WHY CHURCHES FAIL.

BY PAULINE STEINEM.

"I think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches," says Emerson, "without feeling that what hold the public worship had on man is gone or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and the fear of the bad." What was true in Emerson's time applies with even stronger force to-day. The clergy, too, are becoming alarmed at the empty benches in their houses of worship; and with true business instinct, characteristic of this age of commercialism, they have instituted the church-census. The same spirit that prompted Gregory VII. to keep Henry IV. three long winter days before the Castle of Canossa, for disobedience to the Pope, would say to you and me to-day, "Why don't you go to church?"

To quote Emerson again, “it is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings." And now let us see, if we can, why this is so. Taking for granted that the primary object of the Church should be the evolution of man's spiritual self, and to teach him how to live, it needs but a glance at men and matters to see that she is not fulfilling her mission.

Study of man in his infancy teaches that the religious instinct is inherent, and that it existed in human nature long before the advent of an institutional church. The Teuton calling upon Wotan under the spreading branches of mighty oaks, and the Indian worshiping the Great Spirit, had perhaps clearer perceptions of Deity than many a Christian who goes to church to-day. There have been, from the time that the curtain of history first rises upon the world until our own time, religious devotees whose teachings differed in their out

ward forms according to the peculiarities of the races and nations for whom they were intended; but their moral and ethical truths are identical, and the same golden thread of religion, binding back the soul of man to his Creator, runs through the ancient Vedas of the Hindus and the nine Classics of the Chinese, through the sayings of Pythagoras and Plato and those of the gentle Nazarene, as well as through the laws of Moses and of Zoroaster. This is what St. Augustine means when he says: "That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity."

However, the early Christian Church (which was founded by Paul, not by Jesus) was not satisfied with spiritual dominion only-temporal power seemed necessary for her perpetuation; and in order to gain followers she offered inducements in the form of punishments and rewards, until "In hoc signo vinces" came to mean nothing more than a good policy. When Clovis and his four thousand followers embraced Christianity they did so because it seemed to them the surest road to conquest.

There is no doubt that the Church fulfilled her mission for that time in the best way. But, this mission once accomplished, she had to learn to give up temporal powers, and the long and weary struggle of the Holy Roman Empire ended at last in the final divorce of State and Church. Having outgrown all medieval notions about crowning or deposing monarchs, the Church to-day must stand or fall according (1) to her inherent strength or weakness, (2) to her success in evolving man's spiritual nature, and (3) to her ability to lead him to a better life.

There are those who say that, with the greater intellectual development of man, he becomes less susceptible to religious teachings, and therefore he does not go to church. This, however, cannot be proved; it only goes to show that man's devel

opment has been one-sided, and that, instead of developing evenly his threefold nature,-physical, mental, and spiritual,— his mental progress has been forced at the expense of his spiritual development. Besides, it would not be true to say that the spiritual, i. e., the religious nature in man, is on the decline, for never before in human history was there such a growth of altruistic feeling among all classes-proving rather the contrary; and those who know how to read the signs of the times say that we are rapidly nearing the Spiritual Age.

If, in spite of this spiritual awakening, the churches are empty, it is because they are giving stones to those who clamor for bread. Repelled by the lifeless dogma of the Church and its worn-out forms, the soul of man, torn from its accustomed moorings, drifts in an ocean of uncertainty, and in its yearnings after the spiritual grasps at any "ism" or "ology" that is presented like a drowning man at a straw. For centuries the Church has been trying to teach man how to die, while he is seeking for guidance how to live.

It has been said that, if Christ came again to-day to live among men, he would not find a Church after His own heart; yet the world is fuller of His teachings now than ever before, and even Science is clasping hands with Religion. Only the Church, closing herself against every new truth, does not seem to know that the New Thought (which, however, is very old) contains the spirit of those teachings whereof she is closely hugging to her heart the letter; but it is "the letter that killeth," and in order to be a power for good the Church needs the vitalizing spirit.

When Rome was becoming the spoil of barbarians, it was the cry of the pagans that Christianity had turned the hearts of the people away from the worship of the ancient gods, which was the alleged cause of their calamities. To-day there are those who call the disaster on the island of Martinique a judgment of God that befell the inhabitants for not being better Christians an accusation as little justified now as then. Just

as the Christianity of that day brought spiritual life to a people to whom the ancient forms of worship had ceased to mean anything, so a better understanding of the teachings of Jesus, as well as of all great teachers of mankind, is superseding today what has become narrow and antiquated and inadequate to feed the growing spiritual hunger of the race.

The social progress of the world shows that men have been much better than their beliefs; for, notwithstanding the fact that the Church has tried to keep them apart by laying down denominational lines and nourishing prejudices, the tendency of the world to-day is toward universal human brotherhood. Our poets, our philosophers, and our men of science have taught us most of what we know; and what we need is more teachers and fewer preachers.

The spirit of discontent is abroad; grave social problems are confronting us, and the people are anxiously awaiting a time when there will be no more poverty-no more want. Believing the causes of their misery to be external, they also look for the remedies to come from without, not knowing that within themselves lies what makes them poor and miserable, or prosperous and happy. Church and school must unite in the education of the masses-not the mere education of the intellect, which starves the soul and leaves morality untouched, but that education which brings out in man the best that is in him: which means, in short, the evolution of the individual. Then will society, which is an aggregation of individuals, be pervaded by that altruism which recognizes "the unqualified brotherhood of man" as the "highest ethical ideal,” and will bring about the ideal State vainly hoped for by means of legislation. The Church has a mission to perform; let her look to it lest she be "weighed in the balance and found wanting."

THAT which becomes bounded becomes a burden, though it were erstwhile coveted. Only in free action is there joy.-Muriel Strode.

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT.

I

ORTHODOXY AND THE NEW THOUGHT.

N getting down to the fundamentals of life and being, the New Thought encounters many artificial structures and some false growths. Included in the latter are certain creedal superstitions in which men in various ages have sought to embody their ideas of humanity's origin and destiny. The most conspicuous and deep-rooted of these developments is the theological conception of God and man-their nature and mutual relationship. Even in this enlightened day it is affirmed by the Christian pulpit that the Creator is possessed of passions that, when found even in man, are proved by modern metaphysical science to be mere perversions of natural and beneficent powers. From the same source we learn that our race is composed of "miserable sinners"- -worms of the dust-whose immortality is something yet to be "added unto" them, and whose salvation from their innate helplessness and inherited degradation is wholly dependent upon a Deific caprice.

The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, pastor of the wealthy and fashionable Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of this city, is quoted as having said in a recent sermon:

"Discipline a thing that is essentially bad, and it will become more and more a thing gloriously bad. Mere evolution will not change a bad man into a good man; it will not put into him what was not there before. And the worst thing about the human heart is what it is already. Man, as we know him, is essentially bad. The Bible says so and we know so. The doctrine of man's essential depravity is the least comforting of our theology, but it is terrifically true to Scripture, to history, experience and observation."