How do we account for the ecclesiastical situation that is revealed by the church announcements in the daily papers of any large city? I shall not stop to characterize either the sermon topics or the publicity methods that are here disclosed, for this has been done many times, and the facts speak too loudly for themselves. Many explanations have been offered, but the background reason usually remains unnoticed. It is that the church already _has_ religion. It has it, and therefore peddles it; it peddles it, and therefore all the devices of the advertiser, the hawker, and the auctioneer become appropriate; and because they are appropriate, the church that is most up-to-date in using them esteems itself the most enterprising. The ministerial and ecclesiastical jazz and piffle are direct results of having minds that are at rest upon the main issues. Reliance upon yesterday’s thought produces the vacant, noisy mind of today. Orthodoxy did it! Every orthodoxy, whether it emphasizes a formula of thought, or loyalty to an institution, or the propriety of an habitual process--every orthodoxy, whether economic, political, social, professional, educational, scientific, or religious (and we have them all)--every one, though created by reason, is a drag upon reason. Yet orthodoxy is only an organized or social expression of a necessary and inescapable factor in the exercise of intelligence. It is because we remember, form judgments, make inferences, and then use the products of this process as data both for immediate decisions where action is necessary and for new judgments--it is for this reason that we are humans at all and not brutes. Our fairest structures are built upon past thinking as well as through present thinking. There is no other way. Irrationalism or pure romanticism may be useful now and then as a protest or as a spur, but this is never the horse that carries the load. Here, then, is our paradoxical situation: We must guide thinking by thinking; we must trust reason; but reason itself, in this process, binds us to the irrational. What would be a reasonable policy in this situation? XXII THE DEEP DEPRAVITY OF OUR RESPECTABLE FAULTS Men check their own growth by self-imitation. Now, inasmuch as each self exists in and through reciprocity with other selves, self-imitation becomes a criss-cross of copyings. This mutual imitation of one another is “respectability.”