has no creeds of 
 any kind. Theology is taken out of the institution 
 and handed over to the individual; it is a matter 
 always not of institutional fiat but of individual 
 opinion! But it is not to be assumed from this 
 fact that all theological problems are ruled out, or 
 of their own accord disappear, from the community 
 pulpit. Such a thing is impossible, even if it were 
 desirable, which it is not ! For man is a theological 
 animal just as truly as he is a religious animal. He 
 lives gladly and curiously in the realm of the intel- 
 lect. He is so constituted by nature that he wants 
 
260 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 answers to questions, solutions to problems. When 
 he encounters the unknown, every instinct of his 
 being demands that this unknown be transformed 
 as speedily and surely as possible into the known. 
 Now in religion he finds more questions unanswered 
 and problems unsolved than in any other field of 
 experience. Here the unknown stretched to bounds 
 that baffle calculation, to say nothing of compre- 
 hension. Here, therefore, his demands are most 
 insistent. And it is nothing more nor less than the 
 honest attempts of his intellect to satisfy these 
 demands that constitute what we mean by theology. 
 The trouble with our churches in the past is not 
 that they have theologized, but that they have set 
 arbitrary limits to the process of theologizing. 
 They have been guilty of the monstrous crime of 
 asserting that our questions about the infinite and 
 the eternal have been answered, that the unknown 
 has been explored to the very end. They have even 
 gone so far as to state the secret of creation, and to 
 insist upon our accepting this statement as a reve- 
 lation from God. With the result that theology, to 
 say nothing of its falsity, has been made absolutely 
 a dead thing ! It has become a matter of formula 
 and rote. Nobody has any interest in what any 
 conventional theologian has to say, for everybody 
 knows what he will isay before he begins. The 
 doctrines have been taught him by the church, and 
 it is his business, parrot-like, to repeat them. 
 
 The Community Church, now, is destined, in 
 course of time, to restore theology to its original 
 
OEGANIZATION AND WORK 261 
 
 position as a science of inquiry. By refusing to 
 offer any dogmatic solution of what must always 
 remain in the very nature of the case a mystery, and 
 by encouraging every individual to enter upon his 
 own quest of the unknown and bring back his own 
 testimony of discovery and correction, the Com- 
 munity Church will lift theology onto a plane of 
 interest as high as that of any of the great sciences 
 of our time. The minister will not only be expected 
 but requested to discuss the vast problems of God, 
 immortality, the origin and character of the soul. 
 People will assemble to hear him, as they gather to 
 hear a lecture on astronomy or geographical ex- 
 ploration. The sermon, if well done, will be as 
 fascinating as a novel. For nobody will know, as 
 they know now, what conclusion will be reached. 
 The minister may work out to a belief in God, or he 
 may not. He may accept the transcendental deity 
 of the idealistic philosophy, or he may find more 
 satisfaction and comfort in the idea of an evolving 
 God who is still finding his way and trying his 
 experiments. In discussing immortality, he may 
 accept the doctrine or reject it, as the evidence may 
 seem to him to dictate. The point is that in a Com 
 munity Church, freed from every last vestige of 
 theological dogmatism, the minister, like every 
 other individual, will simply be one inquirer into 
 the mystery of the unknown making confession not 
 of what others must believe, but of what he himself 
 has found. Under such conditions, theological dis- 
 cussion will flourish as it has not flourished since 
 
262 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 the great days of Aquinas and Albert Magnus. 
 The message of the Community Church will be 
 theological to a degree that will surprise us. 
 
 Supreme over everything else, however, in the 
 message of the Community Church, will be the 
 social note. That message of socialized religion, 
 for which we have been struggling so long and on 
 the whole so unsuccessfully, will at last come into 
 its own in this new type of religious institution. It 
 was only a few years ago that there came what was 
 known as the social awakening of Christianity. A 
 great social enthusiasm came breaking upon the 
 world, like the opening of the buds in spring; and 
 this enthusiasm spread to the church, and seized 
 upon the hearts of eager and sensitive young men. 
 For a time it seemed as though the churches were 
 going to be transformed, and the social spirit, so 
 implicit in the gospel of Jesus, become the dominant 
 factor in religious life. Great prophets appeared, 
 like Washington Gladden; great books were writ- 
 ten, like Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the 
 Social Crisis; great platforms were formulated, like 
 that of the Methodist Episcopal Church. But the 
 churches as a whole, as we can now see after 
 the interval and in the light of the experience of the 
 war, were not affected. They remained the same 
 highly individualized, and therefore essentially 
 unsocialized, institutionts that they had been from 
 the beginning. And as we now look back upon this 
 period, we can see that it must necessarily have 
 been so — and must ever be so, as long as churches 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 263 
 
 are organized along the lines which are accepted at 
 this moment. For the ordinary church, as has been 
 pointed out, is by its very nature a private and not 
 a public institution, and is therefore concerned 
 primarily with private and not public affairs. Its 
 concern is not with the citizens of the community, 
 but with its own members. Its interests of course 
 begin with itself and its prosperity, and not with 
 the community and its welfare. Its problem must 
 be not the relation of citizens to one another in the 
 community, but the relation of each individual 
 citizen to itself, as a soul to be saved, a member to 
 be won. All of which means that the denomina- 
 tional church can never be an institution of 
 socialized religion ! Its message can never be pri- 
 marily a social message. Its business is to further 
 the propaganda of the particular denomination 
 which it represents. This means that its business 
 is private, and not public; and its concern the 
 individual and not society. 
 
 The Community Church, however, in contrast 
 with the denominational church, can have no other 
 practical message but the social message. When 
 the members of such a church come together, they 
 gather as members primarily of the community ; and 
 the interests which are uppermost in their minds, 
 are community interests. There are no Presby- 
 terian doctrines to divert their attention; no outside 
 sectarian demands to exhaust their energy ; no com- 
 petition with rival churches on the next block to 
 narrow their vision and stiffen their selfishness. 
 
264 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 They are free of every consideration but that of 
 their relations together as neighbors in the one com- 
 munity, as associates in the business of the public 
 welfare, as servants of the common good. How will 
 it be possible for the minister of &uch a church to 
 avoid discussion of community problems? How 
 will it be possible for the members of such a church 
 to seek any other instruction than that of justice, 
 righteousness and good will? Many things about 
 the Community Church may be uncertain, but this 
 one thing is sure, that the social message will flame 
 from its pulpit like a beacon from a lofty hill. It 
 is because I see in this reorganization of the church 
 along community lines an opportunity for the 
 preaching and hearing of the social message such 
 as I am convinced can never come in the existing 
 denominational institutions, that I have become 
 conscripted, as it were, to the furtherance of this 
 movement. This is the "way out" of our impasse 
 in this matter of socialized religion. We must have 
 community churches, that we may have pulpits in 
 every community which will proclaim "the Gospel 
 of the Kingdom" ! 
 
 So much for the message of the Community 
 Church. What now shall we say about its work? 
 
 Central to all its activities will be the Sunday 
 morning services of w^orship. These will be very 
 different from what we see about us at the present 
 moment, for they will in every case be community 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 265 
 
 services, by which we mean that they will be services 
 of communion and not of disunion. Nowadays 
 the community divides itself up on a Sunday morn- 
 ing into all sorts of fragments. The majority of the 
 people, long since disgusted with these private clubs 
 known as churches, do not go anywhere for worship. 
 The rest disperse in a hundred different directions, 
 each one seeking a little company of persons, with 
 whose opinions he agrees, or into whose secrets he 
 has been initiated. Families are often divided in 
 this process, brothers going to one church and 
 sisters to another. Even husbands and wives occa- 
 sionally separate, a temporary divorce proceeding 
 being enacted when they approach the altars of 
 God. A community is cut up into a larger number 
 of pieces, and is therefore less of a community in 
 the true sense of the word, on a Sunday morning 
 than at any other moment of the week. We are at 
 that time most conscious of the differences that 
 divide us, and least conscious of the interests, pur- 
 poses and ideals that inevitably unite us. If it is 
 possible to conceive of a method of tearing people 
 apart, and defeating the ideal of a common life 
 dedicated by a common spirit to common ends, 
 which is more disastrously successful than that of 
 denominationalism, the world has not discovered it. 
 Now the Community Church unites people on a 
 Sunday morning, instead of dividing them. The 
 single church in the small community, or the many 
 churches in the many neighborhoods of the large 
 community, will gather together all of the people 
 
266 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 witliin their districts and lead them in a great act 
 of spiritual communion one with another. I know 
 of one Community Church, already established in a 
 little town, which comprises within its membership 
 ninety per cent of the inhabitants of that town. 
 These people represent no less than thirteen dif- 
 ferent denominations; and under ordinary circum- 
 stances would divide themselves up on a Sunday 
 morning into thirteen different congregations. But 
 in this town, these people all come together in the 
 one place, for a common act of dedication to the 
 best and the highest that they know. Ninety per 
 cent of the population of this community is 
 assembled, or represented, in the Community 
 Church on every Sunday morning. They do regu- 
 larly together, as a matter of course, what the citi- 
 zens of other communities do only by a great effort 
 at a union service on Thanksgiving Day, or a 
 patriotic assembly on the Fourth of July. Sunday, 
 in other words, is the community day. The Sunday 
 morning service is the weekly gathering in conse- 
 cration of the community life. The Community 
 Church, in its work, will hallow this day and this 
 service; and as the Community Church movement 
 develops throughout the country, it will become the 
 great occasion for the expression of the democratic 
 idealism of America. 
 
 Secondly, in its work the Community Church will 
 organize a forum, for the development of those 
 ideas and processes which cannot find proper ex- 
 pression at the Sunday morning service. No 
 
OKGANIZATION AND WORK 267 
 
 Community Church will be complete without a 
 forum; for the church, we must remember, is the 
 community, and the community must have oppor- 
 tunity for community discussion of public problems, 
 and this discussion can properly be held only in the 
 best atmosphere of moral and spiritual idealism. 
 Few of us realize to what an extent in recent years 
 the forum movement has fostered the community 
 idea, and the forum meeting suggested the possi- 
 bility and desirability of the Community Church. 
 These forums, when successful, are indeed the Com- 
 munity Church in embryonic form. They are the 
 people of a neighborhood gathered together without 
 regard to any other interest than that of their com- 
 mon concern with a problem of public thought and 
 public welfare. We have now only to extend this 
 forum gathering, to integrate its helter-skelter 
 membership into a definite organization, to lift its 
 activity above the plane of mere discussion to that 
 of service and devotion, to fuse its energies, con- 
 centrate its many-mindedness, purify its spirit, in 
 order to transform it into a genuine Community 
 Church such as we are discussing at this moment. 
 The forum movement must be very definitely 
 regarded as an anticipation of, and preparation for, 
 the Community Church movement. And now that 
 the two movements are together in the field, they 
 will tend to become ever more and more closely 
 allied, until the one is always and everywhere asso- 
 ciated with the other. Every forum will inevitably 
 tend to develop into a Community Church; and 
 
268 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 every Communitj Church will necessarily organize 
 itself, among other things, into a forum. The 
 church, may we not say, will be the forum worship- 
 ing; and the forum will be the church debating! 
 Thirdly, the Community Church will not forget 
 that work of personal ministration which has from 
 the beginning been a perogative of religion. This 
 will consist, on the one hand, of religious education 
 for the young; and, on the other hand, of spiritual 
 counsel and advice for those of maturer years. 
 Religious education by the church will some day, 
 of course, be made unnecessary by a system of 
 adequate public instruction which will not elimi- 
 nate those moral and spiritual elements which are 
 so essential in the right training of the rising gen- 
 eration. This happy end, however, will not be 
 achieved until theology has been dethroned from its 
 central place in the religious life and the age-old 
 distinction between church and society successfully 
 eliminated. Meanwhile the Community Church 
 must train its children to a true understanding of 
 those ideals of fellowship which are the essence of 
 our new religion of democracy or humanism. This 
 means, from the negative point of view, a curricu- 
 lum altogether delivered from the traditional 
 studies of the Bible, church history, creeds, and 
 ecclesiastical virtues; and, from the positive point 
 of view, a curriculum occupied with investigations 
 of social institutions, the social virtues necessary to 
 the maintenance and extension of such institutions, 
 the lives of the saints and martyrs who have glori- 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 269 
 
 fied these virtues, and the literature and art which 
 record the sacred story of human brotherhood. The 
 historic development of the family, the school, the 
 state, the church; man's struggles to organize his 
 life on a basis of good will; the rise and fall of 
 civilizations; democracy, its meaning and signifi- 
 cance; economic needs as a factor in social develop- 
 ment; evolution, especially in its ethical and 
 spiritual phases as presented for example by John 
 Fiske and Henri Bergson; great movements for 
 human betterment, such as the abolition of slavery 
 and the slave trade, the emancipation of women, the 
 prohibition of the liquor traffic, prison reform, 
 single tax, and socialism; great servants of 
 humanity, such as Lao-tse, Buddha, Socrates, 
 Jeremiah, Jesus, St. Francis, St. Xavier, Savo- 
 narola, Huss, Wesley, Parker, Garrison, John 
 Bright, Tolstoi, Jane Addams, Wilfred Grenfell, 
 Romain Rolland, and Mahatma Gandhi; the philo- 
 sophical principles of cooperation and mutual aid ; 
 the story of religion in its non-theological and 
 therefore universal humanistic aspects — ^these are 
 some of the subjects which will be presented and 
 studied in any well-organized school of community 
 religion. A book of the type of H. G. Wells's The 
 Outline of History, written with clearer insight into 
 spiritual influences and values, and supplemented 
 by abundant first-hand material from literature and 
 contemporary life, may not unfairly be presented as 
 a text-book for such a school. 
 
