ty current; the clergy and the
congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are
forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a
thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this--any
more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and
industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary thought can see the
main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church
activities the clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient
Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are responding to the
actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and
this is bound to have an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can
say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life,
and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in
its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say
that the clergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, or in Red
Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist
forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust
means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity
by the method which modern educators most favor--by doing. Also he
will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news despatches from over the
world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the
fate of his own boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it
that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!

#The Desire of Nations#

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the
great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do
not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of
the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the
Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and
say that we think about nothing but the belly--and that is true, in a
way; because we are the representatives of a starving class, which
thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is
ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James,
the brother of Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the
body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have
souls; whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.

We have children, whom we love, and