Nor can I justly be denied the right of criticism because my own ardor is diminished, and I am frequently conscious of a distinct lukewarmness. I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings of Christianity; nevertheless the church--that is to say, the Protestantism with which I am familiar--has seemed to me increasingly a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men such as Smith and myself the help and inspiration of the vision of Christ. There are far too many Smiths who do not care particularly whether the churches prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy of the church’s best consideration. Even if the ninety-and-nine were snugly housed in the fold, Smith’s soul is still worth the saving. “I don’t want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that.” Yet Smith doesn’t care a farthing about the state of his soul. Nothing, in fact, interests him less. Smith’s wife had been “brought up in the church,” but after her marriage she displayed Smith to the eyes of the congregation for a few Easter Sundays and then gave him up. However, their children attend Sunday school of a denomination other than that in which the Smiths were reared, and Smith gives money to several churches; he declares that he believes churches are a good thing, and he will do almost anything for a church but attend its services. What he really means to say is that he thinks the church is a good thing for Jones and me, but that, as for himself, he gets on comfortably without it. And the great danger both to the church and to Smith lies in the fact that he does apparently get on so comfortably without it! I My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been rather varied, and while they present nothing unusual, I shall refer to them as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches. One of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and Presbyterian, and I “joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming later a communicant of the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a vestryman and a delegate to councils, and for twenty years attended services with a regularity that strikes me as rather admirable in the retrospect.