 Personal ministration to those of older years will 
 
270 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 have its place in the Community Church, as the 
 work of physicians, organized more and more on the 
 basis of public service, has its important place in 
 the community at large. Ideal social conditions 
 are central to religious life, as ideal sanitary con- 
 ditions are central to physical health. But always, 
 in the one case as in the other, there will be those 
 unhappy individuals who through weakness, 
 ignorance, or deliberate excess, find themselves in 
 need of healing. For such the church has ever been 
 a place of refuge and restoration; and so it will 
 continue to be under any form of ecclesiastical 
 organization in the future. But in the Community 
 Church this service will be put on a basis of exact 
 science, such as is now being offered, for example, 
 by psycho-analysis; and in the hands of skilled 
 experts, trained to this task of service as their 
 specialty. The Community Church, in other words, 
 will have its clinic for the diagnosis and cure of the 
 besetting ills of man's inward spirit. 
 
 Lastly, and most important in this matter of the 
 work of a Community Church, is the problem of 
 community service. For it goes without saying 
 that the chief work of such a church will be social 
 in its character. It will find, indeed, the crown of 
 all its labors, the justification of its very existence, 
 in what we may call applied or socialized religion. 
 Inevitably it will organize itself into a kind of com- 
 munity center for the initiation and direction of 
 every form of practical service for the common wel- 
 fare. Indeed the community center, as we know it 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WOEK 271 
 
 today, may not inaccurately be described as the 
 Community Church at work. It is significant that 
 where the Community Church establishes itself, 
 there is no need for the community center to go, for 
 the Community Church builds a community center 
 for its work as inevitably as it builds a sanctuary 
 for its worship. We have a community center 
 movement in this country today, only because we 
 have in most localities churches which are too busy 
 in denominational rivalry with one another, or too 
 blinded in service of their denominational interests, 
 to give attention to the social welfare of the com- 
 munities in which they stand. As the forum is 
 destined to coalesce with the Community Church, 
 so also is the community center; for the Community 
 Church must practice the message which it 
 preaches. 
 
 In this practical social work of the Community 
 Church, two things must be said with great 
 distinctness. 
 
 In the first place, this work will not be of the 
 charitable and philanthropic type ordinarily asso- 
 ciated with church activities in society at large. 
 The Community Church, in obedience to the new 
 social philosophy of our time, will concern itself 
 primarily not with persons but with conditions. It 
 will seek not so much to relieve distress as to 
 reform and thus wipe out the social causes which 
 produce distress. The Community Church will 
 deal at first hand with the community — its festering 
 ills, its crying injustices, its pitiless exploitations 
 
272 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 of the many by the few. It will face unafraid the 
 problems of property, of private ownership of 
 public resources and utilities, of the use of capital, 
 of the system of profit, of the hundred complexities 
 of our new industrial civilization which have 
 created new miseries for old, and perpetuated 
 slavery into an age of freedom^ The Community 
 Church, in other words, true to its name, will seek 
 to establish a true community; this will mean a 
 battle to the death against every political and 
 economic privilege of wealth which now stands in 
 opposition to the commonwealth. At the least the 
 Community Church will be an agent of reform, at 
 the most of revolution; for it is concerned that 
 "God's Kingdom shall come,'' by which it means, as 
 did the Nazarene, that God's will shall here and 
 now be done on earth. 
 
 Secondly, it is to be noted that the work which 
 the Community Church will undertake will be 
 dictated by the community to the church, and not 
 by the church to the community. Ordinarily, as in 
 the case of the institutional church, for example, 
 the church knows exactly what the community 
 wants or ought to have ! It attempts to dictate in 
 matters of practical service, just as it has attempted 
 to dictate in matters of worship and belief. But 
 not so the Community Church ! It must never be 
 forgotten that this church belongs to the com- 
 munity, and not to some outside organization, or 
 movement; that it is an outgrowth of the com- 
 munity life, and therefore a natural expression of 
 
OEGANIZATION AND WORK 273 
 
 that life; that it is just as much an instrument in 
 the hands of the people as the government or the 
 schools. This being the case, the Community 
 Church will register as accurately and immediately 
 the sentiments of the community, as the barometer 
 registers the density of the atmosphere. The 
 church will rest in the hands of the people as a 
 pliable tool, to be used for whatever the people 
 want. In its practical work, therefore, the Com- 
 munity Church will not so much serve the people 
 as express the people. The church will not do 
 something for the people, but the people will do 
 something with the church. The community and 
 the church will be at the center of things, and what 
 is done will be the will of the community. 
 
 For example, in New York City in recent years 
 the social workers have been busy with the organi- 
 zation of neighborhood associations, and now, to- 
 day, of so-called community councils. These are 
 attempts not to dictate to the people or even to serve 
 them, but to awaken the people to a consciousness 
 of their own needs, and put in their hands public 
 instruments through which these needs may be 
 satisfied. A true neighborhood association, or 
 community council, is a simple organization of the 
 people in a certain limited locality, for the discovery 
 and expression of neighborhood interests, and the 
 service of these interests by the people themselves 
 in their own way and to their own ends. Now all 
 these organizations would be unnecessary if our 
 churches were community and not denominational 
 
274 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 institutions. What these neighborhood associa- 
 tions are doing, our community churches will be 
 doing when once they have found their place and 
 won the confidence of the people. 
 
 Another illustration is furnished by the remark- 
 able National Social Unit undertaking which was 
 carried forward so successfully some years ago in 
 Cincinnati. This is an attempt to do in a some- 
 what more intensive and thoroughly democratic 
 way what the loosely organized neighborhood asso- 
 ciations are doing in New York. Thus its organi- 
 zation, as finally perfected, includes a citizens' 
 council, chosen by block councils, which are elected 
 in turn by residents living in a unit-area of thirty- 
 one blocks; an occupational council, composed of 
 representatives of seven skilled industrial groups; 
 and a general council, made up of the other two 
 councils, and having full control of neighborhood 
 programs for civic betterment. Its result is the 
 awakening of the people of a given area to a con- 
 sciousness of their social needs, and their organi- 
 zation under their own leadership for the satisfac- 
 tion of these needs. What is produced is a highly 
 complex and amazingly efficient social machine, 
 democratic in every part, through which the com- 
 munity is able to express itself with ease and 
 power. The Community Church will need and 
 therefore produce just such machinery as this. 
 Indeed, when religion has become thoroughly 
 socialized through its identification with com- 
 munity needs and aspirations, the churches 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 275 
 
 throughout the land will themselves be the social 
 units through which the community will function. 
 
 Further illustrations of our meaning are found 
 in the public health activities of our time, the social 
 and recreational movements, the great reform cam- 
 paigns conducted by such bodies as the Consumers' 
 League, the Nation;al Association for Labor Legis- 
 lation, the National Child Welfare Association, etc., 
 the organizations for the protection of civil liber- 
 ties, all political movements looking toward the 
 establishment of economic justice and industrial 
 cooperation. Even the trade unions and the more 
 radical class movements in society have at their 
 heart, in however strange and perverted form, the 
 vision of the whole community functioning happily 
 and freely as a working organism. From the most 
 conservative to the most revolutionary proposal for 
 social change, there runs a consciousness of com- 
 munity values and community ideals, which is the 
 one constant quantity in the equation of reform. 
 Everywhere today we are thinking in terms of 
 community life, and working for a heaven which 
 shall be here and not beyond the grave. 
 
 Do I mean to identify the Community Church 
 with these movements? Are our churches, if trans- 
 ferred from the theological to the community basis, 
 to become mere public health and recreational 
 centers, mere organizations for political reform and 
 industrial agitation? Not at all ! No church that 
 is a church can be confined to these activities, how- 
 ever central they may be in any true expression of 
 
276 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 that spiritual life which finds its fulfillment in the 
 democracy of fellowship. What I see in these 
 phenomena is a spirit at work in narrow fields of 
 particular endeavor, which will some day be caught 
 up and put to work everywhere in the higher life of 
 man. What I see is a new religion, now uncon- 
 scious of itself, which will some day create new 
 churches in which it will "center and function for 
 the projection of those farther community ideals 
 which none of us are today sufficiently socialized to 
 conceive." ^ 
 
 VI 
 
 Contemplation of all these aspects of our problem 
 shows how fast we are moving, both in the churches 
 and in the social field, toward the development of 
 community religion. The one really vital move- 
 ment in Protestantism today is the effort of pro- 
 gressive men and women to make the churches to 
 be active forces in the social life of city, state and 
 nation. The great preachers are prophets of social 
 change; the live churches are agencies of social re- 
 demption. More and more religion seeks to justify 
 itself by its social vision, and to work out a tech- 
 nique for the practical fulfillment of this vision. 
 On the other hand is the growing realization of the 
 truth that the social service activities of our time 
 are essentially religious in character. In them is 
 the spirit of consecration, the love of men, the 
 
 * Harvey Dee Brown, In pamphlet, Sociological A.wec/ts of a 
 Community Churchj published by the Community Church, New York 
 
 City. 
 
ORGANIZATION AND WORK 277 
 
 yearning for the Kingdom. Our settlement houses, 
 imperfect and incomplete as they are, nevertheless 
 are as truly the expression of the religion of our 
 time as the monasteries were the expression of the 
 religion of the Middle Ages. Our campaigns for 
 public health, the abolition of poverty, the democ- 
 racy of labor, are as genuine and heroic adventures 
 of the spirit as the crusades to the Holy Land. 
 Canon Barnet is a saint as truly as Francis, Jane 
 Addams as surely as Teresa. In more senses than 
 one the settlement or social center is the modern 
 church, and the social worker the modern priest. 
 
 It is this identification of religion with the cause 
 of social change, and the great movements of social 
 change with religion, which points unerringly to the 
 advent of the Community Church. For the Com- 
 munity Church, be it said again, is the community 
 functioning spiritually. It is democracy at work 
 in religion. It is the people entering into their last 
 and most precious inheritance. For the history of 
 our time is the history of the conquest of social 
 institutions by the common people. One hundred 
 and fifty years ago, in America and in France, the 
 people decided to take possession of their govern- 
 ments; and from that day to this, the history of 
 politics has been the history of the progressive 
 democratization of the state. Fifty years ago, the 
 people entered upon the prodigious task of taking 
 possession of industry ; and today, in Russian revo- 
 lutions, and British Labor Parties, and reform 
 agitations everywhere, we see the progressive 
 
278 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 triumph of the democratization of the economic 
 system. Now comes the turn of the church, to do 
 at last what it promised but failed to do in the 
 great days of the Reformation. For religion, as 
 Dr. Joseph E. McAfee has stated, "like every other 
 social concern, must be brought under community 
 control, if democracy is fully to vindicate itself." ^ 
 In religion, as in politics and industry, the people 
 will have their way; and the Community Church 
 is the temple which they will build. 
 
