th a pleasure and a privilege, there are
others, and they not few, whom no influence or persuasion can induce to
attend Sunday worship. Such persons must be left to spend the day as they
please.

A very large proportion of those who do not attend church services are
people of culture and character, from whom church-goers have nothing to
fear as regards a disturbance of their worship. Generally this class are
interested in having Sunday kept as a day of quiet and rest, and their
non-attendance at church is no evidence that they have any desire to
secularize Sunday.

An eminent writer has said: "We live in a transition period, when the old
faiths which comforted nations, and not only so, but made nations, seem to
have spent their force.... There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine,
in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery,
turbine-wheels, sewing-machines, and in public opinion; but not in divine
causes.... A silent revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious
sects, and in place of the gravity and permanence of those societies of
opinion, they run into freak and extravagance.... In creeds never was such
levity: witness the heathenisms in Christianity,--the periodic revivals,
the millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to
popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of mesmerism, the
deliration of rappings, the rat-and-mouse revelation, thumps in
table-drawers, and black art ... By the irresistible maturing of the
general mind the Christian traditions have lost their hold."

If these statements are true, we have a sufficient answer to the question
so often asked: "Why do not people go to church as they once did?" They do
not go because they have lost their faith in churches and worship,--at
least such have as are appealed to from those holding liberal and
reasonable views. There are no doubt men who consider the too often
expensive ways in which churches are supported as altogether beyond their
means. The demands of civilization upon individuals in these restless
times, when there are so many organizations, secret, secular, and
religious, are indeed too great for small incomes, especially as the cost
of food is continually increasing, and as society in other ways makes so
many secular demands upon them. Public worship is after all, in the view of
many persons, not a necessity, but only a luxury which can easily be
dispensed with. It might perhaps have been be