In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was an article commending Christian missions.  The first caption ran:  “Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions,” and its subtitle was “How Missionaries Aid Commerce.”  Here is Business Law in the Spiritual World!  Here is the church commended to the heathen and the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial prosperity, a hawker of wares!  If the Bulletin ever penetrates to those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek.

Such naive opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit within the sanctuary.  It is a part of it all that everyone has today what he is pleased to call “his own religion.”  And nearly everyone made it himself, or thinks he did.  Conscience has ceased to be a check upon personal impulse, the “thou shalt not” of the soul addressed to untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to others.  The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and everybody; exalting others in terms of himself.  We abhor religious conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from the stigma of orthodoxy.  We do not go to church to learn, to meditate, to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young and prosperous; it is good business; it pays.  We have a new and most detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating of “courage,” “patriotism”—­what crimes have been committed in its name!—­“development of backward people,” “brotherhood of man,” “service of those less fortunate than ourselves,” “natural ethical idealism,” “the common destinies of nations”—­and now he rises up and glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so far as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!

[Footnote 21:  Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 376.]

Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in our churches.  They are voluntary groups of men and women, long since emancipated from the control of the church as such, or of the minister as an official, set free also from allegiance to historic statements, traditional, intellectual sanctions of our faith; moulded by the time spirit which enfolds them to a half-unconscious ignoring or depreciation of what must always be the fundamental problem of religion—­the relationship of the soul, not to its neighbor, but to God.  Hence the almost total absence of doctrinal preaching—­indeed, how dare we preach Christian doctrine to the industry and politics and conduct of this age?  Hence the humiliating striving to keep up with popular movements, to conform to the moment.  Hence the placid acceptance of military propaganda and even of vindictive exhortation.