e" ought to receive "more abundant honor." They will have
workingmen in their vestries and their sessions and their boards of
trustees. They will show to all the world that they have accepted the
word of Jesus: "One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are
brethren."

4. This means that the life of the church will not only be thoroughly
democratized, but greatly simplified. All its administration will take
on plainer and less luxurious forms. The splendors of architecture and
art, of upholstery and decoration, of ecclesiastical millinery and
music, with which we now so often seek to attract men to the house of
God, will be put aside; and the followers of Jesus Christ will get near
enough to him to have some sense of the fitness of things in the
ordering of the houses of worship where the Carpenter is the social
leader and where rich and poor meet as one brotherhood.

Instead, therefore, of permitting the church to be invaded and
vulgarized by the luxury and extravagance of the world, they will turn
the current in the other direction. The church, under the new
leadership, will not take its cue from the world; it will enforce its
own standards upon the world. "Out of Zion will go forth the law."

Bitter words were those spoken at a recent meeting of the Congregational
Union in England by one of the greatest of English preachers.[30] "The
common life of the home," he said, "is often a mere vulgar exhibition of
the means of living. We try to persuade ourselves that showy living is
essential life. In tens of thousands of English homes the mere show of
things is the goal of a restless and feverish ambition. Everywhere we
seem to be loitering and pottering about in the implement yard. Even in
our universities we must have showy buildings, though we starve the
chairs. All this peril becomes the more insidious when we pass into the
realm of the church of God. Why, the 'means of grace' are often
misinterpreted as grace itself. We are obtruding our badges and ribbons,
our soldier's dress without the soldier's spirit, our music, our
ministers even,--how they look, what they wear, what they do--they are
all part of the wretched vulgarity of the modern spirit."

The two things are rightly put together. The ostentation of the home,
the tawdry luxury and profusion of fashionable society, creep into the
church and set up their standards there, and the religion of Christ puts
on a costume in which its Founder would never recognize