p. 10 | The World's Great Need

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Sep 26, 1912

The World's Great Need

THE great need of the world is practical Christianity. Religion in the minds of many consists too much in form and ceremony and ritualism. The earnest, humble, devoted life is too little in evidence among many who make high profession; but it is such lives, representing the Christian spirit, that will tell more for God than eloquent preaching, fine edifices, and imposing ceremonies. Of this Gen. William Booth, of the Salvation Army, is reported as saying: —

Everywhere I find the complaint that the crowd is turning away from the churches. One of the most striking symptoms of the age is indifference to religion as religion, especially when that religion takes an organized form, and finds its expression in ritual, ceremonies, and formal worship alone. I am not now blaming the churches. I am not a judge of ecclesiastical systems or their methods. But I have an impression that the mass of the people are discovering that there is a great gulf fixed between the profession of love — love which is the core of religion — and the practise in daily life of those activities and self-sacrifices which will ever spring out of love where it exists. Religion has too widely become a matter of form instead of a living, breathing, active principle, — a withered husk, a dead shell; and the man in the street has thrown it away.

“Am I a pessimist?” you ask. Well, the outlook is not promising; I might even say it is melancholy. When I think of it all, I am distressed. The one hope for the future of the world is a people whose religion has become their very life’s blood, and their one constraining force. The world needs salvation, — salvation in high places and in low ones, in our aristocracy, in our politics, in our secular newspapers, as well as in the blackest, ugliest, and most devilish sections of the community.