SECULAR LIFE AND RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 453 



instead of these great realities; if in the name of religion it appear 

 to draw off men from these things which are actual, then it is not 

 difficult to understand how men intent on these primary matters 

 may say they see no great need of the Church. And yet the whole 

 history of humanity has shown that there is need. Men do not 

 do those outward and practical things at their highest level with- 

 out some feeding of their inward life, some nourishment of their 

 spiritual strength, some ministry of humbling and of uplifting, of 

 grace and peace and power, such as that for which the Church with 

 its opportunity of worship and instruction was designed to stand. 

 In the tremendous pressure of modern life, and just because of that 

 which is sometimes decried as its secularizing tendency, while yet 

 men know that in the deeper sense which we have described this 

 great modern life of ours is not all secular, but much of it is very 

 sacred, just because of the idealization of every relation in which 

 they stand, men are seeking the point of rest, the centre of unity, 

 the place of power and of impulse. They need these things as 

 never before, and if they turn from the Church, it is sometimes 

 because in their need they have sought and have not found in the 

 institution of religion that light and power, that ministry of grace 

 and peace which before all other things they feel that it is the function 

 of the institution of religion to afford to them. 



There never was a time in the history of the world when a bold, 

 far-seeing, and enlightened instruction in matters pertaining to 

 man's moral life and his spiritual interests was more needful than 

 just now, in the midst of the pressure and temptations, and of the 

 limitless expansion of the life of our time. There never was an 

 age when a worship which will deliver us from the tyranny of that 

 which is outward, which will lift us above the sordid and the com- 

 monplace, which will quicken us to that which is beautiful and great, 

 was more necessary than it is at present. There never was a time 

 when the Church, as institution, had a greater work to do, so 

 only that it knows how to do that work. 



But its real task is always, like that of the Master, to lose its life 

 that it may find it. The real task is always to lose itself as institu- 

 tion in order that it may become merely the soul of the great human 

 society, and to find itself again in having made that society truly 

 and freely, broadly and humanely, religious. It has no real aim 

 but to make the men who will then make the world. It has no 

 real aim but to nourish the inward life of the men who then are 

 to see to it that laws are made and executed in the spirit of perfect 

 justice, that business is transacted in faithfulness and honor, that 

 personal relations are regulated in wisdom and love, und that in all 

 things reason and the will of God prevail. In other words, the Church 

 may well maintain worship and specific religious instruction as one 



