A striking example of this illusory self-involution is the continuance of denominational competition in rural communities after the facts and the wickedness of it have been exposed. Denominational officers responsible for this condition have become so far ankylosed by the poison of officialdom that they take only the feeblest steps towards reform, and meantime the laity, though it does not believe in this competition, contributes the money for keeping it going. Nothing will effectively counteract these tendencies except a further development within Protestantism of the functions of minorities. Among other things, we need a more critical church press and also more periodicals devoted to religion but entirely independent of official support. We must ask more questions, and questions with a sharper point. We must not hesitate to bring about losses of some kinds of power in order that spiritual powers of better quality may be released. Genial humor and good-natured satire might well be employed as one antidote to the sense of personal enlargement that so commonly attends elevation to office. If we Protestants gasp at the effect upon Catholic “dignitaries” of the authority that they wield, we should at least snicker out loud at the effect upon our own bishops. Active, unabashed, good-natured minorities are needed wherever our life is organized, and indeed wherever, organized or not, we move in masses. We owe a debt to anybody who employs unfashionable good taste. There is room for coteries of persons bent upon reaching out beyond the conventional to the beautiful and the true. We need minorities in morals, too; minorities that will openly place the weak points over against the strong points in current moral standards as well as practice, and that will also pay the cost of experiments in living upon a higher plane. We cannot have moral evolution without in some way abandoning old standards and adopting new ones. If this abandoning and adopting is desultory, hit-and-miss, and especially if it is compelled to be secret, evolution becomes unduly slow and costly, or else unduly fast and costly. The rational procedure is to recognize that there is a place for minorities that seriously experiment with reconstructions for the benefit of all. The widespread moral confusion and haste of the present day is a natural result of the lack of critical minorities thinking and experimenting in the open during the preceding two or three generations when the conditions of existence were being rapidly transformed by economic forces.