It no longer has any interest in hereafter things.
There may be a holy city in heaven; it does not know, it will not affirm for nor against; but it does know there are unholy cities on earth.
The streets of the upper city may be paved with gold; it will not enter into controversy about it; but it is certain the streets down here are paved with poor asphalt and trodden by footsore and weary men.
Heaven may be more desirable than earth. The condition there may be a great advance on this. Advanced thinkers in Protestantism will neither affirm nor deny that; but they are convinced the conditions down here should be made much better and if possible even that of heaven on earth.
The truth is, both heaven and hell, like angelology, have fallen out of modern theology. Heaven is too high and hell too deep. No telescope has ever revealed the one and modern sweetness, gentleness and light repudiate the cruelty and sufferings of the other.
The Gospel for the individual soul, the soul the Son of God once outweighed against a whole world in all that the world might stand for of wealth and riches and power and attained ambitions, saying the profit in the gain of a whole world would not equal the loss of one soul, has been set aside.
Instead we have that modern and amazing evangel known as the “Social Gospel.”
Here for illustration are two old people living in a miserable cabin in a reeking, malarial swamp with a dozen children drinking in the poison of their environment. What folly to spend time and money on the father or mother. How inefficient any effort to save the children just one by one. Get to work at once and drain the swamp, drive out the poisonous and infectious insects with which the place is swarming, fill in the land with fine clean earth, plant flowers and sow seeds of fruitful harvests, let the salt sea blow in and breathe across the spot.
The old people may die, in all probability they will, but under right and sanitary conditions the children will grow up into vigorous elements of a strong and worthful society.
Why spend time, money, heart and enthusiasm in seeking to overcome or straighten out and make correct the bent lives that have come down to us through the unsanitary moral conditions of a previous generation? We have had wretched laws, desperate customs, children have grown up under them to become fathers and mothers of generations no better than themselves.