Article December 31, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Willard L. Sperry, Averill (Episcopalian)

[Extracts from "The Disciplines of Liberty," by Willard L. Sperry]

"The initial appeal of religion is always to religious consciousness, not to that stage of religious self-consciousness once removed from life, which is reflected in our creeds, dogmas, and liturgies. Canon Barnett, pioneering among the poor of the East End of London, once complained that 'the sad thing in all crises is the way in which good people use their strength in trying to restore the old.' In those words he passed judgment not only on the political and economic temper of our time, but on its religious temper also. For in so far as even the most liberal and modern apologia for Christianity has about it this suggestion of a system to be upheld rather than a life to be communicated, every such apologia is once removed from the zest of living. It is a detached discussion of life rather than a direct communication of life.

"But it is not the flood tide of familiar ecclesiastical apologetic which interests serious-minded men and women to-day, no matter whether they be inside or outside the Church. The significant signs on the religious horizon are those clouds no bigger than a man's hand gathering in unecclesiastical quarters. It is still very hard for the church mind to believe that any good can come out of these Galilees and Nazareths. The theologian scents the minor heresy of the novelist, the dramatist, the radical. He misses their major passion for a new world. George Bernard Shaw is the last of the moderns whom we should suspect of being enmeshed in the cobwebs of a dogmatic system or committed to a professional apologia for Christianity, yet this same heretical Irishman says: 'I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas or Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will, if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.' Utterances of this sort—and they are multiplying very fast to-day—are far more significant as signs of the religious times than the cumuli of conventional apologetic always piled up in the heavens by the trade winds of habitual ecclesiasticism. The most notable fact in our present situation is this general turning of the unchurched mind to the religion of Jesus. There is a hopefulness and desire, even a resolute determination in this mind, almost unparalleled in the twenty centuries of Christian history."

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