To meet the growing social discontent, the increasing indifference to old forms of religion, the open dissatisfaction with religious organizations which had degenerated into clubs for rich men, there was developed some years ago in America the “institutional church.”  This was an honest effort to give to church members, and to those likely to become church members, opportunity for social and intellectual diversion.  Parish houses and settlements were established, and these were furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms, auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, and provision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes.  These are all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and study clubs good, as far as they go.  But what a pitifully short way they go!  They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not the slightest impression on the big social problem.  The reason is plain.  The appeal of the institutional church is too intellectual.  It reaches only that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social opportunity.

To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled since the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can be done for the uplift of humanity.  That the church seems to be losing its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.

The people, the great world of people,—­what a field for the church to work in, if it only chose!  The great obstacle is that the church (leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force, is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building.  Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand empty and deserted.  Simply from the point of view of material economy this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would appear deplorable.  From the point of view of social economy, reduced to terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.

What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity?  Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets?  The great mass of the people, packed in dreary tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness.  What would happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?

Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling, and misery.  At least we may infer as much from the success of the occasional experiments which have been tried.  We have a few examples to prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often been described.  It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented, the right is almost always preferred.