Such naïve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me
conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit
within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today
what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone
made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check
upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to
untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to
others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and
everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious
conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from
the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate,
to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young
and prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and most
detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us
has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating
of "courage," "patriotism"--what crimes have been committed in
its name!--"development of backward people," "brotherhood of man,"
"service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural ethical
idealism," "the common destinies of nations"--and now he rises up and
glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so far
as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and
flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to
believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become
a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of
sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!

[Footnote 21: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 376.]

Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in our churches.