(7) That it is immoral to lay up riches with the hope that with them we may buy, for ourselves or for our heirs, exemption from the common lot of useful and productive labor; that an economy based on an increasing, unpaid, interest-bearing debt, in which men seek to acquire some ownership, that thereby they may gain relief from the necessity of earning bread by work, is an unnatural economy, doomed to result in social chaos. It is right for man to desire a reasonable security, especially in age; but such security cannot rightly come by increment from private investment. A Christian security must be a social security.

These ethical convictions are clear in the New Testament, recognized by reputable Christian theologians. In accordance with them, Jesus lived. It was because He proclaimed them that He was crucified. To them the saints have borne their witness. Because the Church of the late yesterdays soft-pedaled them, striking its forte on more comforting notes, stressing pious acts and subtle formulas with which to decorate an essential worldliness, the wisdom of Jesus, which probes to the heart of our common problems, is a wisdom well-nigh forgotten. There are millions of Christians who simply do not know that the Christianity to which they give a vague and occasional allegiance involves obedience to such hard and searching sayings. When they hear a preacher re-echo these Christian precepts, they take offense. "Let the parsons keep their hands off economics and their voices out of politics." So say many, even most, professing Christians nowadays, quite unaware that they are rebuking, not the preacher who repeats the maxims, but Him who in the first place proclaimed them as having a changeless and divine validity (One should note, however, that Christ did not teach that the Church should seek to establish itself as a sort of rival State, and that Christian moralists are unsympathetic with theocracy. The State is rather to be regarded as directly responsible to God. As Father Kelly of Keiham once put it in terms of the English scene, "It is the duty of Lambeth to insist that Westminster obey God. It is not right for Lambeth to attempt to make Westminster obey Lambeth."); and if even Christians are unaware of what their Master teaches, one can hardly expect that the world at large should understand. It is because the Church has thus obscured the socially prophetic note that it seems to most people to have no relevancy. The masses of the folk, observing the Church as of late the Church has been willing to present itself, say, "There is nothing here to bother with. These people bear within themselves no salvation. They are as mad as all the rest of us. They are not worth listening to. They are not even worth crucifying."

4

Is the Church then obsolescent?

Certainly the conventionalized Church of the late past seems to have before it little or no future: the tolerated and patronized Church, endowed or otherwise supported—and controlled—by mildly interested adherents who are more than willing to be men and women of the world as it is; the ever so respectable Church, intent upon its own repute, keeper of well-swept conventicles, attended by properly starched congregations (mostly middle-aged or older), and afraid to call its soul its own lest someone be offended; the Church willing to accept divided lives; the Church as buttress of a social order based on values not those of its Master. That Church will die; indeed it is dying now with great rapidity. It has become to the more vital elements of society, and particularly to the young, more often than not a bore and an impertinence.