become so fully accepted, organized, and established that the Roman-Protestant barrier assumes the permanence of the everlasting hills. In It is, however, with quite another separation that this discussion proposes more especially to deal. American communities there is forming a line of demarcation which appears to gain definiteness between church people and non-church people, religious and irreligious, saints and sinners. Evangelistic efforts designed specially to reach those outside the Churches seem to meet with a diminishing response from the unchurched multitude. Either there is a growing indifference toward relig. ion in a large section of the community, or there is developing a party spirit, a group consciousness, suggest ing a definite crystallizing of antichurch sentiment. Whatever the true nature of this cleavage, it can readily be seen that it presents to the Christian mind a problem of serious dimensions, calling for frank treatment and a genuine solution. Inquiry into the history of its development is in order. The first New England settlers brought with them the idea of the English parish church, one church in a community. In many English villages the Church of England has the only religious edifice and is the only religious agency. All the people feel that they belong to the church and that the church belongs to them. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, saints and sinners, read together the same ritual and unitedly pray, "God have mercy upon us, miserable sinners." The thing to note here is that there is no dividing line. Before God all are equal. None thanks God that he is not as other men. Criticism of the ritual is doubtless possible, but it may be unhesitatingly admitted that the united confession and prayer have a democratic influence and encourage a feeling of community solidarity. Thus it came about that, in early New England, township and church were the same. The town meeting voted land and money for a meeting house. Town hall and church in some New England towns are still under the same roof. Church membership was at first a voting qualification and the town meeting voted the pastor's salary from the taxes. This identity of town and church was of course destined to dissolution as controversies made divisions, as new denominations appeared, as the doctrine of complete separation of Church and State became accepted, and as the great revival movements strest the distinction between saint and sinner, regenerate and unregenerate. In this connection the story of the conflict over the Half-Way Covenant is not without interest. It must be remembered that, in those days, all were Calvinists. All believed that the individual is saved by a special impartation of the divine nature whereby his totally depraved human heart is regenerated irrespective of any act of his own will. Hence it became customary to require of all candidates for church membership the confession of a definite experience as evidence of the supernatural change. Always there were those who felt unable to claim the experience. Many of these were honest, good-living people, deeply interested in religious matters and, to all appearances, worthy of church privileges. What could be more natural than that many ministers should wish these people to receive some sort of church recognition? Furthermore, there may have been misgivings in some some clerical minds as to whether the confessed experience is always an infallible test, whether one whose life shows the peaceable fruits of righteousness may not have received the grace of God without knowing it, or, contrariwise, whether others who claim the experi ence and fail to produce the fruits desired may not be under illusion as to their experience. In this situation many churches adopted the so-called Half-Way Covenant. By this arrangement, those who could not claim a supernatural regeneration, but were of good moral character and gave assent to the church covenant, might have their children baptized, vote in the business meetings of the church, and enjoy all its privileges except the sacrament of the Lord's supper. Into this situation came the Great Revival connected in history with the name of Jonathan Edwards. This movement strengthened the emphasis on a conscious regeneration. Edwards denounced the Half-Way Covenant, and it became generally discredited. Even now it is sometimes referred to as a compromise with Satan. In justice to the many excellent pastors who favored it, their motive for doing so should not be overlooked. They saw the danger of dividing their communities. They knew that, should the exclusion be made complete, many whom they loved and respected would be on the outside. Nor could they help knowing that such cleavage would drive many who were not far from the kingdom of God much further away. There stirred in the hearts of those pastors something akin to the old Christian love-passion which hates dividing lines and barriers and feels Jesus' desire to gather all into the fold. It is a case of an instinct truer than logic, the heart bigger than the mind, of a love that is broader than theology. No reaction from that triumph of the exclusive spirit has since set in. Rather it has been strengthened by the multiplication of sects and the political activity of the evangelical churches in the prohibition cause. While on this issue the churches have won an astonishing moral victory, it has been gained at the cost of definitely alining a large body of men not merely as deliberate church absentees but as church opponents. Few religious leaders perceive the danger inherent in all negative reforms. When the Church takes from a man that which he wants, however