The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New AgeBland, Salem Goldworth
Religion
The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age
Bland, Salem Goldworth
Christian sociology; Church and social problems
The task before Western civilization to-day, it is probable, is the
greatest civilization has ever faced. It is a complete reconstruction
that is demanded. It must be accomplished with speed. All the Western
nations are involved. There have been other reconstructions as drastic,
but either they have been permitted a much longer period of development,
or they have been confined to much smaller areas.
The struggle will not be over religious opinions, or political theories,
though both are involved. It will be over what touch men ordinarily
much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has
seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than
their profits. It will be a struggle no class can escape.
The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged
in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be
foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the
bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.
Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this
unparallelled crisis. But it must be Christianity in its purity and its
fulness, not a Christianity wasting its energy on doctrinal controversy,
broken by denominational divisions, or absorbed in taking care of its
machinery. It must, in short, be a Christianity neither
intellectualized nor sectarianized nor institutionalized.
It must be a Christianity, born as at the first in the hearts of the
common people, simple, democratic, brotherly; like a tree, its top in
the sky but its roots deep in common earth; treating institutions, even
the most venerable, as the mere temporary contrivances that they are;
with the faith of Jesus in the human heart and in the ultimate triumph
of love, and a willingness, like His, to find a throne in a cross.
Warwick Bro’s & Rutter, Limited,
Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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