You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent so much time talking about it.  Folk of this sort do not ordinarily flock to the stenciled walls and carpeted floors of our comfortable, middle-class Protestant meeting-houses.  They are not attracted by Tiffany glass windows, nor the vanilla-flavored music of a mixed quartet, nor the oddly assorted “enrichments” we have dovetailed into a once puritan order of worship.  That is true, but it is also true that these are they who need the Gospel; also that these folk do influence the time-current that enfolds us and pervades the very air we breathe and that they and their standards are profoundly influencing the youth of this generation.  You need only attend a few college dances to be sure of that!  One of the sad things about the Protestant preacher is his usual willingness to move in a strictly professional society and activity, his lack of extra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrow and unskillful observations and perceptions outside his own parish and his own field.

Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is dominating modern society.  It began, like all movements, in literature and philosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its way into social and political and economic organizations.  Now, when we are dealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class; this is our world.  And here we find naturalism today in its most brutal and entrenched expressions.  Here it confronts every preacher on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation.  We are continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of our hard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries of philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightest practical significance.  But few things could be further from the truth.  It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetually moulding the life of office and market and street.  It has sometimes been the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent and contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literature and art.  Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamental indifference to their appeal.  It forgets the significance of their intellectual and emotional sources.  This is, then, provincialism and obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensible or more disastrous than in the preacher of religion.

Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society where our own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order.  Let us ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant there.  That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few would deny.  It would appear to