One thoughtful respondent who is facing his sunset years says that he has heard some sixty-five hundred sermons and has reversed certain of his opinions so that he has felt compelled to resign as a trustee of his church since he has a new and clear idea of the kind of church he wants. He cannot longer believe in the kind of deity who likes to be flattered, thanked, entreated, and listen to Te Deums. “We inherit such ideas from vain Oriental kings.” “Symbolisms a thousand years old are not suited to us or to our times.” “I cannot subscribe to that stock idea--‘the religion I got from my mother’s knee is good enough for me’--for by the same token we should now be idolaters or Druids.” “Now that the church has become a man it ought to ‘put away childish things’ and should no longer use ‘bottles’ and ceremonies two or three thousand years old.” “If we judge the church by its results in suppressing selfishness or even vice, it is a failure and any other agency in any other field or business not being able to show any better and faster results, that is, in reducing crime, unrest, selfishness, and hate between classes, races, and nations, especially as evidenced by the experiences of the decade 1911–1921, would have to resign.” “If Christianity had not been, almost from the very start, handicapped by the church in creating irrelevant and quarrelsome issues and diverting emphasis to a future life, instead of improving the conditions of the present one, it is fair to say that our present social, moral, and spiritual condition would have been very different from and better than it is.” The church atmosphere, hymns, prayers, sermons, ceremonies, “are all age-musty and dominated by and saturated with miracles and sanguinary and puzzling atonement and trinity theology, things with which I am no longer in sympathy and the emphasis of which is offensive to me.” “I think all these things are man-made incrustations. I sometimes think the wonder is not why so many men stay away from church but why so many attend it. Religion must be rescued. I do not know how but it has got to be done.” CHAPTER VIII SOME CONCLUSIONS