 * See article in The New Republic, January 18» 1919. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 
 
^The new era is ushering itself in by a new religion, 
 and that religion is not merely the Christian religion, 
 but an expansion of it. . . . Keligion now becomes 
 the sum of all human aspirations; worship the sum of 
 all human services; and all the workers are the wor- 
 shipers. The Church loses one by one its functions, 
 and ceases to exist as a separate institution . . . but 
 its place is taken by the universal communion of a 
 humanity pressing forward to the prize of its high 
 calling.'' 
 
 Henry Demarest Lloyd, in 
 
 Man the Social Creator 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 
 
 I 
 
 Our discussion of the Community Church would 
 be incomplete if we did not turn from theory to 
 practice, from prophecy to reality. For this move- 
 ment has within a comparatively few years become 
 something more than a program and a promise. 
 Community churches are rapidly appearing in all 
 parts of the United States, more particularly in the 
 middle and far west; and presenting, therefore^ a 
 problem of practical concern. 
 
 The most fertile field for these churches seems to 
 be the rural and thus sparsely settled sections of 
 the country where, as we have seen, the old-line 
 denominational institutions no longer flourish. 
 Many communities in these areas are beset by a 
 ridiculously excessive number of churches, no one 
 of which is able to win adequate support in com- 
 petition with the others. In such cases, the tend- 
 ency is strong today to combine these churches into 
 a single institution, to be sustained by the com- 
 munity as a whole. In other villages or townships, 
 the churches have killed one another off, and thus 
 
 281 
 
282 NEW OHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 have disappeared altogether. In such cases, 
 religious life tends to revive in the form of an insti- 
 tution which represents a combination of com- 
 munity church and community center. In some 
 states the condition of the churches in the rural 
 districts has become so scandalous that the de- 
 nominational machines have been forced to take 
 joint action to save the institution ; and always they 
 find the community basis the one upon which they 
 can most easily and effectively do their work. Thus 
 in Ohio, at a conference of clergymen representing 
 twelve different Protestant denominations, it w^as 
 agreed that, in any community of one thousand 
 inhabitants or less, one church was adequate ; that 
 in such communities where there was more than one 
 church, all should be abandoned except the one 
 strongest institution in the field, or, if this was 
 impracticable, all should be combined in a single 
 union or community church ; and that in such com- 
 munities where there was no church today, one 
 should be established on strictly undenominational 
 lines. A similar program has been drawn up by a 
 conference in Montana representing eight de- 
 nominations. There can be no question that the 
 future of organized religion in the rural sections of 
 this country is wrapt up with the destiny of the 
 community church idea. 
 
 A second field where community churches are 
 appearing most rapidly and flourishing most vigor- 
 ously is that of the suburban or residential districts 
 of our great cities. In such places there is a nat- 
 
THE PEACTICAL PROBLEM 283 
 
 ural uniformity of population which makes easy the 
 development of a well-ordered neighborhood or 
 community life. Now as this life rises above the 
 threshold of consciousness, and enters upon the 
 fulfillment of its purposes, it finds intolerable the 
 idea of a division in religion which exists nowhere 
 else in the social group. Why should there not be 
 one church in common, as there is one recreation 
 hall, one library, one high school, one park and 
 playground, in common? This is the question that 
 the citizens of such towns inevitably ask themselves 
 when faced by the challenge of organizing their 
 religious life; and inevitably they answer it by 
 turning away from the old sectarian disputations of 
 their fathers, and building a single church for the 
 whole community. Incidentally this is a return to 
 the old idea of town and parish, which held sway 
 in the early days of the Puritan settlement of New 
 England, but in a new spirit as broad and humane 
 as the old spirit was intolerant and autocratic. 
 
 Lastly, we find today isolated community 
 churches appearing in certain of our larger centers 
 of population. These are old churches reorganized 
 and rededicated by members who are clear-visioned 
 enough to discern, and wise enough to heed, the 
 signs of the times ; or new churches established by 
 persons who see no hope in any phase of Protestant- 
 ism today, but hold with Emerson that "no greater 
 calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of 
 worship." ^ These churches represent the boldest 
 
 ^See his "Divinity School Address" (1838). 
 
284: NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 experiment in the religious life of the present day. 
 In communities which are not in any real sense of 
 the word "communities," but chaotic masses of 
 heterogeneous human material, seething whirls of 
 unamalgamated social, racial and religious ele- 
 ments, they hold aloft that "kindly light" without 
 which our democracy would be hopelessly lost 
 "amid the encircling gloom." If this democracy is 
 to be saved, it must be by religion lifting 
 
 "High . . . against whatever darkness, 
 ... a burning lamp ... a flame 
 The wind cannot blow out."^ 
 
 But religion understood not in the traditional 
 theological sense, but in that new sense of spiritual 
 fellowship which is the community in vision! 
 "Religion," says Henry Demarest Lloyd,^ "is that 
 group of ideas which hinds men together/^ It is 
 the spirit of these ideas which the community 
 churches in our great cities cherish, against odds 
 which, like an earthquake, shake the world ! 
 
 The appearance of these churches may well stir 
 confidence in the minds of all who see in a move- 
 ment transcending and superseding Protestantism, 
 as Protestantism transcended and superseded 
 Catholicism, the hope of the continuance, as a social 
 influence, of organized religion. It would be 
 foolish, however, as it would be also dishonest, to 
 deceive anybody into believing that these com- 
 munity churches, in either city or country, are at 
 
 ' Edna St. Vincent Millay, in The Lamp and the Bell, page 38. 
 'In Man the Social Creator, page 33. 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 285 
 
 this moment true to type. The Community Church, 
 as interpreted in the ideal sense, has yet to appear — 
 and on a day far distant from our own! All of 
 these churches which take the name, fall short in 
 form; they are evangelical and thus exclusive, or 
 they cling from necessity or choice to old denomi- 
 national affiliations, or they embody class distinc^ 
 tions abhorrent to pure democracy. Many of them 
 fall short in understanding; they have not thought 
 through the logic of this ideal of community re- 
 ligion as affecting Christianity, or the relation of 
 church and state. But what we have here, of 
 course, as in every such situation, is the process of 
 evolution. The significant fact about these 
 churches is not that they have not arrived, but that 
 they have started. What is well begun is half done ! 
 All that is needed, now the spirit of change is thus 
 effectively at work, is knowledge of adverse circum- 
 stances that impede development, war against the 
 hostile forces that deliberately interfere with 
 progress, answer to doubts and questions that stir 
 even in the friendliest minds, in order to effect a 
 release of energy which will sweep the movement on 
 to triumph. 
 
 II 
 
 First among the conditions unfavorable to the 
 rapid and full success of the Community Church i -^ 
 the traditional idea which has been stated ^ but 
 
 ^See above, page 228, 
 
286 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 must now be amplified from this standpoint, that 
 religion represents a private rather than a public 
 or community interest. The majority of people, 
 especially those who have received religious train- 
 ing of any kind, are simply not in a state of mind 
 to understand, much less appreciate and accept, the 
 doctrine that the practice of religion is essentially 
 a community affair, and should be properly organ- 
 ized, therefore, on a community basis. Religion 
 means nothing to such people save as an intimate 
 individual experience which may be regarded as a 
 medium of personal salvation, or an influence to 
 personal righteousness, or even an open door to 
 social standing. The church has to them no attrac- 
 tion or even worth, save as it provides a kind of 
 private chapel or shrine, which may serve as a 
 refuge from the common life of the world in which 
 we are all too often lost. To humanize religion 
 in terms of social function, and present the church 
 in the guise of a social institution — to fuse the 
 sacred with the secular, transform theology into 
 sociology, and seek again the union of church and 
 state — means simply to wipe out everything that is 
 distinctively spiritual and abandon religion alto- 
 gether. The Community Church is to these people 
 not a church at all, but a community center, to be 
 called such in the name of honesty if nothing more ! 
 This attitude, naturally to be expected in the 
 light of Christian history, and certain to be broken 
 down in course of time by processes of education, 
 would cause no discouragement nor alarm were it 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 287 
 
 not for the fact that these processes are constantly- 
 being interfered with by forces that are not unwill- 
 ing to serve their own interests at the public 
 expense. The denominations, in other words, are 
 busily at work ! They see clearly enough what the 
 development of this democratic movement in re- 
 ligion really means. They understand, without 
 any special tutoring on the subject, that every 
 successful attempt to identify religion with life and 
 the church with the community, means the progres- 
 sive disintegration of their authority and influence, 
 and therefore of their social primacy and property 
 interests. It is just because the movement of 
 secularization has advanced so fast and so far in 
 recent times that the churches have lost their hold 
 upon the modern world, and are now tottering upon 
 the brink of collapse. The great denominational 
 interests of Protestantism know perfectly well that 
 if they are to be saved at all, this movement must 
 be stopped. Religion must preserve its private, 
 personal, unworldly character. The interests of 
 religion must be more sharply than ever identified 
 with the interests of a particular creed, or formula, 
 or sectarian organization. Therefore, in every 
 place where their hands are not being forced by the 
 utter disintegration of organized religious life, the 
 denominational bodies are doing their utmost to 
 thwart local tendencies toward church union, to 
 maintain the ascendency of theological over social 
 interests, to prevent the capture of the church by 
 the community. What Catholicism is doing in its 
 
288 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 parochial schools is only an extreme illustration of 
 what most of the Protestant denominations are 
 doing, much less openly and efficiently, in their 
 prayer-meetings, Sunday schools, theological sem- 
 inaries, and revivalist campaigns. They are de- 
 liberately setting themselves in opposition to the 
 basic democratic interests of our American life. 
 Active as a divisive force in a free society strug- 
 gling against enormous odds for the realization of 
 universal human fellowship, they appear more and 
 more in the guise of a great conspiracy against the 
 social integrity of the nation. Infinitely more 
 serious than the alien groups among us, set apart 
 from the common understanding and the common 
 will by foreign tongues and customs and modes of 
 life, are the sectarian churches similarly set apart 
 by foreign creeds and rites of worship and offices of 
 hierarchical control; for the alien groups remain 
 fixed, and make no invasion of the common life, 
 whereas the churches are constantly seeking to 
 draw men off, as an electric plant for private profit 
 draws water off from the flow of the Niagara river. 
 The whole tendency of our denominational churches, 
 in other words, is to break up the solidarity of our 
 social life, and thus to defeat the ideals of the 
 republic. Just to the extent that these churches 
 are true to themselves, they are untrue to democ- 
 racy. They are each and every one of them to be 
 described as antisocial. What a thoroughly intel- 
 ligent and aroused community consciousness will 
 do with these private institutions, so inherently 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 289 
 
 subversive of the public good, remains to be seen. 
 But that no general community movement or re- 
 ligion is possible until these agencies of private 
 propaganda and interest are abolished, or, as now 
 seems likely, perish of their own desuetude, is 
 obvious. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Mention of a community consciousness brings us 
 to the second great condition in society today which 
 is unfavorable to the progress of the Community 
 Church movement. We refer to the obvious fact 
 that we lack the deep sense of community interests 
 and values, without which the Community Church 
 can not be produced, much less sustained. ^^A 
 church of this kind,'' writes Rev. Harvey Dee 
 Brown,^ a social worker of long and successful 
 experience as well as the minister of a community 
 church, "cannot be handed down to a modern com- 
 munity out of the purposes and logic of an older 
 religious and theological individualism. It must 
 arise from the people themselves out of their new 
 community habits, and their collective human re- 
 lationships. Until these relationships are more 
 careful of the common health, more just and dis- 
 criminating, more glad with social fellowship, 
 more intelligent and more symbolized by common 
 act, the beautiful and righteous communal spirit 
 which will establish public churches for its self- 
 
 ^ In his pamphlet, Sociological Aspects of a Community Church, 
 page 13. See above, footnote, page 276. 
 
