The Church and Modern Life

by Washington Gladden

The assertion is often made that the church is an effete institution; that its usefulness is past; that it is sinking into innocuous desuetude. That assertion has been current for a thousand years--perhaps longer; there have been many periods in which it was urged much more confidently than it is to-day. This fact would suggest caution in pressing such a judgment. Wise physicians do not hastily pronounce the word of doom. They have seen too many patients return from the gates of death. Men and women who, in their younger days, appear to have a slender hold on life, often reach a vigorous old age. The same thing is true of institutions. It is not prudent to assume that because they are ailing they are moribund.

The Christian church, as we have seen, is far from being in perfect spiritual condition. Some of her symptoms are disquieting. But even as we often have good hope for our friends when their health is impaired, and find that there are good reasons for our hope, so we need not despair of the recovery of the church from the morbid conditions which we acknowledge and deplore. That the patient has a good constitution and surprising vitality is indicated by the experience of nineteen centuries. More than once, through this long lifetime, she has been in a worse way than she is to-day, but she has rallied, and returned to her work with new vigor.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century her case seemed to be desperate; but heroic remedies were used, and while the cure was far from complete, and did not reach the root of the malady, there was at least a partial recovery. In England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in America at the end of the same century, the symptoms were alarming; but she lived through those critical periods, and has done better work since than ever before.

That the work of the church has been sadly misdirected; that she has often put the emphasis in the wrong place; that while she has been doing many things that were worth doing she has largely left undone the main thing she was sent to do, was made plain by our study in the last chapter. And there can be no doubt that this misdirection of her energies, and this failure to exercise her strength in normal ways, have resulted in many morbid conditions, some of which she has partly overcome, but from some of which she is still suffering.

With the disorders from which the church has suffered in past generations we need not now concern ourselves. But the weaknesses and ailments of the present time demand our attention. We must know what they are that we may help to cure them. That responsibility rests upon us all. If the church is to be made whole, it must be by the intelligent and normal action of the men and women who are members of the church. We must know, to begin with, what health is, and what is disease; we must have some clear idea of what would be the normal condition of Christian society.

Men sometimes mistake conditions of disease for conditions of health. In cases of nervous breakdown, patients are often spurred on, by the malady itself, to work when they ought to rest. The less able to work they are, the harder they work. They do not know that this restless activity is a sign of disease, they think it is proof of abounding vitality. And there are many ways in which morbid conditions tend to propagate themselves. The instinctive impulses of an invalid are not safe guides. Yet there are many cases in which, even if the man is not his own medical adviser, he must have an intelligent idea of what ails him, in order that he may be able to follow medical advice, and adopt the regimen which leads to health. His reason must be summoned to discern and resist his morbid impulses, and keep himself in the ways of life.

Equally true is it that if the church, which is the body of Christ, is out of health, the men and women who are the members of that body must know what ails them, and how to supply the remedy. And when they summon their reason and seek to have it divinely enlightened, they are likely to discover that many of their worst disorders are conditions which they have been cherishing; that some of the things they have been most proud of are ills that they must pray and work to be rid of.

1. The first and the worst of the church's infirmities is unbelief. In one of the moments of vision, when the long obscuration of his light in the future centuries was revealed to him, Jesus sadly wondered whether, when the Son of Man came, he would find faith on the earth. The pathetic query has always been pertinent. Faith is the vital force of Christianity, and the weakening of that vital force is the prime cause of all its disorders.

The unbelief which brings enfeeblement and decay to the church of Christ is not, however, the kind of unbelief which the church is most apt to reprove.

There is, doubtless, in the church of to-day some weakening of faith in the historical facts of the Christian religion, and in the central doctrines of the Christian creed. Science and criticism have rendered incredible some statements which once were universally accepted. Considerable revision of theological belief has been found necessary, and it is probable that in this process the hold of some upon the central verities has been relaxed.