Again we might address ourselves to the ethical and practical aspects of preaching and the ministry.  Taking largely for granted our understanding of the Gospel, we might concern ourselves with its relations to society, the detailed implications for the moral and economic problems of our social and industrial order.  Dean Brown, in The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit, and Dr. Coffin in In a Day of Social Rebuilding, have so enriched this Foundation.  Moreover, this is, at the moment, an almost universally popular treatment of the preacher’s opportunity and obligation.  One reason, therefore, for not choosing this approach to our task is that the preacher’s attention, partly because of the excellence of these and other books and lectures, and partly because of the acuteness of the political-industrial crisis which is now upon us, is already focused upon it.

Besides, our present moment is changing with an ominous rapidity.  And one is not sure whether the immediate situation, as distinguished from that of even a few years ago, calls us to be concerned chiefly with the practical and ethical aspects of our mission, urgent though the need and critical the pass, to which the abuses of the capitalistic system have brought both European and American society.  In this day of those shifting standards which mark the gradual transference of power from one group to another in the community, and the merging of a spent epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor the most serious peril of religious leadership is met by fresh and energetic programs of religion in action.  In such days, our chief gift to the world cannot be the support of any particular reforms or the alliance with any immediate ethical or economic movement.  For these things at best would be merely the effects of religion.  And it is not religion in its relations, nor even in its expression in character—­it is the thing in itself that this age most needs.  What men are chiefly asking of life at this moment is not, What ought we to do? but the deeper question, What is there we can believe?  For they know that the answer to this question would show us what we ought to do.

Nor do our reform alliances and successive programs and crusades always seem to me to proceed from any careful estimate of the situation as a whole or to be conceived in the light of comprehensive Christian principle.  Instead, they sometimes seem to draw their inspiration more from the sense of the urgent need of presenting to an indifferent or disillusioned world some quick and tangible evidence of a continuing moral vigor and spiritual passion to which the deeper and more potent witnesses are absent.  It is as though we thought the machinery of the church would revolve with more energy if geared into the wheels of the working world.  But that world and we do not draw our power from the same dynamo.  And surely in a day of profound and widespread mental ferment and moral restlessness, some more fundamental gift than this is asked of us.