290 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 recognition, worship and expression, cannot arise. 
 The evolution of the community life, both its body 
 and its mind, must precede the birth of the com- 
 munity soul. ^That is not first which is spiritual 
 but that which is natural, and afterward that 
 which is spiritual.' '' 
 
 That we lack this soil for the growth of the 
 Community Church is evident enough. The crass 
 individualism of our American consciousness has 
 long been the despair of those who have come to 
 see, with Mazzini, that democracy means not merely 
 liberty but association. At bottom we do not know 
 what association means. We are suspicious of any 
 attempt to develop the political structure of society, 
 either national or international, and thus enlarge 
 the area of socialization. Our industrial life is a 
 welter of contending and competing groups, tend- 
 ing steadily to a class struggle which threatens to 
 engulf mankind in economic ruin. The whole 
 social and international crisis which is upon the 
 world is due to nothing so much as a failure of the 
 creative intelligence of the race to organize the 
 forces of the common life in harmonious and coop- 
 erative functioning. It is not that people are bad 
 and need to be made good, not that they hate and 
 need to learn how to love, which causes the present 
 disorder of our civilization. It is rather that our 
 social machinery is disruptive in its effect. Men 
 are torn apart rather than united by the instru- 
 ments of social life. The channels through which 
 the goodness and the love of people can flow, and 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 291 
 
 fulfill themselves in friendly social relationship, 
 are hopelessly choked, or else have not been con- 
 structed at all. In other words, we have as yet no 
 real community life on either a small or a large 
 scale; and until that community life is developed, 
 we cannot hope to have a genuine Community 
 Church. 
 
 Nevertheless, we need not be discouraged. On 
 the contrary, there is every reason for good cheer; 
 for the whole trend of thought in our time, as we 
 have seen, indicates that the individualistic days 
 are passing never to return. We are coming rap- 
 idly to the knowledge and acceptance of society 
 as an organism with a single life and destiny for 
 us all, as the guiding principle alike of thought 
 and action; and in obedience to this principle, are 
 more and more learning to act together in the 
 common service of the common good. Our Red 
 Cross Society, our public health and recreational 
 activities, our neighborhood associations, commu- 
 nity councils and social units, our political and 
 social reform agencies, our programs of economic 
 reconstruction, our international movements for 
 disarmament, our leagues or councils of nations, — 
 all these are so many expressions of the dawning 
 social consciousness of this stirring age. In the same 
 way are these the creators of this consciousness, for 
 ^^the finest output of their efforts passes into the soul 
 of the community in whose creation they thus par- 
 ticipate."^ A vast preparation, therefore, for the 
 
 ^Harvey Dee Brown. See above, footnote, page 27d. 
 
^92 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 coming of the Community Church is under way ; the 
 very appearance of community churches in increas- 
 ing numbers throughout the land, is itself the best 
 kind of evidence of the reality of this preparation. 
 But such evolution of community thought and life 
 must pass far beyond anything which we know or 
 even foresee at this moment, before we can hope 
 to have a Community Church that is true to type — 
 a church, that is, rooted in the community, main- 
 tained and managed by the community, and de- 
 voted wholly to the interests of the communal life. 
 It is the rise of this community consciousness, 
 with its inevitable production of the Community 
 Church, which precipitates the question as to 
 what it will do with our existing denominational 
 churches when it comes to power. How can it 
 help destroying them, if they still retain strength 
 enough to constitute a menace to social health? 
 Twice before this has the democratic will, lifted 
 momentarily to an exalted consciousness of group 
 interest, annihilated private institutions which 
 were living at the expense of the whole. Chattel 
 slavery had to go, and the liquor traffic had to go, 
 in the name and for the sake of that higher "law 
 of liberty" which is the common good. Why does 
 not denominationalism belong to this same pariah 
 class? What is to prevent an enlightened and 
 aroused social conscience from placing it in this 
 class? "There are countless ways by which men 
 in a free country may encroach upon their neigh- 
 bors' rights,'' said William Ellery Channing in 
 
THE PRACTICAL PEOBLEM 293 
 
 1837/ "In religion the instrument is ready made 
 and always at hand. I refer to opinion combined 
 and organized in sects and swayed by the clergy. 
 We say we have no Inquisition. But a sect skil- 
 fully organized, trained to utter one cry, combined 
 to cover with reproach whoever may differ from 
 themselves, to drown the free expression of opinion 
 by denunciations of heresy, . . . such a sect is 
 as perilous and palsying to the intellect as the 
 Inquisition. . . . The liberal spirit of the people, 
 I trust, is more and more to temper and curb that 
 exclusive spirit which is the besetting sin of their 
 religious guides.'' 
 
 In all probability the progressive disintegration 
 of our sectarian bodies will make unnecessary 
 drastic social action for their abolition, after the 
 example of the slave-pen and the saloon. Yet these 
 bodies inherit vast momentum from the past; their 
 foundations are imbedded deep in the traditions 
 and affections of great hosts of people; and. they 
 possess properties of enormous magnitude and 
 power. They may very well, therefore, survive in 
 part at least into an age which will conceive them 
 to be not only scandalous and inconvenient, but 
 intolerable. In such case, would not society, wide- 
 awake to its basic interests of unity and fellow- 
 ship, be obligated to expropriate and end them? 
 We are not sure ! The right of any group of citi- 
 zens in a democracy to combine in a private society 
 
 *Iii his sermon "Spiritual Freedom." One volume edition of his 
 Works, page 180. See above, page 40. 
 
294 NEW OHUECHES FOB OLD 
 
 for the furtherance of private interests not abso- 
 lutely in contravention of the public good, is unde- 
 niable. The recognition and protection of this 
 right is the one sure test of that ^^liberal spirit" of 
 which Channing speaks; its denial or limitation is 
 one of the first and most insidious signs of tyranny. 
 But of this at least we are sure — that the social 
 conscience, when it matures, will ^^temper and 
 curb" denominationalism to the extent of stripping 
 away the public mask which now conceals its pri- 
 vate character. The sectarian church, for example, 
 will enjoy no special privileges, as for example 
 exemption from taxation. Its position will be 
 practically that of the private school in relation 
 to the public school. Such change of status will 
 perhaps be all that is necessary to protect society 
 from an influence ^^notoriously sectarian, and 
 therefore hostile to liberty."^ 
 
 IV 
 
 In these two factors — an imperfect religious 
 sense, and an imperfect community sense — we have 
 the chief obstacles in the path of the advancement 
 of the Community Church movement at this present 
 moment. Equally serious in kind if not in degree 
 are certain objections to, or criticisms of, the move- 
 ment, which appear in many minds, some of them 
 not at all unsympathetic. 
 
 Closely analogous to the problem of the commu- 
 
 » William EUepy Channing. See above, footnote, page 293. 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 295 
 
 nity consciousness which we have just been dis- 
 cussing, is the objection that our democratic ma- 
 chinery for the control and management of public 
 interests is altogether inadequate for such a task 
 as we would impose upon it. This objection, of 
 course, has its primal origin in the hard, cold fact 
 that the history of public schools, public libraries, 
 state and municipal universities, has not been so 
 conspicuously successful, from the standpoint of 
 community welfare, as to warrant anybody in 
 urging very vigorously the surrender of our 
 churches to public control. Inadequate facilities 
 for our school children, narrow and provincial poli- 
 cies of administration, intrusion of political ignor- 
 ance and corruption, suppression of freedom of 
 thought and speech, prostitution of public instru- 
 mentalities to private uses — all these evils are too 
 common to need argument to show that new 
 methods of democratic functioning must be devel- 
 oped, if the way is to be made clear for the safe 
 establishment of the church as an out-and-out com- 
 munity institution. 
 
 Behind this objection, however, there is some- 
 thing deeper than the mere facts of inadequate 
 and incompetent control of our social interests. 
 Fundamentally at work here is that constitutional 
 distrust of the American mind of everything that 
 is public or social in nature. So inwrought in the 
 very fibres of our being is our traditional individu- 
 alism that only recently, as we have just now seen, 
 have we developed any social consciousness at all. 
 
296 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 Utterly remote from us has been the mind of the 
 pagan Greek who saw in his city the sublimation 
 of his life, or even the mind of the Christian 
 Augustine, who fashioned his immortal dream of 
 the future after the pattern of what he called the 
 "City of God.'' The result of such an attitude 
 has been the exaltation of the individual at the 
 expense of society, and of private initiative at the 
 expense of public experiment and adventure. We 
 have neglected our social responsibilities, thrust 
 them away from our attention and concern, de- 
 graded them as an intrusion upon the central 
 things of life, and thereby robbed them wantonly 
 of the dignity and beauty which are their own. 
 Contemptuous or impatient of them ourselves, we 
 have gladly surrendered them to those who en- 
 joyed or profited from their manipulation, and 
 thereby created that very corruption of democracy 
 which now we offer as the all-sufficient justifica- 
 tion of our conduct. 
 
 It is true that our social machinery is inade* 
 quate for the tasks it has in hand, to say nothing 
 of new ones to be added. But the logic of this 
 fact is not the withholding or the withdrawal of 
 our most precious interests from the control of 
 the social group. Are there any who today, even 
 under the worst conditions of public administra- 
 tion, would return our schools to private hands, 
 or disendow our state and municipal universities, 
 or close our public libraries? What we need is 
 an ever closer and more exact identification of all 
 
THE PKACTICAL PROBLEM 297 
 
 our private interests with the public interest, so 
 that the community, in city, state or nation, will 
 of necessity take on a sanctity so wonderful that 
 we will feel ourselves bound to it as a priest to 
 the altar of his God. The salvation of our democ- 
 racy is to be found not in the restriction of its opera- 
 tions, but in their extension and enlargement, so 
 that the first and not the last concern of the indi- 
 vidual will be the public welfare. It is the old 
 maxim of more democracy being the cure for the 
 ills of democracy ! And what can be more effectual 
 to this end than the deliberate casting in of the 
 destinies of the church with the community? Such 
 change would not be without its price. But the 
 church would register for itself the inestimable 
 gain of socialization, and for the community that 
 exaltation of function and purpose which would 
 in the long run save its life. 
 
 A common and very practical charge brought 
 against the community church movement is that 
 it represents in actuality, if not in theory, the 
 organization of one more denomination, and 
 thereby discredits the very principle of undenomi- 
 nationalism which it is trying to foster. Here 
 is a movement, it is said, which indicts Protes- 
 tantism for its sectarian divisions. It denounces 
 these divisions as a betrayal of the religious spirit, 
 and condemns the various churches of the Prot- 
 
298 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 estant world for their failure to unite and thus 
 become one great and universal embodiment of 
 the spiritual ideal. Then, as the very first step 
 of its own undertaking, this movement which so 
 abhors divisions, proceeds to separate itself from 
 all existing ecclesiastical groups and set up another 
 church of its own. Instead of overcoming denomi- 
 nationalism, therefore, the Community Church 
 simply adds one more to the one hundred and 
 sixty odd sects which now make the Protestant 
 world a realm of chaos instead of order. The Com- 
 munity Church constitutes its own best refuta- 
 tion ; in the very fact of its organization, it undoes 
 itself. It should be the very genius of this move- 
 ment to work inside and not outside existing re- 
 ligious bodies, and thus by some such action as 
 that of the federation principle, which is now so 
 beneficently at work, help on the great end of the 
 unification of Christendom. 
 
 The answer to this interesting criticism is two- 
 fold. In the first place, the alleged sectarian char- 
 acter of the Community Church idea is apparent 
 rather than real. It may be that in certain places, 
 under certain conditions, the Community Church 
 must take on the form of a new denomination, and 
 thus add one more to the existing number of 
 churches in one community. But behind this Com- 
 munity Church, in such case, is a new principle 
 of organization which points the way to the ulti- 
 mate extinction of sects, and the union of all per- 
 sons and groups into one great religion. The de- 
 
THE PKACTICAL PROBLEM 299 
 
 nomination organizes itself apart from the rest 
 of the religious world, because of certain ideas 
 which it wants to propagate or certain forms of 
 worship which it desires to practice. Even where 
 such separatist terms are not emphasized, there 
 will be found to be present in the denomination 
 at least a certain habit of mind, or way of think- 
 ing, which draws a certain group of people apart 
 from their fellows and encourages them to set up 
 and maintain their own private religious insti- 
 tution. 
 
