They might with advantage close, and their clergy be employed upon some useful national service. Ritual and incantations are doubtless useful aids to religious worship and the necessary quietude of mind, but they are losing their hold over souls to whom religious life has become a matter of social service. These are of the order spoken of by Ernest Crosby:
None could tell me where my soul might be. I searched for God, but God eluded me. I sought my brother out—and found all three.
The number of “unbelievers” is growing. There are certain doctrines which we cannot believe because they violate our reason, or our sense of justice and fair play. Centuries ago it may have been possible to believe them: that is no concern of ours. To each age its own mind and its own enlightenment. What is more disquieting to the rulers of orthodoxy is that we do not care, that we cannot believe in certain doctrines. Doctrines are at a discount just now. The Church may quarrel over Kikuyu, or the Apostolic Succession, or the Virgin Birth, or marvel at the new possibility of a canon of the Church of England preaching a sermon in the City Temple. We feel that
it is infinitely more important that a few experiments in practical Christianity should be imposed on the world. Religion in the past has been conceived as essentially a matter of suppressing the intellect, submitting to oppression and injustice, learning to bear patiently the inflictions of Providence. Religion in the future will demand all the attention which our feeble intellect can offer it, and the conscious and willing co-operation of mankind in the realization of God's plans for a regenerated world.
Whilst the Churches addicted to ritualism and literalism decline, the Brotherhood movement gains in force and influence. Men meet to give united expression to their religious impulses. They meet for prayer and worship, but never without immediate bearing on some great social question or object. Opinions are freely expressed. Heterodoxy in details of faith is rampant, and is no obstacle to Christian fellowship. To the Sunday afternoon and evening gatherings of the Brotherhood flock the many to whom the Bible is still a source of spiritual food, and who demand a plain and practical interpretation of its teachings. An impromptu prayer, in which the keynote is the loving fatherhood of God, and its bearing on the brotherhood
of man, precedes a homely address or sermon, closely packed with allusions to social and political questions. Or the address is entirely secular; a downright unbeliever has been invited to give the audience the benefit of his knowledge or experience, in connection with some great movement for the betterment of the world. There is a disinclination to criticize anybody's religious views, provided he shows by his acts and life that he is part of the new Ministry of Humanity. Here we have the pivot of the change which is overtaking the forms of religious expression.
Men are no longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place of squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer compensates for the glaring faults of this. This is no sign of the weakening of the spiritual hold on reality. It is a sign of the spiritualization of the values of life. It is a sign that we begin to understand that we are spirits here, now, and everywhere, that we see that time in this world and the
way we employ it have a profound bearing on eternity. There is no reason, in the name of God or man, why we should be content to let this world remain a place of torment and foolishness, if we have reached a point when we can see the better way. There is a certain type of religious mind which dreads the idea of social reconstruction, on the assumption that we shall not long for heaven if conditions here below are made less hellish.
There is also a type of churchman whose finer sensibilities are sorely tried by the secular occupations of nonconformity in general. If once or twice in their lives they should stray amongst Congregationalists, Baptists, or Methodists, they come away disgusted at the brutal directness with which social evils are exposed in the light of the word of the Lord. They complain of the general lack of finesse and Latin; the licence of the pulpit has usurped the reverence of the altar. It is perfectly true that statements are sometimes made in nonconformist pulpits which are bald and offensive to the ear of scholarly accomplishment. But the complaint of secularization is singularly inept. Nothing could be more secular in the way of complacent acceptance of the worldly
reasons for leaving awkward questions alone than the attitude of this type of critic.