PRESIDENT WHEELER, of the University of California, in a recent address at Berkeley, set before us the present age religion in the following:
Any one who is a candidate for active membership in this present world had better learn right at the start that this present world, here at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is distinctly a world of work. This present age has developed indeed the cult of work and equipped it with a theology. Energy is the god who is worshiped therein, rather than being; the creed has no faith but that begotten of works; and the plan proposed for the saving of souls sets the hygiene of exercise above the medicine of theory and the nursing of culture. Passivity is the great sin; letting things take their course is the supreme heresy. Men of affairs constitute the priesthood, and the fanatic extremists, found in every cult, are here represented by the dervishes, both howling and whirling, who compose the glorious order of the hustlers.
So far as the energy demanded is concerned, we are sure there is none too much of this expended, but when we make human energy the all in all, and leave God out of the question, we will find that the doing of men is a ''deadly doing'' in most cases, and that the structures which they build rest upon foundations of sand. The best characters, and the characters which have moulded the world for good, have not been formed by constant, restless energy alone, but they have contained the elements of deep thinking and earnest consideration of the great questions of life. More than this, the men who have possessed this are those who have entered into the ''secret place'' of God, who have learned of the great I AM, who have seen man's utter incompetency and nothingness apart from God, and who have brought the divine life into their own.
Nowadays much is said which is little less than the deifying of the human; trite apothegms, sprightly proverbs, trite sayings, expressing truth in a bright, strong way, are very common, and many seem to feel that they are born of this day and generation, when they are as old as the ages. Dr. Wheeler has truly said that the present age has developed the ''cult of work and equipped it with theology,'' but it is not a truth of the age which men need, but the religion which is born of Jesus Christ; and no outward form of works of any sort or kind will compensate for the great truth uttered by Jesus, ''Ye must be born again.'' Life must come in from God and flow outward from the heart. It can not be worked out, and it can only be acquired by living faith in Him who is the Source of it all.