The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on “The Vanishing Sermon,” and “Will Preaching Become Obsolete?” I exchange them for two others, and find lengthy articles entitled “Can We Control Our Own Morals?” and “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life.” Now, if a disquisition on “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life” be not a sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavour to ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse to listen to professional preaching, because, while their democratic ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for scientific perfection in their products “leave them not far from the Kingdom of Heaven,” the Church, unhappily for itself, “has not been big enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their allegiance.” This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go to church--a novel and, I should think, popular point of view. Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia, and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects. As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. “The faith we need is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and morals by going at it in the right way.” The tendency of a simple truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism, is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.