Facing a Crisis

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 21, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 28.

[From an article by John Graham Brooks, "La Follette's."]

Every religious body faces to-day a crisis at least as great as slavery and one that will test her as by fire. If she fails, her tragedy will be this, that the very wrong-doers to whom she truckles will lose respect for their clerical apologists. Plenty of our great law-breakers know perfectly well that much they do is morally indefensible. A man of this type was once mildly chided by a clergyman for the free use of round and hardy oaths. He listened to the half-hearted rebuke and answered: “Come, now, parson, you and I are quits; I swear and you pray, but we don’t either of us mean anything by it.” A witty dean of a theological seminary in the East was asked by a parishioner why the devil was so often painted with a smile. The dean replied: “I am afraid it is because he has found out that many of us clergymen do his devil work so much better than he can do it, that it tickles him.” Never had the church a nobler field for regenerating service than she has to-day, and her bitterest enemy could wish her nothing worse than that she should be silent, faltering, and inarticulate in hours like these. So far as she sides against reform her awakening will be rude and her penalty costly and heavy to bear. Even now, quickened moral energies of our youth are seeking other channels outside her sanctuary.