ertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity today
about the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree,
relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values.
We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We are
adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. In
an issue last month of the _Inter-Church Bulletin_ was the following
headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," and underneath
the following:

"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general,
says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between
Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of
the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than
anything else is a strong injection of business method into their
management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a
book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'"

In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was
an article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran:
"Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions," and its
subtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business Law in
the Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen and
the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial
prosperity, a hawker of wares! If the _Bulletin_ ever penetrates to
those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious
to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is
conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen
and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek.

Such naive opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me
conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit
within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today
what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone
made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check
upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to
untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to
others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and
everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious
conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from
the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate,
to repent and to pray; we go to be