Article January 22, 1903 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Ripon, Joseph Parker, William Short, Charles H. Watson, Tileston F. Chambers

The Rev. William Short of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, preaching on the theme "The Religion of the Future," is thus reported in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat:—

"Time-honored opinions, hoary with the antiquity of centuries, have been cast aside, and old interpretations of truth, venerable with age, have been superseded. Our conceptions of God, of man, and of their relations to each other, have undergone a change."

Carlyle's definition of the old idea of the deity as "an absentee God, sitting idle since the first Sabbath at the outside of His universe and seeing it go," was to be replaced, Dr. Short said, by a future religion of divine immanence, which in itself is not new, but is a return to the teaching of the early Greek fathers. "We shall go back nearer to Christ and his apostles," the preacher said, "for many ideals and interpretations. At first the Christian religion was much simpler than now, and it was much more concerned about the way Christians lived than what they professed."

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