Article September 3, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from William W. Peck, Frank N. Riale, Daniel Dorchester, James W. Fifield

[Rev. William W. Peck in Boston Herald.]

The churches today are living on the momentum of theological discussions which were set going a century ago. The church is holding aloof from the civic and social problems of the day. It has fed upon the doctrinary teachings of a past century. The living relation of religion to the actual battle between good and evil which is being waged in the world by vigorous men is not insisted on, and the consequence is twofold. The work of importance that is being done to further social justice is being done by people outside the church, and also the church offers no attraction to people who would be of value to it—active, forceful thinkers and workers. Most of them are outside the church. The whole insistence of the training in theological schools is upon doctriness and theological subjects. This does not appeal to the young man of strength and vigor who is anxious to make his life count in waging war against the social injustices of the day, unless he feels courageous enough to attempt the almost impossible task of reconstructing his church along new lines.

The message of the church must be changed, if the church is to survive, from a message of another world to one of this world. The old distinctions between "sacred" and "secular" must be done away with. I hope that the present church will die a natural death, with the gradual death of its old adherents, and that the church of the future will give from its pulpit a spiritual interpretation of life of the present time with present conditions, used to inspire men to live out their present lives in the highest way. The time will come when people will learn to sink theological differences. They will drop disputing about the early theology of St. Paul, on which the present churches are founded, and through which the church has lost hold of vital things. I am sick of seeing one thousand people trying to support three or four miserable little churches in a community just large enough to maintain one church as it should be. It is disgusting, the bitter sectarian animosity of Lilliputian dimensions, which keeps the churches separate.

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