because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is
a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The church
member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He is
a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been
saved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right
you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It is
strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment
of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that
nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for
being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. It is
strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is
at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero,
degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled
hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! But
for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries,
up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by
discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Social
service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome
fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the
servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sin
is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need is
to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of
that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee
on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money,
and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!

Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse and
its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the
relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social
order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant