stances which give off neither light nor heat,
nor allow a free current of air to pass through. These hard substances
are called "clinkers." Once they were good pieces of burning coal,
igniting the coal around them, but now their fire is dead, their heat
is spent, and they must be removed for the good of the furnace.
Something like this has happened in the Church. It has a heavy
percentage of human "clinkers," sometimes in the front pews, sometimes
in the pulpit. They were good people once, too, possessed of spiritual
life and capable of inspiring those around them. But spiritual
experiences cannot be warmed over--they must be new every day. That is
what Saint Paul meant when he said that the outer man decays, but the
inner man is renewed. An old experience in religion is of no more
value than a last year's bird's nest! You cannot feed the hungry with
last year's pot-pies!

This is the day of opportunity for the Church, for the people are
asking to be led! It will have to realize that religion is a "here
and now" experience, intended to help people with their human worries
to-day, rather than an elaborate system of golden streets, big
processions, walls of jasper, and endless years of listless loafing on
the shores of the River of Life! The Church has directed too much
energy to the business of showing people how to die and teaching them
to save their souls, forgetting that one of these carefully saved
souls is after all not worth much. Christ said, "He that saveth his
life shall lose it!" and "He that loseth his life for my sake shall
find it!" The soul can be saved only by self-forgetfulness. The
monastery idea of retirement from the world in order that one may be
sure of heaven is not a courageous way of meeting life's difficulties.
But this plan of escape has been very popular even in Protestant
churches, as shown in our hymnology: "Why do we linger?" "We are but
strangers here"; "Father, dear Father, take Thy children home"; "Earth
is a wilderness, heaven is my home"; "I'm a pilgrim and a stranger";
"I am only waiting here to hear the summons, child, come home." These
are some of the hymns with which we have beguiled our weary days of
waiting; and yet, for all this boasted desire to be "up and away," the
very people who sang these hymns have not the slightest desire to
leave the "wilderness."

The Church must renounce the idea that, when a man goes forth to
preach the Gospel, he has to consider himself a sort of