ous gospel of Success, by adding penalty to
the self-denying clergy; what is painfully obvious is their apparent
unbounded confidence that there are no clergy sufficiently foolish to
sacrifice stipend at the call of faith's venture! And since the
Armistice, the only real activity in organized religion has been a
series of "drives" for vast sums of money, in most cases professionally
directed.

"A consideration of a few facts such as the forgoing must readily
convince even the most unimaginative person that whatever power faith
might have had in the past, it counts for little today; that its
secrets, its very meaning have been forgotten. Otherwise there could not
be this extraordinary exaggeration of the place of money in spiritual
operation, and the unblushing, tacit admission that mammon, which Christ
so warned against, had been recognized as the master of spiritual
situation, instead of the willing servant and useful adjunct of faith it
was designed to be in the Christian vision. Indeed they all speak of
that, largely unconscious, atmosphere of distrust of God which is so
all-prevailing among Christian people today. If the great, positive vice
of the age is covetousness, the great negative one is distrust of God;
the two invariably go together as parts of a whole--one is the reverse
side of the other--for, it is not that we _must_ not, or _ought_ not,
but that we "_cannot_ serve God and mammon." And this atmosphere is one
in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it
breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround
itself when human hearts will.

"It is not surprising that out of such conditions should grow false
values, and that spirituality should be measured by the world's
standard. Thus we have fallen into the vicious habit of adjudging
qualifications for spiritual leadership among the clergy by the amount
of their stipends, and measuring their potentialities for usefulness in
the Kingdom of God by the amount of their yearly incomes; among the
laity, the men of power are ever the men of material means, whom we
permit to play the part of Providence in feeding and sustaining the
Church from large purses, the filling of which will not always bear
close investigation, and the really successful parish is always the one
that, no matter what its spiritual condition, rejoices in abundant
material means. So evident is it that the means of spiritual life have
been so confused w