“But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods are the methods of their fathers—a solecism, stupid, irrational, immoral.
“The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt, rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of life.
“Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to be the friend of publicans and harlots.
“Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty and blood, flame, sword, thumb-screw, rack and torch. The blackest pages in the story of the martyrdom of man have been written by their hands. They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or the piteous cry of expectant motherhood.
“The Bible they made a bludgeon with which to brain heretics, forged its word into chains, and with its leaves kindled martyr fires.
“They have arraigned the reason, the heart and the knowledge of the race against Jesus Christ and His religion. They stretched Galileo on the rack for inventing a telescope which gave new beauty to the psalm, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.’
“They are driving manhood from the modern Church. Your New York congregations average four women to one man. Of forty-three Governors of our states, only seventeen are members of any church; yet all profess allegiance to the religion of Jesus. The men have formed secret societies outside the Church.
“The Church triumphant will be a social power. Man to-day is more than an individual. The individual has played his role in the growth of the centuries. This is the age of federation, organisation, society, humanity. Man can no longer live to himself or die to himself.
“I proclaim again the universal priesthood of believers. I call for those mighty forces among the unordained which thrilled the Waldenses, the Franciscans, the Puritan and early Methodists and sent them on their glorious careers. I preach a holy crusade for man as man, in the name of God, whose image he bears. I ask you to join with me as man, not as priest, and build here a ‘Temple of Humanity’ that shall be for a sign of hope and faith and freedom.”
As he closed, a spontaneous burst of applause shook the building, and instead of the usual prayer which ended his sermons he lifted both his big hands high above his head and the audience rose.