In some respects the Church resembles a coal furnace that has been burning quite a while without being cleaned out.  There form in the bottom certain hard substances which give off neither light nor heat, nor allow a free current of air to pass through.  These hard substances are called “clinkers.”  Once they were good pieces of burning coal, igniting the coal around them, but now their fire is dead, their heat is spent, and they must be removed for the good of the furnace.  Something like this has happened in the Church.  It has a heavy percentage of human “clinkers,” sometimes in the front pews, sometimes in the pulpit.  They were good people once, too, possessed of spiritual life and capable of inspiring those around them.  But spiritual experiences cannot be warmed over—­they must be new every day.  That is what Saint Paul meant when he said that the outer man decays, but the inner man is renewed.  An old experience in religion is of no more value than a last year’s bird’s nest!  You cannot feed the hungry with last year’s pot-pies!

This is the day of opportunity for the Church, for the people are asking to be led!  It will have to realize that religion is a “here and now” experience, intended to help people with their human worries to-day, rather than an elaborate system of golden streets, big processions, walls of jasper, and endless years of listless loafing on the shores of the River of Life!  The Church has directed too much energy to the business of showing people how to die and teaching them to save their souls, forgetting that one of these carefully saved souls is after all not worth much.  Christ said, “He that saveth his life shall lose it!” and “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it!” The soul can be saved only by self-forgetfulness.  The monastery idea of retirement from the world in order that one may be sure of heaven is not a courageous way of meeting life’s difficulties.  But this plan of escape has been very popular even in Protestant churches, as shown in our hymnology:  “Why do we linger?” “We are but strangers here”; “Father, dear Father, take Thy children home”; “Earth is a wilderness, heaven is my home”; “I’m a pilgrim and a stranger”; “I am only waiting here to hear the summons, child, come home.”  These are some of the hymns with which we have beguiled our weary days of waiting; and yet, for all this boasted desire to be “up and away,” the very people who sang these hymns have not the slightest desire to leave the “wilderness.”

The Church must renounce the idea that, when a man goes forth to preach the Gospel, he has to consider himself a sort of glorified immigration agent, whose message is, “This way, ladies and gentlemen, to a better, brighter, happier world; earth is a poor place to stick around, heaven is your home.”  His mission is to teach his people to make of this world a better place—­to live their lives here in such a way that other men and women will find life sweeter for their having lived.  Incidentally we win heaven, but it must be a result, not an objective.