 Now the Community Church breaks absolutely 
 with this denominational principle or tendency. 
 It shifts the basis of organization from the exclu- 
 sive doctrine or ritual or type of thought, to that 
 community grouping of citizenry which constitutes 
 the essence of our American democracy. It makes 
 its conditions of membership identical with those 
 of citizenship in the city or town in which it is 
 doing its work. It is thus in character an inclu- 
 sive and never in any sense an exclusive body. If 
 it exists apart and builds its own separate shrine, 
 it is only because the religious conditions in its 
 particular locality are so hard and fast, competi- 
 tion between existing churches so fierce, that there 
 is no opportunity for the presentation of the new 
 idea excepting in this form of a church of its own. 
 The very planting of this institution, however, is 
 the first step in the disintegration of all existing 
 churches. Little by little, as the Community 
 Church commends itself to the people and its idea 
 
300 NEW OHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 of inclusion spreads abroad, denominational bar- 
 riers will crumble, sectarian churches lose approval 
 and support, and thus the whole base system of 
 Protestantism disappear. Once it is seen that the 
 Community Church emphasizes the community 
 and not the church, and seeks not to dwell apart 
 from the community but to rise out of it and from 
 it as the spiritual expression of its life, then it 
 becomes instantly apparent that this charge of 
 compromise with the denominational principle is 
 false. 
 
 Secondly, there is the pragmatic answer to the 
 criticism. The great majority of community 
 churches today do not in any sense represent the 
 organization of a new sectarian group added to 
 those already existing, and thus contribute to the 
 present confusion. It is only in certain large 
 cities, where the Protestant churches still retain 
 some strength and vigor, that the Community 
 Church even gives the appearance of taking on a 
 sectarian character. Here, to a certain limited 
 extent, it adjusts itself to its environment as the 
 first condition of survival. In all other places, 
 however, it creates its own environment and thus 
 reveals at once its essential spirit. In rural com- 
 munities, as we have seen, the Community Church 
 represents the amalgamation or absorption of pre- 
 viously existing denominational churches, and 
 thus their disappearance from the field. A cer- 
 tain town in upper New York State, which five 
 years ago had a Congregational, a Baptist, a Metho- 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 301 
 
 dist, and a Universalist church, and today has 
 only the one Community Church, is a good ex- 
 ample of what we mean. In suburban communi- 
 ties, newly built and organized, the Community 
 Church appears literally as the church of the com- 
 munity, and denominational churches do not ap- 
 pear at all. In one such town in California, it is 
 expressly provided in the charter that no sectarian 
 institution shall be allowed to enter and acquire 
 property during a certain term of years. In these 
 communities there is provided a habitat in which 
 the Community Church appears at once in its fully 
 developed form, and in which therefore we can 
 see it as it really is. Always this church is con- 
 spicuous for nothing so much as its non-sectarian 
 character, and from the moment of its inception 
 sterilizes competition. 
 
 VI 
 
 A third criticism of the Community Church is 
 that suggested by the complaint that its field is 
 narrow, and its opportunity of usefulness there- 
 fore extremely narrow. ^^The field is the world," 
 has been the cry of Christendom for lo, these many 
 centuries. Now comes along a movement which 
 deliberately undertakes to shut itself off from the 
 world, and tie itself down to the one and perhaps 
 very small community which constitutes its locale. 
 To serve the life which is close at hand — ^to per- 
 form our nearest duty, as Carlyle was never tired 
 
302 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 of emphasizing — is of course a basic principle of 
 effective action ; but to limit our service to our own 
 doorstep, so to speak, is to rob ourselves of that 
 wider field of opportunity which calls to us with- 
 out ceasing. The church, of all institutions, should 
 be universal in its appeal. Its sympathies should 
 be as wide as the circle of humanity; nothing 
 human should be foreign to it. In thus fulfilling 
 its world-wide mission, the denominational church 
 surely has advantage over any community church 
 whatsoever. In innumerable towns and cities 
 throughout the nation, there are churches of its 
 own faith, and thus members of its own family. 
 In neglected wastes at home, and pagan areas 
 across the seas, there are mission stations which 
 carry its name and bear its message of deliverance. 
 Wherever there are men it goes, and there dedi- 
 cates itself to the task of love. 
 
 From the more superficial standpoint, this criti- 
 cism seems to have a certain impressive validity. 
 The Community Church is indeed exactly what its 
 name implies, an institution first and foremost of 
 the community in which it stands. Its roots strike 
 down into its own soil, and it breathes the air and 
 feeds the needs of its own especial habitat. But 
 what of the community itself, of which the Com- 
 munity Church is this spiritual expression? Is 
 this community limited to itself? Does it exist 
 only for itself? Is it cut off from contact with 
 other men in other places? Does it know nothing 
 of world-wide needs, and hear and answer no cries 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 303 
 
 from distant fields? This may have been true in 
 years long since gone by. The word "community'' 
 still has a certain connotation of remoteness, sur- 
 viving from the time when town was separated 
 from town by long stretches of forest or prairie, 
 and the sea cut men off by so terrible a barrier 
 that such a seer as St. John felt that in "a new 
 heaven and a new earth,'' there could be "no more 
 sea." But all this is of the past! Our world 
 today is all of a single piece, so to speak; there 
 are no longer any lost communities. We are 
 knitted together even as the cells of a single 
 organism. The World War was a demonstration 
 of this unescapable unity. An ugly political quar- 
 rel, breaking out in a remote section of the Balkans, 
 set all Europe aflame in a fortnight, and ultimately 
 engulfed all the five continents and seven seas of 
 the globe. No rai^e, no nation, no city, no remotest 
 village or hamlet, was untouched by the conflict. 
 No community, in other words, lives any longer 
 unto itself. Each is bound by a million threads of 
 vital human interest to every other community 
 throughout the world. The myriad strands of 
 cable, telegraph and telephone wire, the railroad 
 rails and steamship highways, and now the invis- 
 ible courses of the air which belt the world, are, 
 as it were, but a symbol of the spiritual bonds 
 which draw us together and make us one. Now, 
 if never before in history, each place is an epitome 
 of the whole populated earth, as each man is an 
 epitome of his race. To plant a community church, 
 
304: NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 therefore, in a community, is to plant it in the 
 world. For a community church should embody 
 and set forth at one and the same time the spir- 
 itual aims and purposes of its own community, 
 and thus of all humanity. What mankind needs 
 and dreams of and passionately strives for in one 
 place is the same as in every other. The Commu- 
 nity Church, therefore, is the one church which is 
 universal, as it is the one church which is human- 
 istic. The Presbyterian church is primarily a Pres- 
 byterian church ; the Methodist church, Methodist ; 
 and so on! Each represents sharply a segment 
 and not the circle of the human race — each is a 
 part and not the whole. The Community Church, 
 on the other hand, is whole in the sense that it 
 embraces all mankind. Here for the first time, in 
 this system of community organization, do we find 
 a fulfillment of PauFs vision of the many members 
 and the one body. The foot is doing the work of 
 the foot, and the hand the work of the hand; the 
 ear is busy with hearing and the eye with seeing. 
 Each is in its appropriate place, and engaged at 
 its appropriate task; but all are serving the one 
 body, and together they constitute the body. 
 
 As for missions, particularly those in foreign 
 fields, it is unquestionably the community church 
 movement which is going to save these to the work 
 that they are really appointed to do. What is the 
 weakness of missions today, and the real threat of 
 their speedy disintegration, if not that scandal of 
 division which seems an even more flagrant and 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 305 
 
 inexcusable betrayal of the Christian gospel abroad 
 than at home? Presbyterian missions and Baptist 
 missions and Congregational missions, all con- 
 tending jealously for the souls of Indians or 
 Chinese, present a spectacle which would be inex- 
 pressibly comic if it were not so tragic. Think 
 of seeking to persuade the heathen mind, before 
 you know your own ! Under the pressure of fail- 
 ure, appalling economic waste, and the growing 
 contempt of all influential opinion in foreign lands, 
 this situation is rapidly being changed. Theo- 
 logical competition is yielding to cooperation on 
 the basis of common Christian service. Missions, 
 in other words, so far as they are being led wisely 
 and intelligently today, are becoming unified com- 
 munity institutions. Support along denomina- 
 tional lines is more and more an embarrassment 
 rather than a help. Which means that, in the not 
 distant future, the Community Church will be the 
 one effective "base" for the mission campaign! 
 
 But there is more involved here than the mere 
 matter of the organization and support of missions 
 for their work abroad. A wholly new philosophy 
 of missionary activity has come to the fore in 
 recent years, and is rapidly transforming the whole 
 character and purpose of the work that is being 
 done. The old theological type of mission, dedi- 
 cated to the task of saving the souls of the heathen 
 from hell-fire, is no longer in high favor. We have 
 come to see this traditional undertaking for what 
 it really is — an impudent intrusion into the sancti- 
 
306 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 ties of the alien mind which can do little good and 
 incalculable harm. Today, therefore, this work 
 of converting individuals is giving way to the more 
 enlightened work of developing communities to 
 higher standards of social welfare and happiness. 
 Whereas the old-time missions broke up the native 
 community life which they encountered in these 
 strange and hostile lands, the modern mission is 
 seeking to foster this life, and thus preserve its 
 essential elements of good. It tries to do in a 
 native Asian or African village what a settlement- 
 house at home tries to do in a city slum — make 
 friends with the people, protect their interests, 
 guard their institutions, purify, beautify and enrich 
 their common life. Thus a mission today estab- 
 lishes improved conditions of sanitation, intro- 
 duces modern methods of agriculture, fosters edu- 
 cational and cultural influences, builds schools, col* 
 leges, hospitals, and social centers. It takes the 
 community for what it is, and instead of imposing 
 upon it alien teaching and rites of worship, builds 
 out of its native constituent elements the best that 
 modern knowledge and experience can provide. 
 The present-day mission, in other words, is an 
 agency not of theological propaganda but of com- 
 munal idealism. As such it is a prophecy of that 
 break-up of denominational religion which is every- 
 where impending; and an anticipation abroad of 
 that new humanistic religion of democracy which 
 is everywhere making its appearance at home. Let 
 there be no doubt as to the relation between the 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 307 
 
 Community Church and foreign missions. In so 
 far as the latter are destined to continue at all, 
 they will be the natural and beneficent instrument 
 of that community religion which seeks brother- 
 hood and peace the world around. 
 
 VII 
 
 A final objection pertains to the problem of 
 public worship in the Community Church. Is it 
 possible that all sorts and conditions of men can 
 ever be persuaded to worship together in a common 
 assembly on Sunday morning? The population of 
 a community includes atheists and theists, agnos- 
 tics and believers, Jews and Christians, orientals 
 and occidentals; in the bounds of Christendom 
 alone, it comprises such highly contrasted types as 
 Roman Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, 
 Christian Scientists, Second Adventists and Holy 
 Rollers. Can all these various groups be expected 
 to find a common spirit of understanding, or a 
 common medium of expression? Does it not seem 
 reasonable to suppose that our different churches 
 represent not so much different ideas as different 
 temperaments among men; and that they do their 
 work along separatist lines not because men are 
 obstinate or tolerant, but because some men express 
 their religion one way, and some another? Why 
 should we expect, or want, to persuade men to 
 worship in one kind of church, any more than to 
 read one newspaper, or frequent a single type of 
 
308 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 theatrical entertainment, or enjoy one particular 
 kind of art or music? It takes all kinds of people 
 to make a world ! Variety, and not uniformity, is 
 the source of life! Think of the mass, the "revi- 
 val,'' the prayer-meeting, the congregational serv- 
 ice, the Quaker "silence" — are these not all con- 
 tributions to man's spiritual experience, and do 
 they not all have their place as expressions of his 
 inner life? Is there not question, after all, as to 
 whether all sorts and conditions of men should 
 worship together; and very serious question as to 
 how such result, if desired, is to be accomplished? 
 The difficulties involved in this query are so 
 apparent, or seem so apparent, that few students 
 of the problem have attempted to do more than 
 suggest some kind of working compromise. Tem- 
 peramental differences have been taken for granted, 
 and an adjustment sought which would please as 
 many, and offend as few, persons as possible. One 
 chasm has seemed to be impassable — that which 
 separates the ritualist from the congregationalist, 
 the high-churchman from the low-churchman. 
 Thus Dr. Irving Maurer, of Columbus, Ohio,^ pic- 
 turing in prospect the Community Church of 1974, 
 describes its edifice as "in reality a double build- 
 ing. A sound-proof tapestry separated the church 
 into two great rooms, one of which was rich with 
 religious symbol and devotional art, the other of 
 which was plain and simple, without painting or 
 
 » See his pamphlet, The Church of Ood in Columbus, published by 
 tlia Commimity Church of New Yorl^ page 4. 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 309 
 
 ornament. The first room was intended for the 
 ritualists and the mystics, and the second for the 
 people with the unpriestly idea of religion. The 
 remarkable thing about the church was that this 
 great tapestry screen could be raised, and that 
 every church service finished by the two rooms 
 being made one, with common music and a common 
 sermon. Another thing you would (note) through 
 a more lengthy observation, was that there were 
 many kinds of service on every day of the week, 
 for on Friday evening the Jews would begin their 
 celebration of the Sabbath, and the Seventh Day 
 Adventists would do the same, and on each day 
 the various religious conceptions called for a bewil- 
 dering variety of ritual or order of worship." 
 
