the Church. Try as
it would, Mother Church could not cover them with her wings. Many of
these activities were alien to {196} her genius and, as they waxed in
strength and confidence, stepped boldly out into the arena of secular
life.

One has only to take a broad survey of modern society to realize how
completely secular life has found means to perform functions which were
formerly carried by the Church. The very control which the Church
wished to exercise repelled them and drove them into the world with its
freedom and tolerance. Free association, individual enterprise, the
creative fervor of genius, and, later, governmental policy have worked
wonders in overcoming the meagerness of secular life. Education is now
almost universal, and so the masses live lives which touch a myriad
interests never known to them in other days. Art has broadened its
scope and now touches with magic fingers all phases of human life,
nature and man being alike raised to a higher spiritual level by her
work. Science has reached out into all parts of nature and thrown a
transforming light upon all things. Philosophy has left the old
scholastic concepts and mated with science to explain the world in
which we live. Charity is giving way to a broader conception of social
justice. In short, the old division of life into two spheres, the
earthly and the spiritual, no longer has its old significance. The
spiritual has made its home in man's daily life, in his reading, his
art, his thinking and his doing. _Wherever there are genuine values,
there is the spiritual_. _Is not loyalty to these spiritual values of
human life coming to be the sole meaning of religion_? Is it within
the power of an institution, still dominated by beliefs hostile to this
frank humanism, to cherish and guide the unfolding of the spiritual
life of the present? That is the query which I bring with me when I
contemplate the {197} Church. Has not the free life of the present
outgrown any centralized and institutionalized control?

To-day, ideas and enthusiasms find their organs in the teeming secular
world. Moral idealism is at home upon the earth in fellowships and
loyalties in which men discover much of their reason for being. The
pulse of society beats time to the songs of its true poets, and throbs
at the call to battle for some noble achievement, while the Church
dreams of the past and the days of her greatness, or tenderly stoops to
comfort those who cli