Article July 3, 1902 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from R. J. Campbell

Ernest Hamlin Abbott has an article in a recent number of The Outlook on "The Revolt Against Convention," the tenth in his series on "Religious Life in America," in which he says: "I found in my fellow-traveler [commercial] a type of a great number of men, as I had met them and talked with them who find in the conventional forms of religious life and thought, little with which to sympathize and much with which to be irritated. Not that such men are uninterested in religion, nor even in the Church and its ministers. ... I found a generally prevalent habit of judging ministers and the Church, not by their conformity to conventional standards, but by their fruits.

"This does not mean that such men are greatly impressed by numbers. The rapid growth of Christian Science interests them, but does not even begin to persuade them of its value. Evidence, however, that Christian Science has affected for good the character of some one they know does more than interest them; it arouses in them a respect for that cult and opens the door to persuasion."

Rt. Rev. Alexander Mackay-Smith, D.D., S.T.D., says in The Church Standard: "Trace back each failure, each perversion of Christianity, and you will see lurking behind it, human indolence or pride, the wish to avoid exertion, or the desire to escape self humiliation. But that is not the fault of the Gospel. What wonder, then, that this sin of self-indulgence is the basis of every medicine which the quacks of this age are offering the world? What wonder that men turn eagerly from the Bible to those who tell them that by this or that remedy they can be saved without knowing or feeling it unpleasantly, and that education, or equality, or atheism, or better laws, or more science will cure them mechanically without agony or sacrifice? But the Bible says No! as in the miracle of the text, 'this kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.' There is no chloroform for moral evils. They can be cured only by a higher life entering in and casting them out, with rending of the man."

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