Article December 15, 1906 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Samuel Gilbert Ayers

One danger attending the conception of a morally bankrupt world is that the churches are led to attach too little importance to what the world thinks about their doings. It prevents the churches paying heed to those just and wholesome criticisms of themselves which are often to be heard from secular lips. ... For the case offers one feature which nothing less than criminal folly can afford to overlook. I allude to the steady growth of a body of instructed public opinion which is adverse, not to this or that side of the controversy, but to the controversy itself. As the strife proceeds religion is seen to be suffering humiliation, and the world—the morally bankrupt world—looks on with shame. That world, whose own deepest interests are understood to be the matter in dispute, is beginning to suspect the bona fides of a quarrel which, starting with pretensions so high, seems at times to be nothing else than a prolonged vendetta between Church and Dissent. ... The churches have themselves only to thank if the world, saddened by the spectacle before it, begins to despair of its High Places, and to look to its Nazareths for the coming of better things.—The Hibbert Journal.

The American Church is not the Church of the common people. Our influence has been on the side of the privileged classes, and we have contributed to the discontent and the distrust, until we are ignored and counted out in the efforts of the common people to secure a fair chance in the struggle of life. So true is this that representatives of our ministry have dared to say in great crises, "I have no sympathy with organized labor." Even representative bodies of the Church have practically said, "These matters are not our business."

But this is the darker side. From every part of the Church and from almost every modern school of thought there is an increasing consciousness of the guilt of such a situation, and, still more, an inspiring consciousness of the responsibility of membership in the kingdom of Him who would contain all men in His family as brothers. To these we must look for the restoration of the divine order and the apostolic democracy.—The Churchman.

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