Article November 16, 1899 ISSUE

A Religion of To-day

George D. Herron

New York Journal

It is time for us to create a world that shall be founded on faith—faith in the living presence of a living God amidst a living people. Most of us accept traditions of a God who lived down through the Hebrew prophets and the early Christian apostles. Possibly some of us have an undefined sense that God was living during the Reformation and until the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or we are willing to believe, and that with a considerable degree of emotion, in a God who will live suddenly and immensely in some after-death world, or in some remote millennium, in which He shall sit in terrific judgment on the world. But the idea that God is living now, in the midst of a living people, inspiring and teaching them even more directly than He inspired and taught the people of centuries ago, with revelations concerning our present problems as sure and safe as any revelations of the past, and with judgments as swift and immediate as any judgments of the future—at such a faith we grow pale, or turn from it in anger. The reason, of which we are unconscious, lies deep in the spiritual and intellectual requirements of such a faith. It is easy enough to assent to formulated beliefs, coming from constituted religious authorities, concerning the God of yesterday or the God of to-morrow.

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