Article July 23, 1904 Issue

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with contributions from Walter Rauschenbusch, S.D. McConnell

Thy present paralysis of the churches affects all Western Christendom, and only a cause co-terminous with modern civilization will explain it. Communities are affected in just the degree in which they are affected by the progress of civilization,—the backward countries and rural communities least, the industrial cities most. State churches and free churches alike feel the drag. It is not because the religious spirit has failed. It runs surprisingly strong, but it runs largely outside the churches. Neither is the trouble due to lack of piety in the ministry, for, on the whole, we are as good as our fathers. We are told that the Gospel has always met with indifference and hostility. But is this to-day a persecution for righteousness' sake, so that Jesus would call us blessed for enduring it, or is it a case where the salt is trodden under foot of men, because it has lost its saltness. The worst explanation is that which shrugs its shoulders and regards the present alienation of the people from the Church as a mysterious dispensation of Providence against which we are helpless. Effects do not happen without causes, and God's reign is a reign of law. In short, no small or local or passing cause will explain so large a fact as the present condition of the Church.

Walter Rauschenbusch.
The Independent.

The day of doom has dawned for the merely formal and heartless in devotion. Very slowly has the notion died that there is merit in act apart from motive, but from the ashes of this expiring superstition has sprung for some fortunate ones a new sense of the power and joy of a healthful, sincere, simple-hearted, religious devotion. The person who has once caught, for however brief an instant, the thrill of individual communion with God, or has felt the uplift, as of unseen wings, that bears a truly worshipful congregation into the freedom of the eternal, can never lose the conviction that in this experience he has found the native and inexhaustible meadow land of the soul. He may reach this altitude but seldom, but he knows that it is there and that prayer and praise are no puerile and passionless formalities, but real as life and love.

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