religious inheritance and partly to mental and spiritual sloth which dislikes the effort of thinking, preferring easy acquiescence in conditions that are the resultants of blinded vision.  For dependency upon money is not something merely of the present, but a condition in the spiritual sphere that is largely a product of a long past.  The really inexcusable thing is our willingness, in a day of greater light and knowledge, to close our eyes to the true nature of the unattractive, anaemic thing we call faith, which would be seen as powerless to achieve at all, if taken out of the soil of material means in which it has been planted.”

He then gives various instances of methods actually put in practice amongst the churches and denominations which indicate the renunciation of faith and an exclusive reliance on worldy agencies and he then continues: 

“The Joint Commission on Clergy Pensions, appointed by the General Convention of 1913, made as the basis for apportionment, not the services of self-denial of, but the amount of stipend received by, the clergy eligible for pension, thus penalizing the priest who, for the love of God, sacrificed a larger income to accept work in the most needed places where toil is abundant and money scarce.  It must be evident, of course, that the motive of the Commission is not an endorsement of the blasphemous gospel of Success, by adding penalty to the self-denying clergy; what is painfully obvious is their apparent unbounded confidence that there are no clergy sufficiently foolish to sacrifice stipend at the call of faith’s venture!  And since the Armistice, the only real activity in organized religion has been a series of “drives” for vast sums of money, in most cases professionally directed.

“A consideration of a few facts such as the forgoing must readily convince even the most unimaginative person that whatever power faith might have had in the past, it counts for little today; that its secrets, its very meaning have been forgotten.  Otherwise there could not be this extraordinary exaggeration of the place of money in spiritual operation, and the unblushing, tacit admission that mammon, which Christ so warned against, had been recognized as the master of spiritual situation, instead of the willing servant and useful adjunct of faith it was designed to be in the Christian vision.  Indeed they all speak of that, largely unconscious, atmosphere of distrust of God which is so all-prevailing among Christian people today.  If the great, positive vice of the age is covetousness, the great negative one is distrust of God; the two invariably go together as parts of a whole—­one is the reverse side of the other—­for, it is not that we must not, or ought not, but that we “cannot serve God and mammon.”  And this atmosphere is one in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround itself when human hearts will.