m needs to be hitched to the star of religious faith. But have
the churches spiritual energy enough to recover their lost position?
That depends upon themselves. If they consent to be bound by dogmatic
statements inherited from the past, they are doomed. The world is not
listening to theologians to-day. They have no message for it. They
are on the periphery, not at the centre of things. The great rolling
river of thought and action is passing them by. Scientific scholarship
applied to the study of Christian origins is extremely valuable, but
the defender of systems of belief couched in the language of a by-gone
age is an anachronism and the sooner we shake ourselves free of him the
better. The greatest of all the causes of the drift from the churches
is the fact that Christian truth has become associated in the popular
mind with certain forms of statement which thoughtful men find it
impossible to accept not only on intellectual but even on moral
grounds. Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the Fall, the
scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of
salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only
misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these
notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do
with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much
less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the
scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned,
is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The
consequence is that religion has come to be thought of as something
apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and
Bible readings, instead of what it really is,--the coordinating
principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a
nutshell,--popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological
college Christianity) does _not_ interpret life. Consequently the
great world of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about it.

+Theologians and preachers rarely realise the situation.+--One would
think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would
see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see
it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in
a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the
need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The
professi