 Some such compromise as this would seem to be 
 unavoidable, men being what they are. But are 
 men in this way what they are, or rather what they 
 seem to be? What such an ingenious picture as 
 this of Dr. Maurer's really visualizes, to our mind, 
 is not the inward temperamental differences of 
 men, at all, but the outward chaos of religious 
 practice superimposed upon men by ignorance, 
 superstition, and direct ecclesiastical teaching. As 
 long as men insist that they must worship in a 
 certain definite way, in order to satisfy their innate 
 spiritual demands, the rigor of the democratic 
 principle in community religion will exact that 
 they be permitted to do so. The rights of religious 
 minorities, in other words, must be respected! 
 The Community Church, if true to its name, will 
 
310 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 never fail to give full and free opportunity to every 
 group of persons who acknowledge particular rites 
 and ceremonies, to hold their own services in their 
 own way, not outside but inside the common 
 church. The Eucharist, for example, unacceptable 
 perhaps to the majority of worshipers in commu- 
 nity churches, would be administered at special 
 services for those desiring to participate.^ 
 
 When we get behind these forms of outward 
 worship, however, do we not find that this idea of 
 inherent temperamental differences separating men 
 into distinct classes, such as high church and low 
 church, is in reality fantastic? Human nature is 
 no such "Joseph's coat of many colors'' as all this ! 
 There are varieties of temperament, of course, and 
 these varieties crave and thus find delight in dif- 
 ferent modes of outward and visible expression. 
 But they appear not at all in isolation, in single 
 men or groups of men, like patches on a quilt, but 
 all together, in various admixtures, in all men. 
 Human nature, in other words, is of a single piece. 
 One individual represents not one separate ele- 
 ment, but all elements thrown together. In some 
 of us, one element may be strikingly predominant ; 
 but other elements are all the time present, and 
 may on occasion spring into momentary and 
 startling ascendency. Most of us, however, have 
 all elements strangely compounded within us, and 
 are subject therefore now to one mood and now to 
 
 *A community church in California, the only church In the town, 
 invites an Episcopalian priest to come at intervals to administer the 
 sacrament. 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 311 
 
 another, according as one element or another takes 
 control. What the Community Church will do, in 
 this matter of worship, will be to offer different 
 kinds of public services at different times, to meet 
 not the unchanging needs of different groups of 
 men, but the changing moods of all of us together. 
 Sometimes we will rejoice in the pomp and pag- 
 eantry of ritualism, sometimes in the simplest forms 
 of congregational worship, sometimes in the sooth- 
 ing quiet of "the silence." All these the Commu- 
 nity Church will as easily provide as the commu- 
 nity or municipal repertoire theatre provides regu- 
 larly tragedy, comedy, romance, farce, and opera. 
 But back of all this, as the central expression of 
 the spiritual aspirations of the community, will 
 be what must be created as the English Book of 
 Common Prayer was created, or evolved as the 
 Song of Roland or the Niebelungenlied was evolved 
 — a Ritual of Communal Devotion! How poor 
 is our American democracy, that it has developed 
 in poetry and song no formal expression of its 
 ideals which may serve as "glad tidings of great 
 joy for all the people!'' How pitiful are our 
 struggles to express fittingly the aspirations of the 
 common heart of man, when we arrange a union 
 church service on Thanksgiving Day, or assemble 
 the multitudes on Armistice Day or the Fourth of 
 July for a patriotic service of dedication ! Yet are 
 these gropings the prophecy of what some day we 
 shall have — a Ritual of scriptures, anthems, re- 
 sponses and heroic song, wliich shall serve the 
 
312 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 people in all their regular exercises of devotion, 
 as the mass now serves the Catholic, or, still better, 
 as some noble pageant serves a city on some special 
 occasion of memory and high hope. This Ritual 
 will appear in due time, as appeared the canons of 
 the Old Testament and New; and, as the expres- 
 sion of a people's life, will serve them in their 
 worship. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I see a Sunday morning in the future, with all 
 the people gathered in one great temple for devo- 
 tion. They come gladly — ^young men and maidens, 
 old men and children, to sing and pray and medi- 
 tate on high things of the spirit. At this hour 
 business ceases and pleasure is unsought. Houses 
 are empty, theatres closed, books and newspapers 
 laid aside, the noise of the streets become a silence. 
 The Community is at worship ! 
 
 It seems a fantasy. But living, not dead, things 
 are in this church ! Scriptures which contain Tol- 
 stoi with Isaiah, Whitman with the Psalms, the 
 words of Lincoln with the words of Jesus! An- 
 thems and hymns which sound not as praises 
 chanted by courtiers to a king, but as the music 
 of a people singing as children the gladness of their 
 souls ; 
 "Each singing what belongs to him or her, and to none 
 
 Singing with open mouths their strong mdodious 
 songs."^ 
 
 *Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing." 
 
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 313 
 
 Prayers which confess not fears, ask not favors, 
 cry not for mercy, but, like the shout of multi- 
 tudes, lift the heart in courage and deep joy ! And 
 a sermon like John Ball's of old, which tells ^^how 
 it shall be when the measure of the time is full,'' 
 how "the Fellowship of Men shall endure, how- 
 ever many tribulations it may have to wear 
 through," for "fellowship is heaven, and lack of 
 fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of 
 fellowship is death; and the things which ye do 
 upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye 
 do them; and the life that is in it, that shall live 
 on and on forever, and each one of you part of it." ^ 
 Here speaks "the word Democratic, the word 
 En-Masse" ; here is 
 
 "Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, 
 Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws 
 divine."^ 
 
 It is no fantasy we see! Religion is now the peo- 
 ple's own. The church is theirs, and with one 
 accord they take it to their hearts ! 
 
 ^ William Morris, The Dream of John Ball. 
 'Walt Whitman, "One's Self I Sing." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 CONCLUSION 
 
^^The true Church towards which my own thoughts 
 tend will be the conscious illuminated expression of 
 catholic brotherhood. . . . It is curious how mislead- 
 ing a word can be. We speak of a certain phase in the 
 history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that 
 word effectually conceals from most people the indis- 
 putable fact that there has been no Beformation. There 
 was an attempt at a Reformation, . . . and through 
 a variety of causes it failed. It detached great masses 
 from the Catholic Church and left that organization im- 
 poverished intellectually and spiritually, but it achieved 
 no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction 
 because the movement as a whole lacked an adequate idea 
 of catholicity. It fell into particularism and failed. 
 It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Chris- 
 tian associations. It drove large fissures through one 
 common platform. . . . People are now divided by 
 forgotten points of difference, by sides taken by their 
 predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by 
 mere sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting 
 places. In the present time as a result of the dissenting 
 method, there are multitudes of believing men scattered 
 quite solitarily through the world. 
 
 The Reformation . . . lies still before us. It is a 
 
 necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the 
 
 reformation and expansion of the State. Together these 
 
 processes constitute the general duty before mankind.'* 
 
 H. G. Wells, in 
 
 First and Last Things 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Christianity, as it first appeared in Palestine 
 and was carried by Paul to the Gentiles, is the 
 greatest movement for human emancipation that 
 history has known. Its advent marks the dawn of 
 the hour of most auspicious promise that ever came 
 to man. The substance of this primitive Chris- 
 tianity was the moral passion and hope of Israel; 
 in all that properly belonged to its composition, it 
 was Jewish to the core. Its quickening spirit was 
 the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, the last of the 
 prophets and himself the supreme religious genius 
 of all time. Its gospel was the "good news" of a 
 righteous society established on earth as a brother- 
 hood ordered by the law of love to the end of 
 peace — a gospel of simple human relationships 
 delivered of the superstition, formalism and racial 
 exclusiveness of later Judaism. Its field was a 
 world unified by the conquest of Roman arms and 
 the discipline of Roman rule, and by its own 
 spiritual failure prepared for a religion which 
 should transform an empire of force into an 
 autonomous fellowship of good will. 
 
 817 
 
318 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 In its early development, the Christian movement 
 seemed to be the seed from which should spring that 
 long-awaited ^^tree of life whose leaves were for the 
 healing of the nations.'' It established at once 
 within itself a community of interest and ideal 
 unparalleled by anything that mankind has seen 
 either before or since that time. Here were joined 
 in one family, as it were, Jew and Gentile, rich and 
 poor, citizen and alien, bond and free; the divine 
 dignity of souls, and their fellowship in Christ, 
 wiped out all distinctions of race, nationality, sex, 
 social status, and made the church, like its God, to 
 be "no respecter of persons." These Christians were 
 united by the good hope of "the Kingdom,'' which in 
 their eyes was no future paradise in heaven, but a 
 new society close at hand upon the earth. They 
 founded and maintained, right in the heart of Rome, 
 scattered groups of free democracies which were at 
 once a challenge to the empire and a prophecy of the 
 social order which was to succeed upon its overthrow. 
 They organized a community of goods, that no man 
 might be poor and none rich, but all be equal in 
 need and opportunity of service. They welcomed 
 to their fellowship every one who would come, to 
 labor and suffer for the better day. As their move- 
 ment spread from city to city, from province to 
 province, like warm life-blood coursing through a 
 perishing organism, it seemed as though Rome were 
 to be quickened to the fulfillment of that dream of 
 universal brotherhood and peace among men which 
 has been in the hearts of all true prophets since the 
 
CONCLUSION 319 
 
 beginning of the world. When at last, in the 
 fourth century, after indescribable martyrdom, it 
 triumphed, and Rome henceforth came to signify a 
 church and not a state, an empire not of the sword 
 but of the spirit, the millenium was apparently at 
 hand. If postponed by the break-up of the political 
 fabric, it was only to find surer and nobler realiza- 
 tion when, in the collapse of civilization, the papal 
 hierarchy remained as the sole organization left to 
 hold society together. And more than once, in the 
 later ages of medieval rule, under inspired and 
 heroic leadership, the church seemed about to enter 
 upon its true inheritance of the unification of 
 humanity! It is startling indeed to contemplate 
 by how narrow a margin, and by force of what 
 trivial circumstances, the Roman church missed its 
 destiny. It had the idea of universality, a sound 
 understanding of spiritual fellowship, the vision of 
 a world-state which should be the church visible on 
 earth, and at intervals the statesmanship capable of 
 realizing its farthest hopes. Furthermore, for a 
 period of centuries, as though by some divine 
 appointment, the world lay ready to the molding of 
 its purpose. But chance, and at last corruption, 
 balked the best opportunity that mankind ever had 
 to unite its interests, and thus avoid the strife 
 which has made the modern world a thing of horror 
 and dismay. 
 
