Preaching and Paganism by Albert Parker Fitch
page 84 of 210 (40%)
page 84 of 210 (40%)
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the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of the
pulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of common entertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity today about the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree, relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values. We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We are adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. In an issue last month of the _Inter-Church Bulletin_ was the following headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," and underneath the following: "George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general, says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than anything else is a strong injection of business method into their management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'" In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was an article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran: "Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions," and its subtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business Law in the Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen and the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial prosperity, a hawker of wares! If the _Bulletin_ ever penetrates to those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek. |
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