Subsequently, this became a stumbling block to many people. A certain type of mind easily becomes confused in its thinking and fails to recognize the difference between an institution and the thing it represents. On the one hand, the priest has sometimes made the mistake of regarding the institution as an end rather than a means. On the other hand, the man on the street has sometimes assumed that the church pretends to be the sum and substance of the faith and has, consequently, failed to use it as a clearing house for the service he should have rendered to God and his fellow men. Any great idea or interest, however spiritual in its nature, must be incarnated in an institution or it will die. The life of the race could not be nurtured without the family. Commerce would die without the market place and the transportation system. Government could not be maintained without the state. Education could not be effected without the school. Religion would long ago have perished without the temple and the altar. Spiritual ideas do not cling to human custom. An institution must make them visual, real, and effective. Such is the reason for the existence of the church. The final vision of the Book of Revelation is of a social order without a temple. We are led to think that such a day will come, but that it will come only because the whole world shall have taken on the spirit and viewpoint of the house of worship. The mission of the church is to make itself unnecessary. It will be dispensable when all the world shall at last have conformed to the purposes of God. What Is Happening to Religion? (1929) A recent book makes the point that the old notion that science had defeated religion has been banished more by what has happened in the field of science during the last twenty-five years than by what has happened in the fields of religion and theology. Certain implications in this statement are worthy of consideration. With all its vaunted moral ideals, the boasted Victorian age did develop a rather marked and dangerous hostility to religion. It was the age of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley and, therefore, an age of discovery. The newness of some of the conclusions it reached caused the public mind to be carried away by its own enthusiasm. The pendulum is gradually coming to rest, and the scientist now understands that a new discovery is not a substitute for God. The greatest sobering influence science has known has been its own constant success in the field of discovery. The theory of development, at first thought to have overturned God’s throne, when studied was found to be full of previously unsuspected implications of the divine. Science discovered that it was not a substitute for God, but only a new theory of divine creation.