Article December 14, 1907 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Philip Stafford Moxom, R. J. Campbell

[The Christian Work and Evangelist.]

To-day the Christian Church appears well-nigh to have lost its social power. Its influence upon public morality appears to be almost nil; it seems incompetent even to the integrity of its own adherents. When all is said about the lessening interest in church going, and the growing indifference to religion, the fact remains that the majority of the so-called "better" class—the more prosperous, more cultured, more influential people of this country—are church members. In other words, our most intelligent, most able men and women, the leading minds and the most prominent personalities in our country, are members of an institution whose function and very reason for being is the exaltation of the nation through righteousness. They are integral parts of a force so vast as to be almost incalculable; they committed, as members of a corporate body, not only to personal righteousness, but to accomplish the renovation of society. And yet, in this corporate capacity, they have failed of their mandate, not with regard to the outside world alone, but to members of their own body. Had the Church all along maintained that social consciousness which characterized the first Christians, had it not been so much occupied with the saving of individual souls, and the maintenance of individual piety, as to forget the social purpose for which souls are saved—the realization of the kingdom of God—it would have been impossible for such defections from virtue and integrity to occur.

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

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