The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men, but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be, inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is coming to life. He is already a worshipper.
By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen to him after death. He belongs properly in
the congregation of self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.
The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human self-realization.
III
Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief, the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If, as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the world cannot go to ultimate ruin.
That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way to a critical and open-minded
evolutionism which tends more and more to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction, science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved, may indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes it certain of accomplishment.
In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome, it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what type of situation does the human character grow strong and heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men; they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such an attitude will not be one strenuously
alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the Old Guard, to die but never surrender.