n mock at, or fret at,
exactly reveals the work that is waiting for business men to do.
Business to-day takes intellectual grasp and insight--promptness,
energy, enterprise, and common-sense. These qualities are needed at once
in the conduct of the Church.
A second class greatly needed by the Church is the university-bred. Many
college graduates are church-members--some are even active workers. But
until lately the universities as a whole have stood rather indifferently
apart from the Church. They have somewhat indulgently regarded it as one
more historic institution for preserving myth and legend. To them the
Christ-life has meant little more than the Beowa-myth, the Arthur-saga,
the Nibelungen cycle, the Homeric stories, the Thor-and-Odin tales!
Druids, fire-worshippers, moon-dancers, and Christian communicants have
been comparatively studied, with a view to understanding the
race-progress in rite and religious form.
This spirit is changing. The most remarkable aspect of the intellectual
life of to-day is the rise of faith in the universities. Like the
incoming of a great tidal wave at sea is the wave of spiritual insight
and religious aspiration that is rolling over the colleges of our land.
The whole intellectual structure of the Church is approaching
reconstruction--its doctrines, creeds, tenets. This reconstruction
cannot possibly be effected by schools of theology alone. At every point
the theologian needs assistance from the man of science. Philosophy,
psychology, ethics, history, literature, sociology, language, natural
science, and archaeology are all bound up in an old creed and must be
looked into, ere a new statement can take form. Their data must be known
at first-hand. Hence there is no intellectual specialty which may not be
made invaluable to the Church.
Too often religion has been a matter of hearsay or dogma. A bitter
conflict has always raged between theology and the latest word of
science. The Church cannot afford to be without the scientific thinkers
of the race. The time has come when there is everywhere heard the call
of Jesus to men of mind.
What work awaits the university man or woman? It is to help free the
Church from traditions and superstitions which scholarship cannot
uphold. It is to throw fresh vigor and intellectual vitality into the
services of the Church. It is to build up a hymnology which shall be
noble and poetic in expression; it is to contribute a great religious
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