To-day, ideas and enthusiasms find their organs in the teeming secular world. Moral idealism is at home upon the earth in fellowships and loyalties in which men discover much of their reason for being. The pulse of society beats time to the songs of its true poets, and throbs at the call to battle for some noble achievement, while the Church dreams of the past and the days of her greatness, or tenderly stoops to comfort those who cling to her sanctions and her vision of a heavenly kingdom, not of this world. She played her part, and she played it greatly--that much we must avow, even while we point out her present limitations--but the world has passed beyond her tutelage and runs lithesomely and courageously into fields where she cannot bring herself to follow. Thus is it, and thus has it always been--institutions and ideas have their period of usefulness when they serve as organizing centers for social tendencies; but the time inevitably comes when they lose their creative power and are outgrown by the life which has made them and is greater than they. And yet there is hope. Will the dethroned monarch recognize the inevitableness of the massive revolution which is surging round her and give up her outgrown pretensions, willingly consenting to play a lesser role in full harmony with the spirit of the time? Not yet will this voluntary abdication come. But, some time in the future, the new loyalties will surely seep into the Church and prepare it for the great sacrifice in which it will find its saving service. Modernism can afford to wait patiently, for time fights on its side. {198} CHAPTER XV THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION--PROTESTANTISM