DECADENCE OF RELIGIOUS PAPERS
ANY one who has had any opportunity for extensive notice of the religious papers of the United States in the last ten or fifteen years, can not but be struck with the general drift away from religion. Papers which formerly were distinctly religious and deservedly the leading ones, are now distinctly secular; and, where religion is touched, it is in a merely perfunctory way, rather than from any deep conviction of the real value of religion. This change has now become so marked that the secular papers themselves are commenting upon it. The New York Sun of February 10 discusses “the decadence of the professionally religious paper.” The Sun takes this up because other papers had remarked the same thing. It says that “denominational organs which once were powerful and of great prosperity give every evidence now of sadly declined fortunes; and magazines devoted especially to religious and theological discussion have lost their attraction even for the most serious public.” Further, the Sun says: “This is the more remarkable because interest and inquiry concerning questions of religion were never more active than they are now. Of the voluminous correspondence coming to us, the subject which engages the greatest part devoted to any single theme is religion. . . . It appears, then, that the decadence of the professional paper and periodical can not be due to any lapse of interest in the subject of religion. It would be easy for us to fill the whole Sun with manifestations of the deepest and most earnest interest and solicitude.” And then the Sun, in its own vigorous way, exposes the true cause of this notable decadence, in the following truthful words: “Unquestionably the old foundations of religious faith have been shaken or completely destroyed in many minds thoroughly imbued with the religious sentiment. In place of that faith has come in a critical spirit, even in those who were most alarmed at its approach and most earnest in combating it, provoked by the scientific method of treating the Bible, and the miracles, whose denial as facts of history leaves Christian theology without a basis on which to stand. This method, too, is now pursued by other than avowed enemies of the religion which it undermines so completely. It is adopted and cultivated in the theological seminaries and in pulpits of Christian churches. All the other infidels since time began have not done a tithe of the damage to religious faith, to faith in the supernatural, which has been accomplished during the last generation by this school nurtured in the Christian Church itself.”