fore,
for not choosing this approach to our task is that the preacher's
attention, partly because of the excellence of these and other
books and lectures, and partly because of the acuteness of the
political-industrial crisis which is now upon us, is already focused
upon it.

Besides, our present moment is changing with an ominous rapidity. And
one is not sure whether the immediate situation, as distinguished from
that of even a few years ago, calls us to be concerned chiefly with
the practical and ethical aspects of our mission, urgent though the
need and critical the pass, to which the abuses of the capitalistic
system have brought both European and American society. In this day of
those shifting standards which mark the gradual transference of power
from one group to another in the community, and the merging of a
spent epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor the most
serious peril of religious leadership is met by fresh and energetic
programs of religion in action. In such days, our chief gift to the
world cannot be the support of any particular reforms or the alliance
with any immediate ethical or economic movement. For these things at
best would be merely the effects of religion. And it is not religion
in its relations, nor even in its expression in character--it is the
thing in itself that this age most needs. What men are chiefly asking
of life at this moment is not, What ought we to do? but the deeper
question, What is there we can believe? For they know that the answer
to this question would show us what we ought to do.

Nor do our reform alliances and successive programs and crusades
always seem to me to proceed from any careful estimate of the
situation as a whole or to be conceived in the light of comprehensive
Christian principle. Instead, they sometimes seem to draw their
inspiration more from the sense of the urgent need of presenting to an
indifferent or disillusioned world some quick and tangible evidence
of a continuing moral vigor and spiritual passion to which the deeper
and more potent witnesses are absent. It is as though we thought the
machinery of the church would revolve with more energy if geared into
the wheels of the working world. But that world and we do not draw
our power from the same dynamo. And surely in a day of profound
and widespread mental ferment and moral restlessness, some more
fundamental gift than this is asked of us.

If, therefore, these chapters pay only