In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were not affiliated with some church were looked upon as lawless pariahs. An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the streets I frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror. Our city was long known as “a poor theatre town,” where only Booth in _Hamlet_ and Jefferson in _Rip_ might be patronized by church-going people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority of the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church. Most of them are in nowise antagonistic to religion; they are merely indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It is inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of their fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and everlasting life. Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeated statement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by religion as in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling through a graveyard on a dark night. A recent essayist,[1] writing defensively of the church, cries, in effect, that it is moving toward the light; don’t shoot! He declares that no one who has not contributed something toward the solution of the church’s problem has earned the right to criticize. I am unable to sympathize with this reasoning. The church is either the repository of the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There is no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a fool, and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” he finds the church wanting, it is, as he would say, “up to the church” to expend some of its energy in proving that there is a good deal in it for him. It is unfair to say to Smith, who has utterly lost touch with the church, that before he is qualified to criticize the ways and the manners of churches he must renew an allegiance which he was far too intelligent and conscientious to sever without cause.