Kingdom and the United States is a marked difference--it is the air of
the preacher. The Englishman is positively sublime in his
unconsciousness of the fact that he had lost a grip of his people. The
American knows and does not blink the fact and is frantically
endeavoring by social service, by popular lectures, by music, by
current topics, by vehement eloquence to regain the grip of his people;
and it must cut a live manly man to the quick to know that his best
efforts on salvation are too often expended on dear old saintly ladies,
who could not be damned if they tried.
Now the curious thing about Canada, which I don't attempt in the least
to explain, is this: whether the preacher pules, or whines, or moons,
or shouts to the rafters, or is gifted with the eloquence to touch "the
quick and the dead"; whether the music be a symphony or a dolorous
horror of discords; whether there be social service or old-fashioned
theology; whether, in fact, the preacher be some raw ignorant stripling
from the theological seminary, or a man of divine inspiration and
power--whatever is or is not, if the church is a church, from Halifax
to Vancouver, you find it full. I have no explanation of this fact. I
set it down. Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their
church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that
the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations,
what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation--opens
that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and
idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the
gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. "The Happy Warrior" in Watts'
picture dreamed of the spirit face above him in his sleep. So may
Canada dream in her tireless urgent business of nation-making; and
religion may visualize that dream through the church.
Understand--the Canadian is no more religious than the American or the
Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer.
He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He
strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one
cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the
Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new
frontier cities is to see a church debouching of a Sunday night. The
people come out in black floods. In one foreign church in Winnipeg is
a membership of four thousand. I think of a little industrial city of
Ontario where there is a church--one of three--with a larger membership
than any single church in the city of New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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