Article December 1, 1906 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

There is no "growing indifference to religion." There may be indifference to the ordinances of religion, carelessness about church attendance and church membership, but everywhere we shall find a most intense interest in religion itself, a readiness and a desire to discuss it, and, what is of more importance, an increasingly honest effort to live it. Men to-day, in growing numbers, are tremendously and seriously in earnest about religion. The difficulty is that too often the religion that is preached to them in church is not the religion they are interested in. This is said in no spirit of pessimistic criticism. There was no finer phrase in Bishop Gore's Church Congress sermon than that in which he said that his words were the cry of a "permanently troubled conscience." That is the spirit in which we would beg churchmen to consider the pressing religious problems of our day. It is not a voice of complaint that is raised, nor a cry of protest alone; it is a plea that the Church, its clergy and its members, shall face facts squarely, and in the strain and stress of honest effort endeavor to rise to its privileges and opportunities and fulfil its duties.—The Churchman.

We have read some of the sermons preached fifty or seventy-five years ago that for practicality and application to the present needs of men are not surpassed by anything of to-day. In fact, if one would find things called by their names and the gospel of Christ applied to existing conditions, let him read the sermons of Chrysostom. While theology occupied a larger place in the preaching of the fathers than it does in our own, yet practical things were by no means neglected. The importance of love, kindness, forgiveness, unselfishness, helpfulness is not a modern discovery. It may also be legitimate to enquire if it be absolutely certain that the neglect of doctrinal preaching issues in added strength and efficiency to the Church. Is it not just possible that the lack of spiritual vigor and general flabbiness deplored so often, results in no inconsiderable degree from breakfast-food sermons? The spiritual life is not greatly built up by an exclusive diet of sterilized syllabub.—The Standard.

The average man usually has a good deal of common sense and it is not dormant, and there is a real kinship between common sense and a real and enduring theology. The average man is a dominant element in the theological education of the minister; he does not appear on the faculty of the theological seminary, he does not give lectures and does not write books, he does not begin to get in his work until the school has turned out the man as a finished product. But then by a shrewd remark or a significant action he "sets the parson to thinking," and the parson begins to overhaul his academic equipment and find the flaws and imperfections in it. The first four years after the graduate has left the seminary are not the least valuable in his real education for the ministry. He may think he "knows it all," but consciously or unconsciously he is getting his best training in the great university of experience where the "average man" is dean of the faculty!

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