CAUSE OF THE LACK OF RELIGIOUS VITALITY.
If religious vitality is at a low ebb, as Dr. Lorimer says, attendance at the churches painfully small, and the tendency to disregard the Sabbath on the increase, the churches and their chief leaders have themselves to blame for it. They have ample equipment, sufficient machinery, and every necessary resource, so far as men and means are concerned, to alter the situation if they will set themselves about it with the right spirit and the requisite energy, with their dominating and controlling motive the salvation of men, rather than sectarian aggrandizement or the promotion of pet isms. What the people want and what they hunger for more than ever before is true spiritual food and not the dry husks of religious controversy; they want light upon the path of their every-day lives, comfort and consolation such as religion alone is designed to give for the sorrows, trials, sufferings, and bereavements common to humanity.9 The people crave such help now amid the worries and distractions of a restless and rushing age, more than they ever did before—the simple, inspiring, uplifting truth, freed so far as possible from the verbiage of a dead scholasticism and freed from the terrorisms and absurdities attached to it by overzealous sectarians of a dead and buried past. Given this kind of preaching, this direct, hearty and sincere administration of religion in the churches, and we shall hear far less of empty pews and a decadent faith.—Leslie's Weekly.