354 RELIGIOUS AGENCIES 



in the change of publishers, or because of the loss of patronage, 

 they have reached a point where they should not be classified with 

 religious papers; but tradition holds them to be still there, and 

 they are not unwilling to receive the patronage of such as do not 

 discern or rightly estimate the transition through which they 

 have passed. 



Has the Religious Press Lost its Influence? 



The power of the religious press as such is affirmed to be less 

 than it was forty years ago. At that time the celebrated Thurlow 

 Weed publicly stated that a political party, aided by the secular 

 press, could afford to ignore the opposition of the religious press 

 when only a portion of it denounced the action of the party, or 

 when some approved and some denounced; but when the whole 

 religious press united against a party it could not survive the 

 shock and would have to compromise. A judicious estimate of 

 the situation is this: The religious press once had a monopoly of 

 religious news; once many took nothing but their religious paper; 

 once the clergy conducted themselves upon the average with much 

 propriety, and, except when a great moral issue arose, did not 

 participate actively in party politics; once denominational differ- 

 ences were accentuated to an undue degree. In all these respects 

 there have been changes tending to diminish the relative influence 

 of church papers. One may find some daily papers and several 

 weekly papers far superior to the magazines of forty years ago. 



But where the religious press is in the hands of men of moral 

 and intellectual power, and is edited not in the spirit of the dim 

 past, but in that of the present day, where that spirit is not inimical 

 to the fundamental principles of Christianity, it may, and does, 

 retain an amount of influence sufficient to make those who control 

 it almost stagger under the responsibility they have to bear. 



Works of Fiction and Religion 



Works of fiction dealing with morals or religion have in all 

 ages of the modern Christian church been helpful or otherwise to 

 religion. The Pilgrim's Progress has been of incalculable value to 

 the Christian church, though in some particulars and to persons 

 of a certain type the morbid strain which appears here and there 

 may have done harm. 



It would be not difficult to prove that the almost countless 

 references of Shakespeare to Christianity have been of value in 

 maintaining a sense of the truth of Christianity. It is true that 

 in the plays of Shakespeare the Scriptures are used for all purposes 



