The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists and traditionalists.  If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it without followers.  But in the great religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of old, will preach the living word of God.  In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation.  Even in the Catholic Church there is a “modernist” rebellion; read the books of the “Sillon”, and Fogazzaro’s trilogy of novels, “The Saint”, and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the economic corruption of the Church.  In America, the “Knights of Slavery” have been forced by public pressure to support a “War for Democracy”, and even to compete with the Y.M.C.A. in the training camps.  They are doing good work, I am told.

This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army.  William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the slums.  He was stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus—–­

  Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
  Unwashed legions with the ways of death.

Incidentally the “General” learned to know his slum population.  He had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared hypocrisy and corruption.  But in his writings he lets us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their diseased and hunger-racked bodies.  So the Salvation army was forced into useful work—­old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm colonies—­until today the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages.  It is all done with the money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can deny that it is better than “Gibson’s Preservative”, and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with port.

And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater.  Here and there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are making attempts at “missions” and “settlements” in the slums.  The more vital churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the practical betterment of their members.  Their clergy are running boys clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers, social study clubs for men.  You get prayer-meetings and psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always before the clergyman’s face—­that with prayer-meetings and psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and educational societies and social reforms he thrives.