The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the
divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine
life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in
their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its
primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men,
but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things
they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote
to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church
whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of
mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly
prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual
service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men
and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the
new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of
deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous
effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own
sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows
and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a
dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is
welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be,
inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is
coming to life. He is already a worshipper.
By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man
who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen
to him after death. He belongs properly in the congregation of
self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.
The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of
service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save
their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all
service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each
other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The
leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in
and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but
versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer
direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult
research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and
chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the
fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human
self-realization.
III
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