Sad View of American Churches.
By Joseph Cook
THIS extravagance of ours in Sunday club palaces, this feeling of ours that social prestige is more to be regarded in certain churches than right standing before Almighty God, this using our Sunday clubs as social preserves to keep families in good position, and to dissuade them sweetly from intermarrying wrongly and below their standard in society, this tendency of cities to give to the church itself commercial measuring tapes, the fact that a fifth of our population in the United States live in cities, and that the churches that set the fashions for the land are more often in cities than elsewhere—all these are circumstances pointing to peril in time to come, and already big with disaster! I am not here to make apologies for church members; nor am I here to make apologies for Christianity. But I make a distinction between Sunday clubs and churches, and between church members and Christians. What is the trouble with a few church members who cheat? They are church members, and not Christians. You must make a distinction between Christianity and the church. This is the way in which, when it is the fashion to belong to a church in our great cities, we now and then find fragmentary platoons of society brought into religious organizations and baptized outwardly, but not greatly changed spiritually. Thus it happens that, with one in six of the population in churches in this country, there is a percentage of church members who do not appear to have learned to their finger-tips that portion of the decalogue which says, Thou shalt not steal. The world, which applauds this sentiment, will not unite with the church to keep such men from doing mischief as church members or aid in the expulsion of such members from the church. The world that sneers at the plant of the church is the soil out of which the church grows; and the sap in that plant is as good as the sap in the sods. The haughtiness of the world toward the church is self-condemnation. If, on this Christian platform, I am to think aloud, I must say that I have little hope for either the world or the church, unless the church within the church expels, or keeps from ever getting in, men who have not learned the decalogue.—Joseph Cook