orning, one looks hopefully--while one hears the
chimes of bells--at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for
people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes
in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right,
faintly sing-song congregations.

One wonders about the churches.

What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel
like singing?

The one thing that the churches are for is news--news that would be
suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing
and pray after one had heard it.

There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news.

Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the
latest and biggest news in them.

News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they
have dared to get from God.

It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some
little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be
said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried. I cannot
conceive of Christ's coming back and saying anything just at the moment.
He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not
arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder
how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic,
visionary, and inefficient.

It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present
spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them,
instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into
business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of,
is being at last revealed to people--where news is being created.

Perhaps it would not be precisely true--what I have said, about Christ's
not saying anything. He probably would. But he would not say these same
merely rudimentary things. He would go on to the truths and applications
we have never heard or guessed. The rest of his time he would put in in
proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years
ago, could be done now. And He would do what He could toward having them
dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally
automatic and of-course machinery of the world.

The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion,
somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals.

All good manners are good in proportion as they b