258 RELIGION 



these heights is to those who habitually dwell below not easy to 

 breathe. Aerial navigation, though it fascinate its practitioner, 

 has as yet but slight practical applicability to the plodding world be- 

 low. It is not surprising that one of the leaders of American educa- 

 tion was led not long ago to remark: " I am an attendant at church 

 and a church member, but I very rarely hear anything in worship or 

 preaching which appears to have any direct relation with the work I 

 have to do." The provincialism of the Church had alienated this 

 sympathetic mind. The busy world had swept him into its hurry- 

 ing movement, and the methods of the Church had left her, as it w r ere, 

 on the banks of this swift stream, unmoved and orthodox perhaps, 

 but high and dry upon the shore, while the new scenery of modern 

 life unfolded itself to the modern man at every turn of the flowing 

 river of time. 



If, then, it is provincialism which limits the effectiveness and 

 obstructs the progress of religion, what is the call of the present time 

 which religion must hear if it would hold its place among the con- 

 structive forces of the world? It is the call to a larger interpretation 

 of its own task, the call from provincialism to cosmopolitanism, from 

 the limited to the universal, from religion for a part of life to religion 

 for the whole of life, from a detached, specialized, guarded, esoteric 

 faith to a faith which is the key of the world's work, its public con- 

 cerns, and its private needs, its politics and industry, its education 

 and art, its national, social, and domestic welfare, its real and con- 

 temporary needs and cares and sins. This is the opportunity w y hich 

 the conditions of the twentieth century appear to offer to religion 

 and which is reinforced by the philosophy, the science, the political 

 movements, and the industrial changes of the modern world. The 

 nineteenth century was a period of extraordinary development in the 

 mechanical, external, and physical efficiency of the world. It was 

 the age of science, of invention, of machinery, of political consolida- 

 tion, of industrial organization, the period which made of human 

 society in an unprecedented degree a fighting, producing, governing, 

 administering machine. Religion had its part in this great movement 

 toward mechanical effectiveness. It was the period of institutional 

 churches, parish houses, denominational work, associated enterprise, 

 conventions, conferences, delegations, committees. Never before 

 did the machinery of the Christian Church work as well as it does 

 now. It is the natural order of progress, first, that which is natural; 

 afterward, that which is spiritual. The development of natural 

 science, the acceptance of natural law, the interpretation of human 

 society in terms of biology, the conception of the social organism 

 with its many members, all this which has marked the philosophy 

 of the past century has had its effect upon religion and has given it 

 also the aspect of a physical, biological, material organization, with 



