CHAPTER XIX
AND THE MACHINE STARTS
One of the things that makes one thoughtful in going about from city to city and dropping into the churches is the way the people do not sing in them and will not pray in them. In every new strange city where one stops on a Sunday morning, one looks hopefully—while one hears the chimes of bells—at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right, faintly sing-song congregations.
One wonders about the churches.
What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel like singing?
The one thing that the churches are for is news—news that would be suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing and pray after one had heard it.
There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news.
Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the latest and biggest news in them.
News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they have dared to get from God.
It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried. I cannot conceive of Christ's coming back and saying anything just at the moment. He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient.