The Faith of Modernism

THE world is being reconstructed. Can Christians aid?

A religion that cannot meet the creative needs of men and women is a social encumbrance. A faith on the defensive is confessedly senile. Aesthetic appeal, vested wealth, the inertia of organization may serve to hide its decadence, but they cannot renew its youth. True, such a religion may serve as a form of social control, like bread and the circus keeping an uneasy proletariat from revolt. So it was in Home when the rich restored the shrines of the Olympian gods. So it was in France when Napoleon purveyed religion as a hope of heaven to a nation he refused political liberty. So in our world there are those who would make the church only a means of quieting unrest. But such hopes are already vain.

The proletariat like the rest of the world refuses to be quiet. A religion that cannot meet the deepest longings of restless hearts, that fears freedom of speech, that distrusts social reconstruction, that makes respectability its morality, that would muzzle scientific inquiry will be ignored by a world that has outgrown it.

Dettagli