doubtful converts, or cash and pledges for missions, or pensions, or the raising of clergy stipends; the “Nation-wide Campaign,” the “Inter-Church World Movement”; these—­not to speak of the growing policy of “making it easy” for the hesitant to “come into the church” by minimizing unpopular clauses in the Creeds or loosening-up on discipline, and of attracting “advanced” elements by the advocacy and exploiting of each new social or industrial or political fad as it arises—­are strong deterrents to those who honestly and ardently hunger for religion that is religion and neither social service nor “big business.”

Christ said “you cannot serve both God and mammon,” and this is one of the few cases where He stated a moral condition as a fact instead of indicating the right or the wrong possibility in action.  Organized Christianity has for some time been trying to render this dual service, and the penalty thereof is now on the world.  This consideration seems to me so important and so near the root of our troubles, and not in the field of organized religion alone, that I am going to quote at length from the Rev. Fr. Duffy of the American “Society of the Divine Compassion.”  What he has said came to me while I was preparing this lecture, and it is so much better than anything I could say that for my present purpose I make it my own.

“To the thoughtful person, and the need of reformation will appeal only to the thoughtful person, it must on reflection become abundantly evident that the chief necessity of our times in the religious world is the recovery of Faith.  Probably lack of the true measure of Faith has been the story of every generation, with few exceptions, in the long history of Christianity, but there possibly never has been a time when men talked more of it and possessed less than in our own day. * * * ”

“Christianity is a new thing of splendid vision for each and every generation of men, unique in its promise and unapproached in its attraction.  And yet how small a factor we have made it in the world’s moulding compared with what it might be.  We have not achieved a tiny part of what we might have achieved, because we lack the essentials of achievement; Faith and Faith’s vision.  Obsessed, after centuries of discussion and persecution, with the notion that faith is made up of mere belief, we have lost the secret of that victorious power that overcomes the world, and are weakly dependent upon the world’s means for what spiritual operation we undertake.  And so content have we grown with things as they are, that what they might be comes only as a dream that passes away quickly with the night; blind to our appalling money-dependency in modern religion, satisfied that the Kingdom of Heaven is as nigh to us as is possible under present conditions of society, we practically have substituted for the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, the ascending degrees of belief, resignation, money.  This is partly due to our