hments" we have dovetailed into a once puritan
order of worship. That is true, but it is also true that these are
they who need the Gospel; also that these folk do influence the
time-current that enfolds us and pervades the very air we breathe and
that they and their standards are profoundly influencing the youth of
this generation. You need only attend a few college dances to be sure
of that! One of the sad things about the Protestant preacher is his
usual willingness to move in a strictly professional society and
activity, his lack of extra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrow
and unskillful observations and perceptions outside his own parish and
his own field.

Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is dominating
modern society. It began, like all movements, in literature and
philosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its way
into social and political and economic organizations. Now, when we are
dealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class;
this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in its most
brutal and entrenched expressions. Here it confronts every preacher
on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We are
continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of our
hard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries
of philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightest
practical significance. But few things could be further from the
truth. It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetually
moulding the life of office and market and street. It has sometimes
been the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent
and contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literature
and art. Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamental
indifference to their appeal. It forgets the significance of their
intellectual and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism and
obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensible
or more disastrous than in the preacher of religion.

Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society where
our own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the
breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us
ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant
there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we
see obvious political deca