harmful, she can not expect to hold his allegiance unless she offsets this deprivation by helping him to gain some positive good. While the modern situation presents some hopeful features in the way of increased cooperation among churches and a movement back to the old New England idea of the community church, it presents also this exceedingly grave menace of a vast aggregation of people, in many communities the majority, excluded from religious influences, acquiring a group or party consciousness which is in danger of becoming, where it has not actually become, antagonistic. Indications are not wanting that some elements in the churches recognize and accept this state of things and are adjusting their theology and their spiritual attitude in accordance with it. Premillennialism, at any rate, seems willing to accept this cleavage as it despairs of ever transforming the world into the kingdom of God and limits the Church's mission to the nurture of the elect few. If Premillennialists thus candidly state in doctrinal form this gloomy electionism, they have no monopoly of the exclusive, pessimistic attitude. The pastor of a Vermont Congregational church whose soul was vexed as he viewed the number of non-churchgoers in his community anxiously consulted one of his deacons as to what should be done about it. This was the reply he received, "I have lived in this town, sir, for fifty years and I have noticed that there are some people who go to church and some who do not, and I expect there always will be." Altho at present the situation is not hopeless, it is time to face the possibilities of a complete and permanent dichotomy. Already vast numbers of men accept their exclusion from the church as a thing accomplished, and proceed with serene complacency to substitute lodge ritual and sentiment for the Christian religion. Further development of this tendency is to be expected unless the Church rises to the emergency. There must inevitably be a more complete isolation of the churches with permanent restriction of their influence. Christ's leaven, instead of permeating the whole lump, must be walled off from a large section of humanity. Few of us like to face this prospect. Prevalence of a stark materialism, already much too powerful in our country, could not be prevented in the group outside the pale. Along with this must go an increase of commercial rottenness and rapacity. And, because high morality can not possibly be sustained without the religious sanction and inspiration, a greater moral decline than we have yet witnessed must take place, with deep injury to our national character. Having thus briefly hinted at the dangers of the situation, it remains only to throw out a few obvious suggestions as to what may be done to avert the catastrophe. In order to avoid becoming a people apart, something may be done by church members as individuals by actively participating in all work for community benefit. Their interest should be positive and constructive rather than negative and prohibitive. Christians whose sole interest seems to be to curtail the pleasures of others aggravate the evil of church isolation. Those who determinedly promote the forms of good which the common mind can appreciate are valuable factors in maintaining the Church's touch with the community. For the same purpose such social and institutional services as the Church can perform for the community are not only valuable but indispensable. By some these functions are regarded as outside the Church's sphere, or are condemned as detrimental to the spiritual life. This view accords neither with present-day facts nor with church history. In the first two centuries of the Christian era there were long periods during which public worship and public evangelism were rendered impossible by governmental persecution, yet those were the times when the Church was at its best in spiritual efficiency. How were the people reached? By personal evangelism and social service. To-day these two services must go hand in hand. And the Church must serve the social needs of the people not as a bait offered in her own interest but as a work she loves to do for the people she loves to help. Social service must supplement, not substitute, the spiritual mission of the Church. When organized Christianity receives such a baptism of the primitive Christendom spirit that it regains a consuming interest in people as people and for their own sakes; when people are valued as persons and not as denominational statistical material; when the Church forgets herself in her great mission and church-consciousness is lost in Christ-consciousness; then, and not until then, will sects sink their rivalries and unite their forces in the interests of communities. Then will the vision of a reunited Christendom begin to be realized. In the meantime, it is of the greatest importance to shun and to teach others to shun every appearance of social, moral, and theological exclusiveness. The "holier-than-thou" attitude renders spiritual influence impossible. The supreme effort should be to make all, even the most practical, phlegmatic, unsentimental, and religiously ungifted of our people feel that they have a part and lot in the matter. In nothing do Jesus' profound insight into the human heart and his long, prophetic foresight of the difficulties to beset the kingdom in the ages to come manifest themselves so wonderfully as in his showing that the worst enemies of the kingdom are religious rather than moral. The woman taken in adultery, dangerous tho she be, is less dangerous to the kingdom than the pious person who insists on carrying out the law and stoning her to death. The publican who