Article September 7, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Reynold E. Blight, George B. Hatch

[Reynold E. Blight in Los Angeles (Cal.) Express.]

The churches are being abolished, not by legislative enactment, but by reason of their own failure to break with the traditions of a dead past and by their apparent inability to adapt themselves to the spirit and needs of the new century. Nearly every great denomination in recent official utterances has complained of declining membership, vacant pulpits, and vanishing influence. The reason is not far to seek. The world of today, practical, optimistic, and progressive, will have none of dogmatism, formalism, or other-worldliness. Sectarianism, doctrinal hair-splitting, and bigotry have no place in the world today. The spirit of the times that has given us the new science, the new education, that has achieved democracy and organized the world commercially, is at work revolutionizing religious institutions, and woe be to that church which is weighed in its balance and is found wanting.

We are socializing industry, politics, and society; now we must socialize religion. The world is about ready for the community church. The church of the new age will care little for theology and ceremonial. It will concern itself with the realization of social ideals and dreams. Instead of seeking heaven hereafter, it will strive to establish heaven here on the earth. It will combat sectarianism, class distinctions, race prejudices, exclusiveness, poverty, ignorance, and dirt. It will preach the gospel of neighborliness, mutual help, social sympathy, and fundamental morality as applied to trade, home, and government. It will include the best in art, science, literature, politics, and economics. It will unify the community, will vitalize and enrich individual life, will provide opportunity for the highest expression of the noblest impulses of personal and social life, and will bring every man, woman, and child in the community under its beneficent influence.

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