Second, there is something wrong with all of us, something which makes it easier to go down than to go. up, and to indulge our passions rather than to follow our conscience. The Bible tells us, and our hearts know, what that evil thing is. It is sin, selfishness, which separates us from our Father in heaven and from our brother-men on earth, and makes all the trouble in the world. We must escape from it, get rid of its guilt and its power, if we want peace and a better life.

Third, there is only one person who can deliver us, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He came from heaven, and lived a sinless life as the Son of man, and died upon the cross to save the world from sin. He rose from the dead to bring immortality to light. He is one with the Father. God is like Christ. He is love, forgiveness, mercy, truth. Every one who wants to may come to this Saviour. If you believe in Him, He will give you a new life. If you trust Him, He will give you the peace that is everlasting. If you honestly try to obey Him in being good and doing good, that will be the test and proof of your true faith. There is no other. Try this. You don't need to swallow a volume of theological definitions. Simply come to Jesus, trust Him fully, follow Him honestly, and you shall be saved. That is Gospel truth.

WHY CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY
IS MORE POPULAR1

Religious conservatism, for all its stern terminology of divine anger, narrow ways, and strait' gates, presents Christianity primarily as a comfort, as a means of getting off rather cheaply by the simple device of being sorry and believing something. Religious liberalism challenges men to an adventurous quest for the ultimate realities of life.

1 By Glenn Frank. William Jennings Bryan, a Mind Divided Against Itself. Century. 106: 795. September, 1923.

2 The original has "straight," which must be an inadvertent error.

E. AN ATTACK ON BOTH PARTIES

THE SHAME OF THE CHURCHES1

The clergy of the various Protestant churches and more especially the clergy of the Protestant Episcopal church during the past few weeks have been acting in such wise as to grieve their friends and to amuse their enemies. If the clergy, high and broad, are conspiring, together to bring their church into contempt and to destroy its influence, they are displaying an efficiency in their efforts that might well excite the envy of the successful business man. It is difficult for anyone of ordinary intelligence and common decency to retain a shred of respect for either party in this disgraceful quarrel.

When one hears the clergy shouting one to another, "I do believe” . . . "I do not believe in the virgin birth," one is not so much troubled by their orthodoxy or their heterodoxy as one is amazed at their bad manners. Matters which cultivated men and women take for granted or veil in decent phrase are unblushingly cried from the pulpit. I am sure if these reverend gentlemen could realize how their cries offend modest ears they would themselves blush for very shame. As they reveal themselves in this contention one deplores in the clergy not only their lack of reserve in the treatment of delicate subjects but more their seeming deficiency in intellectual discernment, their lack of spiritual insight, and their apparent ignorance of historical conclusions which for more than half a century have been the possession of every fairly educated man and woman.

It is plain that in these birth stories we are dealing not with prosaic history but with myth and legend. A

1 By Algernon S. Crapsey. Nation. 118: 53-4. January 16, 1924.

myth is a story told to shepherds by shepherds as they watch their flocks by night. A legend is the same story in poetical form, reduced to writing and recited by a prophet in the temple. History is the same story delivered as a lecture by a professor in a classroom. Of these three forms the last is the least vital. As Shultz says in his "Old Testament Theology;" "When we read the myths and legends of a people we have our fingers on the pulse and our ear on the heart of that people." The bishops may have been childish to take the birth stories literally, but the broad churchman is stupid not to take them at all. Through all the Christian ages, the Song of the Angels has been the carol of the children, and the coming of the wise men the comfort of the weary and heavy-laden. In these birth stories is the germ thought of a world beyond the world, without which our world were very sad and desolate. But the instant we remove these stories from their home in mythology into the sphere of literal history we destroy their charm and make of them mere stories for the nursery. The very same story, in its essentials, is told of e, Augustus Caesar. It is said that one day his mother, Maia, went into the temple to pray and as she prayed a serpent glided into the temple and embraced her and she conceived and the child who was born of that conception in due time became the Emperor Augustus, the master of the world./

༤

These myths were the natural product of the pious imagination of the worshipers of Augustus and the worshipers of Jesus. The Romans thought it impious to think of Augustus as the grandson of a Roman baker. nor could the Christian kneel in adoration before the son of a Galilean carpenter. The quarrel of the highs and the broads over the birth stories is a quarrel of the childish with the stupid. With the high churchman it is the outcome of a lack of intelligence; with the broad churchman a lack of feeling.

The deepest disgrace of this quarrel between the High Church, as represented by the bishop of New York, and the Broad Church, whose chief spokesman is the rector of the Church of St. Bartholomew, is that it is practically a quarrel about nothing. The bishop says Jesus is to him very God of very God; the rector says that Jesus is to him his divine Lord and Master. Such being the case, it would seem the sacred duty of the bishop to obey his God and of the rector to follow his divine Lord and Master. And if the bishop did obey his God and if the rector did follow his divine Lord and Master, would not these two meet in the midst of the stern moralities and severe spiritualities of the Sermon on the Mount, and meeting there must they not each fall down on his knees and cry, the bishop to his God, the rector to his Lord and Master: "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner?"

From that high altitude would not the sinful futility of his cathedral building be manifest to the bishop? Would he not see that to get the wherewithal to build his cathedral he must be careful not to offend the landlords and the money-lords of the city. Looking down from Morningside Heights he would see landlords exacting exorbitant rents for tenements unfit for human habitation; he would see pale, anemic women climbing darkened stairways to sleep in the fetid atmosphere of unventilated rooms; he would see weary workmen heavily slumbering in the same bed with wife and children; he would see the crowded tenements, the breeding place of sexual vice in its fouler forms of sodomy and incest.

And going to the Stock Exchange, the bishop would see the money-lords by the manipulations of the market robbing the innocent, impoverishing the widow and the orphan, and giving the tithe of these ungodly gains to the building and support of his cathedral.

It would then come home to the bishop as a student of history that in every age the building of temples and

cathedrals has been the cardinal crime of the bishops and the priests. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the bishops were exhausting the labor of the people in the building of the cathedrals the people themselves were living in wattle huts without window or chimney, frightened by the dark and smothered by the smoke. It was the sale of indulgences for sin to raise the money to pay for the building of the greatest of all cathedrals, the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, that roused the wrath of Luther, causing him to hurl his anathema at this wickedness and create the great schism in the church.

One single night spent by the bishop of New York alone on the mount of the sermon would, if he has any intelligence, any heart, any soul, make him ashamed and afraid and his quarrel with the rector of St. Bartholomew's would be as nothing in comparison with his quarrel with his own soul.

But the rector of St. Bartholomew's is in a still more perilous condition. It was easy for the rector of St. Bartholomew's to defy the bishop; St. Bartholomew's is the richest single congregation in Christendom; it is the church of the American millionaire and billionaire, and the rector knew that the bishop fears the millionaire and the billionaire more than he fears his God; so the rector was not afraid of his bishop. But the rector was and is afraid of his own congregation; he would never dare defy the millionaires and billionaires as he defied his bishop. He would never dare to tell the millionaires and billionaires to their face that the mere possession of the millions and billions was evidence of their godlessness; if they had not loved their money more than they loved their God they would not have had their money. This rector would never dare to tell his congregation that in living a life of wasteful idleness upon money which they had never earned they were more guilty than the wretched woman of the street who sells her body for her bread.