 II 
 Many forces entered into the spiritual spoliation 
 of Roman Christianity. Ignorance, superstition, 
 
320 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 theologizing, all played their part; but the domi- 
 nant influence that doomed the church to defeat, 
 was what may be best described, perhaps, as 
 ecclesiasticism. The papacy could not resist the 
 temptations, nor escape the corruptions, implicit in 
 worldly power. Finding itself taking the place of 
 the empire and exercising its functions of sove- 
 reignty, it little by little became the empire. It 
 became institutionalized after the exact pattern of 
 the vast political structure reared by Augustus and 
 his successors. The divine right to rule was 
 asserted in both cases in the same terms. The pope 
 assumed the role of the emperor ; the cardinals, of 
 the senators; the bishops and archbishops, of the 
 provincial governors ; the creeds and rituals, of the 
 Roman code. The free democracy of the primitive 
 churches was supplanted by a centralized authority 
 of regal type. The communal poverty of early days 
 transformed itself into a wealth which outdid the 
 splendor of the Caesars. The church now, like the 
 empire before, existed not to serve the people, but 
 to tax them, plunder them, exploit them. It was 
 an institution existing for its own ends, and there- 
 fore eaten up by lust of power, luxury and ease. 
 When the political order reappeared as the Holy 
 Roman Empire, the papacy devoted all its energies 
 to struggle with this new rival for an overlordship 
 which would insure it in perpetuity the temporal 
 power to match its spiritual power. For centuries, 
 the history of the church is tlie history of a great 
 and corrupt empire of this world; the story of its 
 
CONCLUSION 321 
 
 popes is the same as, and at times worse than, the 
 story of most kings and princes. Before the blight 
 of eeclesiastieism religion withered up and disap- 
 peared, save as it lived on in certain obscure 
 heretical groups where the rule of the hierarchy did 
 not reach, or was revived in the sweet piety of a 
 St. Francis or the heroic courage of a Savonarola. 
 It was the Reformation, born of the Renaissance, 
 which rescued Christianity from this bondage to the 
 w^orld. The great gift which Protestantism con- 
 ferred upon mankind was emancipation from 
 ecclesiastical tyranny. Finding its immediate 
 occasion in a revolt from the hideous corruption of 
 a single pope, it was at bottom a revolt against the 
 whole idea of external authority, made inevitable by 
 the intellectual and spiritual awakening of the 
 Renaissance. Central to the life of this amazing 
 period, was the discovery of the individual soul as 
 set over against institutions of every kind whatso- 
 ever. It was democracy at work in its first great 
 endeavor after freedom and the rights of man. 
 The princes, who did so much for the Reformation, 
 were aghast when they saw what the movement 
 meant to the common people ; they would have been 
 still more aghast could they have seen to what 
 lengths it was destined to go in later centuries. 
 But they carried through triumphantly, and with a 
 right good will, the battle against the papacy. The 
 Reformation at least ended the blight of eeclesiasti- 
 eism, if it did nothing else. There were reactions, 
 to be sure, when the reformers found it necessary to 
 
322 NEW CHUECHES FOE OLD 
 
 bring order into the chaos of revolt, as witness the 
 organization of the Lutheran church, the Anglican 
 church, and other centralized ecclesiastical bodies. 
 Eomanism also made an impressive recovery of 
 power and prestige. But the work was done; man 
 was free, if he would use his freedom. What was 
 or still is undone, can be safely left to time and to 
 the waxing knowledge and experience of humanity. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But Protestantism, if it freed mankind from one 
 corruption, brought along another of its own. In 
 place of ecclesiasticism it put not religion but 
 theology; for the tyranny of the church and its 
 ofllcers, it substituted the equal tyranny of the 
 creed and its dogmas. 
 
 The theologizing process was, of course, not 
 unknown in Christianity. It was at least as old as 
 Paul and Augustine; it had taken form in Apostles', 
 Nicene and Athanasian creeds. But in the medieval 
 period, this aspect of religious organization was 
 subordinated to ecclesiasticism. It needed the 
 revolt against the church, and the resulting search 
 for some new center of authority to save the race 
 from what was regarded as the anarchic conse- 
 quences of liberty, to bring theology to the fore, and 
 make Protestantism to be synonymous with de- 
 nominationalism. For all of the last four hundred 
 years, religion in Protestant Christendom has 
 meant acceptance of some particular type of theo- 
 
CONCLUSION 323 
 
 logical belief. It is appalling, if not positively 
 amusing, to note the historical, geological, socio- 
 logical, as well as Biblical, ethical and philosophical 
 ideas which one has had to include in the parapher- 
 nalia of his mind, in order to qualify as a Christian. 
 By some happy chance, or from the sheer necessi- 
 ties of the case, it became possible to believe, after 
 the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler, that the earth 
 moves about the sun, and after Columbus's voyage, 
 that the earth is round, without sacrificing one's 
 religious character and standing. But until com- 
 paratively recent times no acceptance of the Chris- 
 tian gospel was possible without simultaneous 
 acceptance of the story of the Jews as set down in 
 the Old Testament, the creationist theory of the 
 origin of life, the Davidic authorship of the Psalms, 
 the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead 
 (at least in the case of the Nazarene), and a phi- 
 losophy of history based on the central idea of the 
 Atonement; and even today, in most Protestant 
 churches, these ideas are still used as the familiar 
 test of spirituality. They are at least as generally 
 characteristic of thought inside the churches as 
 their rejection is characteristic of thought outside 
 the churches. What on earth such questions of 
 temporal fact have to do with religion, is something 
 which might well baffle the fabled wisdom of the 
 ancients. Bernard Shaw has recently pointed out ^ 
 that science has found it possible to believe in the 
 law of specific gravity, without necessarily believ- 
 
 *Iii his Back to Methuselah, see Preface, page LXXXIX. 
 
324 NEW CHURCHES FOE OLD 
 
 ing the story that, on its discovery, Archimedes ran 
 wildly through the streets of Syracuse crying 
 ^'Eureka! Eureka!'' Music gives its laurels to a 
 pianist or composer without inquiring if he accepts 
 the legend of Mozart's writing of his "Requiem." 
 No Nobel Prize for literature has yet been denied to 
 any writer because he questioned the Homeric 
 origin of the Iliad. But Protestantism has insisted 
 upon identifying Christianity with questions of his- 
 tory, Biblical criticism, and biological and geologi- 
 cal science; and thus as effectively substituted 
 theology for the religion of Jesus, as the medieval 
 church did ecclesiasticism. The result, as we have 
 seen, is denominationalism which, with its multi- 
 farious separation of men on issues of no impor- 
 tance, has cast a blight over the spiritual conscious- 
 ness of the race quite as serious as any cast by the 
 papal tyranny of Rome. 
 
 It is this situation which calls at this moment for 
 a new reformation, as effective in its attack on 
 Protestantism as the Reformation of Luther and 
 Calvin was effective in its attack on Catholicism. 
 It is not enough to correct the errors of orthodox 
 theology on the basis of the latest information im- 
 parted by modern scientific studies. This is what 
 the liberals have been all too content. to do, on the 
 supposition, apparently, that all will be well if the 
 Darwinian theory of origins is substituted for the 
 Mosaic, and the conclusions of the higher criticism 
 of the Bible accepted without reservations! What 
 is needed is something much more fundamental and 
 
CONCLUSION 325 
 
 therefore revolutionary. We must get rid not only 
 of theological errors, but of the whole theologizing 
 process itself. We must disentangle religious ex- 
 perience and idealism not only from dogmas that 
 are old and untrue, but from the whole concept of 
 dogma. The method of Jesus gives us our example ! 
 The Nazarene was a man of his time, and accepted 
 easily the prevailing ideas of his time — the Mosaic 
 theology undoubtedly, demonology, the Messianic 
 philosophy of history, and so on. But no one of 
 these ideas was central to his spiritual thought, or 
 ever played more than an incidental part in his 
 teaching. The Gospels could be rewritten today, in 
 the light of the most recent information, and not 
 affect by so much as the alteration of a phrase the 
 basic principles of his religion. The same is not 
 true of the epistles of Paul, for the apostle, unlike 
 his master, was a theologian. But Jesus's mind was 
 free of the whole theologizing method. He was 
 concerned with life and not with thought, with 
 spiritual experience and not with intellectual opin- 
 ions. So with the churches, if they are to be faith- 
 ful to his religion! Theology must go today, as 
 ecclesiasticasm went yesterday — even that theologi- 
 cal remnant which sets Christianity apart as a 
 separate religion, charged with a mission of 
 peculiar sanctity. Religion, as the spiritual ex- 
 pression of the higher processes of human life, can- 
 not in the very necessities of the case, be narrower 
 or less inclusive than this life itself. It is the final 
 condemnation of theology that it tends ever to make 
 
326 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 religion a contracted and thus exclusive thing, and 
 shut men oflf from contact with their fellows. To 
 find religion is always to find unity, and therewith 
 a universal fellowship of humankind. 
 
 IV 
 
 From this standpoint, the reformation demanded 
 by our age may be summed up as a restoration of 
 primitive Christianity. As the great Reformation 
 went back to Paul, and, getting rid of ecclesiasti- 
 cism, secured liberty, so this new reformation must 
 go back to Jesus, and, getting rid of theology, secure 
 fellowship. It must seek to establish throughout 
 the world what was established in those early Chris- 
 tian churches in ancient Rome — a solidarity of 
 human interests, a brotherhood of men bound 
 together in love, equal not only in rights but in 
 duties, dedicated in fellowship to the bringing in of 
 God's Kingdom on the earth. 
 
 But what specifically does this mean? What 
 does first century Christianity involve in the society 
 of the twentieth century? To speak simply of 
 brotherhood and love does not carry us very far! 
 Says Henry D. Lloyd,^ with commendable im- 
 patience, "He is not the leader who tells us that love 
 is enough, is all, is the law, is life, is God. He is 
 the leader who guides us to the next application of 
 these thousands-of -years-old truisms in the affairs 
 of today. He is the wise man who can tell us what 
 
 *In Man the Social Creator, pages 10-11. 
 
CONCLUSION 32T 
 
 answer this law of love makes ... to the social 
 life of our time." 
 
 There were difficulties in understanding the prac- 
 tical aspects of solidarity even in the days when 
 Jesus and his disciples lived in the open and 
 gathered their food from the corn-fields and the 
 lakes, as witness the question about "tribute unto 
 Caesar." ^ These difficulties were multiplied when 
 the gospel was carried to the cities of Asia Minor 
 and Greece, and thus brought into more intimate 
 contact with the laws and customs of the pagan 
 empire, as witness PauFs truculent injunction that 
 "every soul be in subjection to the higher powers 
 . . . for the powers that be are ordained of God." * 
 Even so, however, the task of love was simple in 
 those far-away days, as compared at least with the 
 task as it presents itself in the highly complex 
 civilization of modern times. What does Chris- 
 tianity mean in a world of railroads and steam- 
 ships, telephones and telegraphs, mills, warehouses 
 and stock exchanges? How is one to effect soli- 
 darity or practice fellowship amid the competitions 
 of modern business, the struggles between capital 
 and labor, the indescribable hatreds and suspicions 
 of international relationships? What road to a life 
 of love is open to a man who is caught in the 
 intricacies of subways, sky-scrapers, tenements, fac- 
 tories, and the ever-present overmastering machine? 
 The problem is different today from what it was in 
 
 » See Matthew 22 :17. 
 * See JComaM 13 ;1, 
 
328 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 the first century a.d. The humblest man encounters 
 every day factors of experience so intricate in char- 
 acter and so stupendous in range, that to expect him 
 to work out its implications and imperatives in 
 terms of human brotherhood, is almost as unreason- 
 able as to demand that he write out the mathemati- 
 cal formulas of the Einstein theory. We are 
 caught today by social forces which we do not yet 
 understand, and certainly have not yet learned to 
 control. Even the "leaders of the people," so- 
 called, "such as bear rule in their kingdoms," ^ seem 
 at most times to be but the sport of titanic winds 
 that sweep the world as though from cosmic 
 sources. If we could escape from social bonds, and 
 live alone as hermits of old, or lose ourselves in 
 separate communities of the type of the early Chris- 
 tian churches, we might learn again what it means 
 to enjoy a fellowship with men that is quick to serve 
 and eager to forgive. But as it is, we are caught 
 like fishes in a net, or involved like cogs in a 
 machine. We are a part of this great mechanism 
 which we call society; and if love cannot be so 
 adapted or directed as to be made to function effec- 
 tively in this mechanism, then it must disappear 
 altogether from the world. Ezekiel, when he saw 
 the vision of the four wheels, saw living creatures 
 with them. "And when the living creatures went, 
 the wheels went beside them ; and when the living 
 creatures were lifted from the earth, the wheels 
 were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, 
 
 ^ Ecclesiasticus 44 :3. 
 
CONCLUSION 329 
 
 they went . . . for the spirit of the living crea- 
 tures was in the wheels.'' ^ Are not we ^^the living 
 creatures'' of the prophet's vision; and are not we 
 challenged to put the spirit of man's life, which is 
 the law of love, into ^^the wheels" of this vast civili- 
 zation which now run wild to crush us? 
 
