p. 11 | Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 1, 1915

Note and Comment

Danger to Protestantism

It is interesting to note that no less an authority in the religious world than Dean Shailer Mathews recognizes the drift of the churches away from gospel ideals. In Zion's Herald for February 10 he points out the danger in the following forcible words:—

A danger to which Protestantism—particularly progressive Protestantism—in America is exposed is that its churches shall become mere agents of social service. There are many people who, in reaction from extreme orthodoxy, have come to feel that the sole business of the church is to push social reform. This danger is particularly strong in America just now because social workers have come to see that the church, instead of being hostile to their ideals, is the greatest force by which their ideals can be put into operation. Such a valuing of the church brings no small satisfaction to those of us who have endeavored to set forth the social significance of the spiritual life.

But we cannot let social service take the place of God. People cannot be amused into conscientiousness. Picnics are not the equivalents of prayer meetings, and Sunday school baseball leagues have not yet developed into revivals. It was natural in a period of awakening and transition that men should jump to the conclusion that the church ought to stand for every good cause. It was easy to forget that society will organize institutions for each newly realized need. But even those of us who feel most deeply the social obligations of Christianity, see that a church as an institution does not have the same field of responsibility as Christian individuals. These last may be organized in a great variety of institutions, each of which performs some particular function set by the division of labor in our world. Church leaders can delegate to these institutions certain duties, but they cannot delegate the duties of spiritual parentage. A Protestant church cannot be an ethical asylum; it must be a home in which souls are born into newness of life. We want efficiency in organization and activity.

We want the message from the pulpit to be heartily in sympathy with our modern thinking. But most of all does American Protestantism need a spiritual passion, a contagious faith in the supremacy of God's spiritual order, and an alarm at the misery that waits on sin. From many a community there is already rising a cry for elemental religion. With all their scientific business success, American laymen are asserting that they want to be assured of God and immortality and the worth of righteousness. They want companionship in spiritual loneliness, comfort in hours of pain, courage in moments of moral wavering. Their souls are athirst for the Unknown, and they will be satisfied with nothing save the water that comes from the river of God. If the awakening of Protestantism were to mean simply a renaissance of ethics, or a sort of bescriptured positivism, American society would be defrauded. When it asks for the bread of life, it will not be satisfied with treatises on eugenics.