Chapter V

At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister, entitled, “Why the Masses Do Not Attend the Churches.” This good and pious man was not ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law, and “the masses” can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional brethren have not brains enough to make religious services attractive; but if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist in spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them in the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that “the masses” stay out of hearing of his pulpit because there he talks nonsense of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of a thousand other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like a scolding wife who grieves because her husband will not pass his evenings with her. The more she grieves the more she scolds, and the more diligently he stays away from her. Satan is not conspicuously wise, but he is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty knack at making people come again; but the really reprehensible part of his performance is not the part that attracts them. The parsons might study his methods with advantage to religion and morality.

It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for their object. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor, have it for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt their ministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister, that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. “The masses” do not really enjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the day in the manner that is least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their taste is not what it ought to be. If the minister were a physician of bodies instead of souls, and patients who had not called him in should refuse to take the medicine which he thought his best and they his nastiest, he should either offer them another, a little less disagreeable if a little less efficacious, or let them alone. In no case is he justified in asking the civil authority to hold their noses while he plies the spoon.

“The masses” have not asked for churches and services; they really do not care for anything of the kind—whether they ought is another matter. If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and worthy. But they should understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which is precisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, who may not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. The physician may have a diploma and a certificate authorizing him to practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation.

I am sure that the ministers and the singularly small contingent of earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies and general mental habitudes to the majority of their fellow men and women. Their voices are like “the gushing wave” which, to the ears of the lotus-eaters,

Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,

coming to us as from beyond a great gulf, mere ghosts of sound, almost devoid of meaning. We know that they would have us do something, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they are concerned for us, but why, we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an unintelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and there in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence—something which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole signifies nothing. Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a survival—the memory of a dream.