prays "God be merciful to me, a sinner" will do less harm to the cause of righteousness than the Pharisee who thanks God he is not as other men are. Never was there a time in Christian history when there was a more urgent need for the Church to turn its gaze inward, acknowledge its own faults, confess its own sins, and, going back to first principles, exchange the exclusive spirit of the Pharisee for the inclusive spirit of Christ. HISTORICAL CRITICISM-CHURCH EFFICIENCY EXPERT The Rev. D. R. PIPER, La Grange, Mo. SOME one has inaptly written that hardly be said to have preserved the church exists for "the preservation of the newer ethical values." This is neither an accurate statement of fact nor a true ideal of purpose. Certainly, the Church has figured very largely in history and in theological conceptions as a preserver and conserver of values. Bishop Gore, in his monumental mistake entitled, The Church and the Ministry, says: "newer ethical values." Many of the newer ethical values are still knocking and shivering at the door of ecclesiastical recognition. Even those of them which have been admitted to protection by church councils and conferences are regarded with suspicion by the big portion of the rank and file of Christendom. And the reason for such suspicion lies in the fear of the heresy of innovation, spoken of by Bishop Gore, and rests upon the idea that the functions and life of the Church are already fixt by the canons of a "once-for-all revelation." It is inaccurate therefore, as statement of fact, to speak of the Church as a "preserver of the newer ethical values." And the phrase is even more fatal as a definition of purpose; for the big word in it is, preservation. There is no warrant in the gospels for believing that the Church was founded to preserve anything. The business of the Church is not to preserve, but to energize. It is com- ' missioned to baptize all peoples-baptism being a symbol of the energizing entrance of the Holy Spirit. It is to declare the good news of God and call upon people to repent and turn-such repentance and turning being made possible only by the influence of a spiritual, energizing agent upon the soul. The task of the Church of to-day is not to preserve the Bible and the ecclesiastical tradition from critical onslaughts, nor the creeds from discredit, nor the apostolic succession from extinction, nor the forms of church government from disuse and oblivion, nor the ethical values new or old. The Church is not a safety deposit vault, nor is it an endowed chair of ethics in the university of the universe. It is a dynamo of God; its sanction is not a tradition nor a once-for-all revelation, but an enduement of power from on high. It is, therefore, the task of the Church so to stimulate, persuade, constrain, empower, and energize the whole of life with a religious motive -so to permeate social and industrial, as well as personal, ethics with a religious energy-that nothing but the living, growing truth will be preserved. It is the work of the Church to keep everything in one great ferment of change from the state of things as they are toward the state of things as they ought to be. Church is a leaven. The No one can study the New Testament by the historical method and believe that it is or was ever intended to be a "once-for-all revelation," if by that phrase it is meant, among other things, that the New Testament contains a final regula for the organization and governance of the Christian community. If one were to debate the question whether Christ ever had any such organization in mind as exists today under his name, he would find small comfort of argument in the gospels, either pro or con. And it is quite obvious that if the Master gave his disciples any ready-made instructions for the organization of the Church, the gospels failed to record the fact. It is equally apparent that the disciples themselves knew of no such plan. They did not at once separate themselves from the synagog. They were Puritans within Judaism before they became separatists from it. They felt their way toward organization as the need arose, by means of prayer and common sense. When the seven were set apart the apostles did not tell the faithful that the Lord had made provision for deacons in his church. They merely declared themselves too busy with spiritual interests to be longer troubled with the temporal ministrations, and advised that some one else should be delegated to that work. And because some one was delegated to that work in Jerusalem, every church since that day has felt obliged to delegate some one to hold a similar office whether the local need for such work existed or not. Why? Because, forsooth, the diaconate is a Biblical office! Can you find a local church society which defends its form of organization on the ground that through it the needs of the community are best met? Do denominations point customarily to their superior efficiency as leaveners of human society in justification of the distinctive type of social machinery they have developed? Rather, they point to dubious proof texts and more dubious traditions. They justify their constituted forms on the ground of Biblical sanction. And so we have the monarchical, hierarchical, republican, and democratic forms of church organization and a few hybrids, all of which think to find their prototypes in the New Testament. Let us pray, brethren let us devoutly thank God that not more than one of them can really be a replica of the apostolic Church. And it is safe to remark that the one which is nearest to the primitive form is, quite likely, farthest from serving the spiritual needs of the present age. For, however much we |