It is as easy as it is dangerous for those of us who have upon our hearts
a work of reform to become victims of fads. When new principles, directly
or indirectly related to religious work, are discovered and announced, it
is not difficult for our appreciation of their worth to become so
enthusiastic as to eclipse everything else in our system of reform with
an overdeveloped sense of their importance.
They usually are important as having bearing upon the great problem we
work to solve. The world, however, is apt to wonder if we know just what
we are about when we lay one fad aside for another, just as we had laid
earlier fads aside for the one, and it does not always place the most
liberal construction upon our enthusiasm.
As a way out, we should properly appreciate and use each new discovery
which has bearing upon our task. We should not, however, allow it to
assume the proportions of a fad so far as we are concerned. Our attitude
toward our ideal and its realization must be broad enough to take in more
than one side of it at once.
So far as the Church and its task is concerned it will be found that the
ideal Paul had for it is not likely to receive a successful addition.
Each social institution has one task to perform, and it will be found to
be unable to perform more than that one task well. We have agencies for
the various forms of service to society. Not one of the others, however,
approaches closely the field which the Church was designed to fill. Its
ministry is purely spiritual and when it leaves that field and takes its
stand in any other it is not only overlapping upon the work of other
social agencies, but it is leaving undone a work which there is no other
agency to do.
In other words, the Church will probably not be able to define a higher
mission for itself than that expressed in one of the letters to
Timothy—a pillar and ground of the truth—a stay and foundation of that
which is everlasting.