SOME OUTLINES OF THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE CHAPTER I THE POSITION AND OUTLOOK OF THE CHURCHES THERE is in many minds a conviction that the day of the Churches is drawing to a close. This is not merely an idea entertained by unsympathetic critics in whom the wish is father to the thought. It is the despairing belief of many who, by antecedents and even by ordination, are identified with the historical tradition and the spiritual mission of the Christian fellowships. Recent periodicals have been full of the question, Has the Church collapsed? and most of the answers, even by ministers or exministers, have inclined towards the affirmative. In many of the Churches the leaders are no longer leading; they have lost the sense of their distinctive task and function. They are groping in a twilight of intellectual and spiritual uncertainty. Their whole tone is "timid and apologetic," as of men who are uncomfortably doubtful whether they are rendering a service commensurate with their emolument. This misgiving in some cases has taken a very positive shape. Papers have appeared affirming that the Christian Church is in a state of complete apostasy from the spirit and teaching of its founders, and implying that sincere men should come out of her, lest they become partakers of her plagues. In this sense recently the Rev. Elvet Lewis (formerly the coadjutor in London of Mr. R. J. Campbell) expressed himself in the Atlantic Monthly. He has abandoned his own pastorate, and apparently despairs of any kind of religious organization possible under existing circumstances. The Century Magazine for February, 1915, contained a paper by Dr. Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, on the question "Has The Church Collapsed?" The burden of his plaint is that the Christian ecclesia has been false to its mission and purpose, from the very first day that its doctrine and organization began to crystallize into definite shape in the minds of SS. Paul and Peter. Dr. Schoonmaker's indignation is awakened by the fact that the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral was resented by the world on æsthetic grounds alone. To his mind the majestic beauty of the medieval shrines is itself a thing to be deplored. The cathedral, he thinks, is not the home, but the tomb of the spirit of Christ. It expresses not the triumph of the Church, but the victory of the world over the Church. His argument implies that Christianity ought always to have remained, what it was in the lifetime of Jesus, a direct spiritual influence of individuals upon individuals, without doctrine or organization, without hierarchy, and without pecuniary endowment. For him the apostasy began with SS. Paul and Peter, the former of whom—so it is implied—turned the religion of love into a system of unprofitable dogma, while the latter transformed it into a temporal power, destined subsequently to enslave the minds and souls of men. One cannot but feel the earnestness of purpose which these criticisms express, and it would be wrong not to salute with respect the spirit of Dr. Schoonmaker and |