n? And what about the millions who go to church
because they are poor, and because life is a desperate struggle, and
this is one way to keep the favor of the boss, to get a little better
chance for the children, to get charity if you fall into need; in
short, to acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who
stand together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent,
contented in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call
them?

#The Church Redeemed#

Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish and
pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers one of the
fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will abolish poverty
and parasitism, it will make temptations fewer, and the soul's path
through life much easier; but it will not remove the necessity of
struggle for individual virtue, it will only clear the way for the
discovery of newer and higher types of virtue. Men will gather more
than ever in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one
another; but the places in which they gather will be places swept
clean of superstition and tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the
Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its
abuses, so the Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its
defense of parasitism and exploitation. I will record the prophecy
that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that
the Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they
deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for
teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right to
commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and Portugal, ever
buried newly-born infants in the cellars of nunneries.

The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew,
Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists
and traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt
itself, the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it
without followers. But in the great religions, which have a soul of
goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise,
prophets and saints who, as of old, will preach the living word of
God. In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new
Counter-Reformation. Even in the Catholic Church there is a
"modernist" rebellion; read the books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's
trilogy of novels, "The Saint", a