The essentials of Christianity

Preface

Our day calls for what is practical in education, efficient in industry, and workable in political and economic relations. In these spheres we are rightfully impatient of beating the air, intolerant of waste and loss of power, and insistent upon modern machinery and new methods. Organization is our watchword, and we want every man at his post.

Religion, like everything else, has caught the temper of the age. Its leaders are imbued with the same spirit as educators, and feel the thrill of business efficiency. They think in vital terms; they discern the need of new view-points; they speak in modern language; they know the power of organization; they want every religious man on the job ; they are aware that all our boasted modern science and invention, which are lightening the burdens of work, filling the world with comforts, and providing unheard-of leisure^ may do more harm than good unless men are made better. The world needs better men, and men everywhere need to lay hold upon those forces which enable them to become better.

These facts have been accentuated by the world war. Recently the church has been criticized for a sort of fatalistic remaining in old ruts while the world was rapidly changing. During the war the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, and other religious bodies, working at home and abroad, gave a tensely practical turn to religion. The millions of virile young men in cantonments and trenches who were religiously inclined, thought of religion in vital terms. They were eager for reality. They sought a workable and working religion.

Today some are growing negligent of religion and becoming indifferent to its claims. They seem unable to make those readjustments in thought and attitude which the times demand. They rebel against old theology without getting for themselves a new and better theology. They have not outgrown the notion obtaining a generation ago that science and the Bible were in conflict. They are impatient with the ptetace

church, failing to understand that institutions always move more slowly than individuals, and that the permanence and usefulness of all institutions are conditioned upon adjustments made by forward-looking people who feel the need of readjustments. Modern knowledge of science seems to have removed God from their world because they still think of God in outgrown terms. Christ fails to be dynamic in their lives because they cannot appropriate him by the theology of other days.

To discard what is outgrown is only half of the modern man's task; the other half is to take on and live in the new, and to be made of worth and service by the new. When some can no longer accept old terms and theologies they throw away their religion and become idlers in the moral and spiritual spheres. Let the modern man, if he feels the need, choose his own terms and make his own theology, but let him not be an idler in living the inspirational life and in helping those about him to a grip on God. Let him deal with vital and essential things in religion and leave other things of more remote consequence for time to adjust.

ptetace

This volume is sent forth with the hope that it may help men over difficulties which hold them back from Qiristian activity and enable them to enlist all their powers in the one task which alone can supply the world's greatest need — the building of better men.

Craig S. Thoms.