At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister entitled, "Why
the Masses Do not Attend the Churches." This good and pious man was not
ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law,
and "the masses" can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking
saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional
brethren have not brains enough to make religious services more
attractive than shaking dice for cigars or playing cards for drink; but
if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist in
spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them in
the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that "the
masses" stay out of hearing of his pulpit because he talks nonsense
of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of a thousand
other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like a scolding wife
who grieves because her husband will not pass his evenings with her. The
more she grieves, the more she scolds and the more diligently he keeps
away from her. I don't think Jack Satan is conspicuously wise, but he
is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty knack at making
people come again; but the really reprehensible part of his performance
is not the part that attracts them. The parsons might study his methods
with great advantage to religion and morality.
It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for their
object. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor, have
it for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt their
ministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister,
that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. "The
masses" move along the line of least reluctance. They do not really
enjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the day in the manner that
is least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their taste is not what it
ought to be. If this minister were a physician of bodies instead of
souls, and patients who had not called him in should refuse to take
the medicine which he thought his best and they his nastiest, he should
either offer them another, a little less disagreeable if a little less
efficacious, or let them alone. In no case is he justified in asking the
civil authority to hold their noses while he plies the spoon.
"The masses" have not asked for churches and services; they really do
not care for anything of the kind--whether they ought is another matter.
If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and worthy. But they
should understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which is
precisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, who
may not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. The
physician may have a diploma and a State certificate authorizing him to
practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised
upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will
submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the
dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may
justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation.
I am sure that the ministers and that singularly small contingent of
earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do
not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies
and general mental habitudes to the great majority of their fellow men
and women. Their voices, like "the gushing wave" which, to the ears of
the lotus-eaters,
"Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,"
come to us as from beyond a great gulf--mere ghosts of sound, almost
destitute of signification. We know that they would have us do
something, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they
are concerned for us, but why we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an
intelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and there
in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence--something
which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the
capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole is devoid of meaning.
Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks
its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp
in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a
survival--the memory of a dream.