II
Smith will not be won back to the church through appeals to theology, or stubborn reaffirmations of creeds and dogmas. I believe it may safely be said that the great body of ministers individually recognize this. A few cling to a superstition that there is inherent in religion itself a power which by some sort of magic, independently of man, will make the faith of Christ triumphant in the world. I do not believe so; Smith could not be made to think so. And Smith’s trouble is, if I understand him, not with faith after all, but with works. The church does not impress him as being an efficient machine that yields adequate returns upon the investment. If Smith can be brought to works through faith, well enough; but he is far more critical of works than of faith. Works are within the range of his experience; he admires achievement: show him a foundation of works and interest him in strengthening that foundation and in building upon it, and his faith will take care of itself.
The word we encounter oftenest in the business world nowadays is “efficiency”; the thing of which Smith must first be convinced is that the church may be made efficient. And on that ground he must be met honestly, for Smith is a practical being, who surveys religion, as everything else, with an eye of calculation. At a time when the ethical spirit in America is more healthy and vigorous than ever before, Smith does not connect the movements of which he is aware in business and politics with religion. Religion seems to him to be a poor starved side issue, not a source and guiding spirit in the phenomena he observes and respects.
The economic waste represented in church investment and administration does not impress Smith favorably, nor does it awaken admiration in Jones or in me. Smith knows that two groceries on opposite sides of the street are usually one too many. We used to be told that denominational rivalry aroused zeal, but this cannot longer be more than an absurd pretense. This idea that competition is essential to the successful extension of Christianity continues to bring into being many crippled and dying churches, as Smith well knows. And he has witnessed, too, a deterioration of the church’s power through its abandonment of philanthropic work to secular agencies, while churches of the familiar type, locked up tight all the week save for a prayer-meeting and choir-practice, have nothing to do. What strikes Smith is their utter wastefulness and futility.
The lack of harmony in individual churches—and there is a good deal of it—is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of a good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult for Christians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost every congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the minister and one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me to fill more fully the Christian ideal than any man I have known was harassed in the most brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of appreciating the fidelity and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I recall with delight the fighting qualities of another clergyman who was an exceptionally brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who had fallen to the lot of a church that had not lately been distinguished for able preaching. This man filled his church twice every Sunday, and it was the one sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s gates; yet about half his own membership hated him cordially. Though I was never of his flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing something of his relations with the opposition party in his congregation, I recall with keenest pleasure how he fought back. Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but he was unheedful of warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He landed finally in his old age in an obscure church, where he died, still fighting with his back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook as a weapon is going out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who stand sturdily for their own ideals receive far kindlier consideration than those who meekly bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and bishops.
Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in my news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a choir-rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious ear to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-like Te Deum, built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has always struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of highly embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings and deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has long contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken my belief that church music should be an affair of the congregation.
There seems to exist inevitably, even in the smallest congregation, “a certain rich man” whose opinions must be respected by the pulpit. The minister of a large congregation confessed to me despairingly, not long ago, that the courage had been taken out of him by the protests evoked whenever he touched even remotely upon social topics like child labor, or shorter hours for workingmen. There were manufacturers in that church who would not “stand for it.” Ministers are warned that they must attend to their own business, which is preaching the Word of God not so concretely or practically as to offend the “pillars.”
Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without hazarding his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the church at the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the Word of God; that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old vigor, people would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous fallacy. I know churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached uninterruptedly for years, and which have steadily declined in spite of it—or because of it. Not long ago, in a great assembly of one of the strongest denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible Truth” was raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring that he had never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet his church was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls echo uninterruptedly an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing. We shall not easily persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on Sunday morning to hear the “Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-worn, meaningless phrases. Those old coins have the gold in them, but they must be recast in new moulds if they are again to pass current.