ses of poor people and also many
people of means use books within narrow limits only. They do not buy
them, they do not read them, they do not think in literary terms. Yet
they have access to books and they turn from them with a clear sense of
intelligent preference for other human values. Books are to them but an
alphabet and social life is the story.

My own impression is that the life of the marginal man is social rather
than literary. His religion will be a social religion rather than a
biblical religion. The weakness of Protestantism is that it stubbornly
insists upon literary interpretation of God and upon a biblical
ministry, while the population around these Protestant churches
exemplifies the diminished value of literature for spiritual uses.

The religious and ethical service of the days to come must interpret
the social life of the people. The great mass of the people care as
little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the
diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the
diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since
feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying
human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for
expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have
this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally
private property does not seem to have boundless value for human
satisfaction. Working men as I have known them do not take pains to get
rich. They know the way to wealth by economy and accumulation, but they
do not take it. They have a vast preference for the social intercourse,
friendly interchanges and mutual dependence by which their life is
refreshed, strengthened and sustained. Ethical policies of the future
while using literature and private property as efficient implements must
interpret social life itself as a flowing spring of religion and
morality.

The training of religious and ethical leaders should be undertaken in
the theological seminary and in the university in such manner as to
standardize the influence of these institutions, by the life not of the
exceptional man, but of the common man. The influence of educated men
must be used to reconstruct churches and societies upon the standards
not of the wealthy, the learned, the genius and the well-to-do, but by
the experiences of the poor, the workingman and the immigrant. The
standard in all religious a