The Church and Modern Life

by Washington Gladden

"(b) That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

"(c) That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof ... is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world."^[29]

These are the indubitable conclusions of modern science; and the proposition to ignore the deepest fact of human experience will not be entertained by the young men and women of the present day. The church, under their leadership, will be a worshiping church, a praying church. It will keep itself in close relations with that unseen universe from which its help must come. It will be a channel through which the divine grace will flow into the lives of men. And it will also be, what it has always been, a school as well as a shrine, a place where the teacher searches out and unfolds the truth and the prophet proclaims the message that has been given him.

2. Under its new leadership the church will continue to be a minister to human want and suffering. The charitable work which has always been emphasized in its administration will not be neglected, but it will take on a new character. There will be less almsgiving, and more of the kind of help which saves manhood and womanhood. The young men and women who are called to this leadership will understand the worth of souls--that is, of men and women; and they will be careful lest, in their relief of want, they undermine the character. Above all, they will feel that while it is the business of the church to care for the poor, its first business is to cure the conditions which breed poverty.

3. They will thoroughly democratize the life of the church, making it the rallying place of a genuine Christian fraternity, in which men of all ranks and stations meet on a common level, ignoring the distinctions of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, and emphasizing the fact of Christian brotherhood. We have churches which profess democracy, but there is reason to fear that many of them are little better than oligarchies; that some of them come near to being monarchies. The new leadership will discern the importance of making every member of the brotherhood, no matter how humble, a partaker of its responsibilities, and a helper in its services. They will know that the problem of church administration is to make every man feel that he is needed. They will grasp the significance of Paul's figure of the body and its members, and will see that "those members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary," and that "those parts of the body which are less honorable" ought to receive "more abundant honor." They will have workingmen in their vestries and their sessions and their boards of trustees. They will show to all the world that they have accepted the word of Jesus: "One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren."

4. This means that the life of the church will not only be thoroughly democratized, but greatly simplified. All its administration will take on plainer and less luxurious forms. The splendors of architecture and art, of upholstery and decoration, of ecclesiastical millinery and music, with which we now so often seek to attract men to the house of God, will be put aside; and the followers of Jesus Christ will get near enough to him to have some sense of the fitness of things in the ordering of the houses of worship where the Carpenter is the social leader and where rich and poor meet as one brotherhood.

Instead, therefore, of permitting the church to be invaded and vulgarized by the luxury and extravagance of the world, they will turn the current in the other direction. The church, under the new leadership, will not take its cue from the world; it will enforce its own standards upon the world. "Out of Zion will go forth the law."

Bitter words were those spoken at a recent meeting of the Congregational Union in England by one of the greatest of English preachers.^[30] "The common life of the home," he said, "is often a mere vulgar exhibition of the means of living. We try to persuade ourselves that showy living is essential life. In tens of thousands of English homes the mere show of things is the goal of a restless and feverish ambition. Everywhere we seem to be loitering and pottering about in the implement yard. Even in our universities we must have showy buildings, though we starve the chairs. All this peril becomes the more insidious when we pass into the realm of the church of God. Why, the 'means of grace' are often misinterpreted as grace itself. We are obtruding our badges and ribbons, our soldier's dress without the soldier's spirit, our music, our ministers even,--how they look, what they wear, what they do--they are all part of the wretched vulgarity of the modern spirit."

The two things are rightly put together. The ostentation of the home, the tawdry luxury and profusion of fashionable society, creep into the church and set up their standards there, and the religion of Christ puts on a costume in which its Founder would never recognize it.

We are dealing here with the very heart of the trouble in our national life, and the problem is one which must be solved by the present generation of our young men and women. The social conditions which are depicted for us by close students of the life of our luxurious classes are ominous in the extreme. The cynical dishonesties and the brutal spoliations which have come to light in the realm of high finance and big business are the natural fruit of such a manner of life as many of our recent novelists have vividly portrayed. And the wanton extravagance of the House of Mirth would not exist if the majority of the people did not admire it. The outcry against it is oftener the voice of envy than of moral revulsion. The cure for this evil, as of most others, is found in public opinion; and the church must educate public opinion to reprove it, and the leadership of the church will be in the hands of the young men and women of this generation.