THE NEW GOD.

It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say if he

were not dead, that that there should be an immediate definition of the

“New God.” It is not easy to define the New Woman--not easy to define

the New Man, nor to formulate New Ideas, but, in these days, when the

passion for money getting over-shadows everything else in life, and

colors our religion and philosophy, with the cheap cynicism of poor

cheated greed, it is easy to define the New God. In the first place, He

is everything that the Old God was not; and that is saying everything

that the Modern Dives wishes said--and for which he pays his preacher.

The successful modern preacher has to be a man of great intellectual

parts, and some knowledge of affairs. He must be a man of the world,

for it is the function of a new prophet in a successful metropolitan

church to preach the New God. And this is most effectively done while

occupying the Old Pulpit. An adroit and conservative judicial spirit

has entirely renovated and made respectable the gift of prophecy in

the Christian church. So we see the churches filled with the social

charity of sweet and silken equality, and all things are kept as sweet

and peaceful as possible in this atmosphere that once reeked with

sulphurous fumes for the wicked. But the sweet savor of camphor and

smelling salts has stifled the sulphur,--and all other disagreeable

odors in God’s House.

The churches of today are mostly mausoleums in which rest the crumbling

remains of the ancient God. But an intellectual age still delights

in the glamor of impressive ritual, and his name and attributes are

enshrined in Creed, Decalogue and Hymn. But the old Law is serenely

disobeyed, with the assurance that the New God is much too good or much

too distant to perplex himself with the peccadillos of good society.

As a certain French countess said in the court of Louis XV., “The good

God would surely think twice before damning people of quality”--and

undoubtedly the New God is more liberal and refined than the old one.

The New God, like the cynic man of the world, takes the world as he

finds it. He is a being of an infinite indifference to syndicates

(_sin_-di-cates!), deals (in which lurks the de’il!), coal oil

monopolies (whence come endowments that throttle free speech on social

questions), sugar trusts (that capture Congress), and the ways of a man

with a maid--or, what is quite as wonderful--the ways of a new maid

with an old man.

The New God is a dilettante in religion, who winks (when bribed with a

good service in a fine church) and looks the other way when broad-cloth

and satin sow unto the flesh.

It is to be suspected that the New Girl in her way is better than the

New God. If the New Man becomes any worse, he ought to--well, it would

be impolitic to say what he ought to do. But between the New God and

the cynics of Mammon this world does not seem to promise the millennium

or Utopia just yet a while.