 In the answer to this question lies the definition 
 of the specific task of religion in this terrific day. 
 We need a reformation, but a reformation in no 
 such general terms as a restoration of primitive 
 Christianity — a revival of simple love and brother- 
 hood and peace. The new reformation must be a 
 scientific affair. It must handle the business of 
 religion as a technical expert handles the business 
 of production in a factory, or of distribution on a 
 railroad. We want not only abstract ideals but 
 concrete formulas — not only the what to do, but the 
 how to do as well ! This means the detailed work- 
 ing out, in terms of modern social conditions, of the 
 technique of solidarity. It means the mastery of 
 the mechanics of love or fellowsliip as applied to 
 landlordism, capital and labor, commercial ex- 
 ploitation, economic imperialism, international 
 war. If we are to have churches which are to live 
 and serve society as effective agents of spiritual 
 transformation, they must take the gospel and make 
 it as vivid, real and practical a thing in the life of 
 twentieth century Yorkshire and Pennsylvania, as 
 it was in the life of first century Palestine and 
 Galicia. They must gather up the prophetic power 
 
 ^Szekiel 1:19-20. 
 
330 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 of all the emancipating religions of the past, and 
 harness it to the task of so refashioning the existing 
 social fabric as to make it as easy to serve and uplift 
 a fellow-creature as it is easy now to exploit and 
 overcome him. The Luther of our time will be a 
 social engineer, who will do for love in programs of 
 social change what his immortal predecessor did for 
 faith in creeds of theological belief. 
 
 Our reformation, therefore, means socialization 
 of religion in terms of modern life. The obverse 
 side of this reformation is of course a social revo- 
 lution which will constitute the "Christianizing of 
 the social order," to quote Walter Rauschenbusch's 
 phrase, or, as we choose to call it, more inclusively, 
 the moralization or spiritualization of this order. 
 
 If religion, as organized in the existing churches, 
 has no social message to tell us what solidarity or 
 fellowship means today, so society in turn has no 
 spiritual ideal to direct its action to humane ends. 
 We are smashing on with breathless haste and 
 exhausting energy, making goods, selling them and 
 thereby making money, reinvesting money to make 
 more goods, selling these to make more money to 
 reinvest — and so on, world without end ! But are 
 men happier than they were ; or, in any true sense, 
 richer? Have they found "the more abundant life'^ 
 in proportion to their more abundant production 
 and distribution of material things? On the con- 
 
CONCLUSION 331 
 
 trary, were they ever so poor, so wretched, so dis- 
 tracted, so close to madness, and the great, proud 
 edifice of their building so close to complete col- 
 lapse? The absence of moral purpose, of spiritual 
 vision, from most that men have been so feverishly 
 doing these last few hundred years, is the consum- 
 mate and perhaps fatal tragedy of this age. Only 
 one thing has shown that the soul of man still lives. 
 Only the momentum of one great passion has kept 
 society in motion to some goal. We refer to the 
 great movement of democracy, sweeping on through 
 the last three centuries from triumph to defeat, and 
 then again to triumph. This is the revolution! 
 This also, brought to conscious spiritual life, is 
 religion — ^the only real religion that we have; and 
 hence in itself the reformation that we seek. 
 
 VI 
 
 Democracy, by which we mean ^^the spirit of the 
 Universal and Beloved Community," ^ is therefore 
 the religion of this age. It is thus also the unit of 
 integration of our new faith. Churches hitherto 
 have been organized around an ecclesiastical 
 formula, or a theological belief. In the one case, 
 has been the priest; in the other, the creed. For 
 both now is substituted the community, which shall 
 be henceforth the only church that we may know. 
 This involves, as we have just now seen, a reciprocal 
 
 »Joslah Royce, In The Prohlem of Christianity^ volume II, page 
 .428. See above, page XIX. 
 
332 NEW CHUECHES FOR OLD 
 
 relationship of change. In attempting to save the 
 church as a social institution, by organizing it anew 
 on the basis of solidarity, we are thereby helping to 
 save humanity. By bringing the church back to 
 love, in other words, we are bringing love back to 
 society. But also, in saving society, we are saving 
 the church ; the revolution is the reformation ! For 
 we can have no true church until we have a true 
 society — no community religion until first we have 
 a community. 
 
 This means, for our present-day task, an exact 
 reversal of the historic method in religion from 
 antiquity until now. "The first shall be last, and 
 the last shall be first !" Hitherto the church has 
 been the direct objective — an end in itself. It has 
 been imposed, as an institution of divine origin and 
 commission, upon society for its guidance and upon 
 men for their salvation. Now society takes the 
 place of prime importance; it is among men, and 
 not in the church, that God is to be found ! Our 
 spiritual task thus becomes the establishment of 
 human fellowship, the organization of love to the 
 creation of solidarity. We must build, that is, a 
 community — a community as wide as the world, as 
 inclusive as mankind. Then, out of this com- 
 munity, as a flow^er springing from a fruitful stem, 
 will come the church ; or rather the community itself 
 will become the church, as the plant becomes the 
 blossom, in evidence of the fulfillment of its 
 destined life. For the true church is the com- 
 munity at worship. It is the glad gathering of men 
 
CONCLUSION 333 
 
 in celebration of their fellowship, and in dedication 
 of it to high uses. 
 
 The day will come when social struggles are no 
 more, when "wars and rumors of wars'' are passed 
 away, when race prejudice is become the memory 
 of an evil time. Then fear will be gone from out 
 men's hearts — and with fear, its spawn of suspicion, 
 hate and death. For ill-will there will be good- will, 
 for dissension unity, and for strife the reign of 
 peace. And men in that day will live as brothers of 
 one family, and work happily together for the com- 
 mon good. There will be a community on earth ; the 
 community at its moments of highest life will be a 
 church ; this church, and therefore this community, 
 will be the presence of the everliving God. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 I 
 
"This is a task which seems to me not unworthy of 
 those who, through the life of the spirit, have wider rela- 
 tions with the universe — ^this lay church which today, 
 more than any other, preserves its faith in the unity of 
 human thought and believes that all men are sons of the 
 same leather." 
 
 BOMAIN ROLLAND, in 
 
 Above the Battle 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Several attempts have been made to summarize the distinctive 
 characteristics of the Community Church. We present, here- 
 with, the following: 
 
 (a) By John Hatnes Holmes 
 
 The Community Church is an attempt to apply democracy 
 to the field of religion. 
 
 Democracy means the association of free men and women 
 in the spirit of fellowship to the end of the common service 
 of the common good. 
 
 The unit of democratic organization is the community; and 
 the agents of democratic action are those public institutions, 
 such as the school, the library, the social center, through which 
 the community functions. 
 
 Among these public agents in each community should be the 
 church which, when organized, will be known as the Community 
 Church. 
 
 The Community Church is undenominational. It eliminates 
 affiliation with any sectarian body whatsoever, in favor of 
 identification with the community in which it is placed. 
 
 The Community Church is public. It accepts the universality 
 of the religious instinct, and welcomes all men, regardless of 
 sect, class, nation or race, on a basis of membership identical 
 with that of citizenship in the community. 
 
 The Community Church is free. It recognizes no creed, or 
 statement of faith, but leaves all matters of theological belief 
 to the unfettered thought and conviction of the individual. 
 
 The Community Church is social. It interprets religion in 
 337 
 
338 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 terms of social service, and dedicates its members to the ful- 
 fillment of social idealism. 
 
 The Conmrunity Church is democratic. It is organized on 
 a basis of self-determination; recognizes a single constituency 
 of members who are voters ; and places its aJBf airs in the hands 
 of a board of managers responsible in all things to the con- 
 gregation. 
 
 The Community Church is the community functioning spirit- 
 ually. It emphasizes the community, not the church, as the 
 source of religious life, and itself as a free agent for the 
 expression, not the control, of this life. 
 
 (b) By John Hatnes Holmes 
 
 The Community Church is an institution of religion dedi- 
 cated to the service of humanity. It is distinctive from other 
 churches as follows: 
 
 1. It substitutes for loyalty to the single denomination, 
 loyalty to the social group. Its first affiliation is not with 
 any denomination, but with the community as a whole. 
 
 2. It substitutes for a private group of persons held together 
 by common theological beliefs or viewpoints, the public 
 group of citizens held together by common social interests. 
 It excludes none but welcomes all, regardless of sect, 
 class, nation or race, on a basis of membership identical 
 with that of citizenship in the community. 
 
 3 c It substitutes for restrictions of creed, ritual, or ecclesi- 
 astical organization, the free spirit. It relegates all matters 
 of theology and worship where they belong — to the un- 
 fettered thought and conviction of the individual. 
 
 4. It substitutes for the individual the social group, as an 
 object of salvation. It interprets religion in terms of social 
 reconstruction, and dedicates its members to the fulfill- 
 ment of social idealism. 
 
APPENDIX 339 
 
 5. It substitutes for Christianity as a religion of special 
 revelation, the idea of universal religion. It regards the 
 religious instinct as inherent in human nature, and all 
 religions as contributions to the fulfillment of man's 
 higher life. 
 
 6. It substitutes for the theistic, the humanistic point of 
 view; for absorption in the next world, dedication to a 
 better life in this world; for the church as a sacred insti- 
 tution, the idea of present society as fulfilling the ^'King- 
 dom of God" — the commonwealth of man. 
 
 The Community Church is the practical acknowledgment 
 of religion as the Spirit of Love incarnate in human fellow- 
 ship. The core of its faith, as the purpose of its life, is "the 
 Beloved Community." 
 
 (c) By Harvey Dee Brovtn, associate minister of the 
 Community Church of New York 
 
 1. The basis of the Community Church is the community in 
 which it lives. It springs from the community and 
 expresses the life of the community. Membership in the 
 church is on the same basis as membership in the com- 
 munity — namely, citizenship. 
 
 2. The home of the Community Church, its buildings, oflSces 
 and equipment, will be owned by the community as the 
 schoolhouse, public library, or city hall; and the control 
 and management of the church will be by the community, 
 democratically administering its affairs according to the 
 will of all the people. 
 
 3. The message of the Community Church will deal with the 
 interest of the community and the problems which con- 
 front its common life. The message may deal with philo- 
 sophical or even theological matters, but if so, it will be 
 because the interest of the community moves in this field 
 and the people desire to have these things discussed. 
 
340 NEW CHURCHES FOR OLD 
 
 4. The work of the Community Church, apart from its meet- 
 ings and teachings, will be the promotion of the welfare 
 of the community in its various phases. The community 
 itself will determine the things it desires to have done 
 and also the ways in which they shall be carried on. In 
 this and elsewhere the will of the community democrati- 
 cally expressed shall be paramount and controlling. 
 
 (d) By Joseph E. MoAfee, author of Religion and the 
 New American Democracy 
 
 The Commfunity Church seeks: 
 
 To express the common religious consciousness. It 
 recognizes that all are religious by virtue of their being 
 human, and all have the right and duty to express their 
 religious nature sincerely. It is universal, 
 
 . To insure liberty of thought and speech. It recognizes 
 that questions of doctrine and of personal religious 
 experience are properly matters of individual concern, to 
 be socially tested only by their product. It is free. 
 
 . To enlist all in the service of the common good. It recog- 
 nizes the universal individual obligation in social welfare, 
 and seeks to point out an avenue of usefulness to each 
 member of the community. It is (a moral) dynamic. 
 
 , To effect a religious organization amenable to the will 
 of the community. However initiated or maintained, it 
 recognizes that each person must have a share in the 
 organization untrammeled by aught but his own desire, 
 that the ultimate control properly belongs to the entire 
 population unit concerned, and not to a selective group. 
 It is democratic. 
 
 (e) By Henry E. Jackson, author of Z Community Church 
 The cardinal virtues or distinguishing characteristics of a 
 Community Church are as follows: 
 
APPENDIX 341 
 
 1. Freedom from the domination of dogma, substituting 
 intelligence for it. 
 
 2. Freedom from the domination of money, substituting 
 character for it. 
 
 3. Freedom from the domination of sectarianism, substi- 
 tuting brotherhood for it. 
 
 4. Freedom to liberate and make known the religion of 
 Jesus, recognizing it whether labeled by his name or not. 
 
 5. Freedom to serve the community rather than itself, losing 
 its life as an organization, if need be, for the sake of 
 the cause. 
 
 6 . Freedom to organize democratically with the right of self- 
 determination, each member having one vote. 
 
 7. Freedom to work for whatever concerns human welfare, 
 abolishing the distinction between sacred and secular. 
 
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