This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the
personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural,
semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while
are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved,
it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their
accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore
the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of
control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to
bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life
into harmony with their fundamental demands.
The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and
the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received.
In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life
of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine
altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.”
The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human
purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it;
but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to
God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no
divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a
man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped wife and nurse
and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill
can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep
thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do
thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge
and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to
extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives
from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a
chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to
some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he
will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but
in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.
Or, indeed, he _might_ found a church or endow a minister. For are we
to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the
Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it
will be a very different church from the churches with which we are
familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and
magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital
efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way
of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by
performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There
is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about
the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God
enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is
like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands
the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It
is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this
belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not
be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as
very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that
which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation
between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this
animistic and supernatural survival in religion.
But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving
efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance upon
church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living,
seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the
perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration
from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence
Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration,
it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person,
the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men
from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide
and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are
to live.
The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the
divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine
life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in
their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its
primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men,
but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things
they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote
to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church
whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of
mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly
prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual
service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men
and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the
new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of
deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous
effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own
sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows
and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a
dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is
welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be,
inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is
coming to life. He is already a worshipper.
By this token, there will be no place in the new church for the man
who is anxious about his soul or who thinks much of what will happen
to him after death. He belongs properly in the congregation of
self-seekers; not in the church of the divine life.
The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of
service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save
their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all
service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each
other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The
leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in
and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but
versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer
direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult
research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and
chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the
fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human
self-realization.