Why Men Should Go to Church

by Archbishop John Ireland, D.D.

I will praise Thee, O Lord, with my whole heart: for Thou hast heard the words of my mouth. I will sing praise to Thee in the sight of the angels: I will worship towards Thy holy temple, and I will give glory to Thy name for Thy mercy and for Thy truth: for Thou hast magnified Thy holy name above all. — Ps. 187, vs. 1-2.

Let the words of Israel's Psalmist tell the purpose, assigned by today's ceremonial to the noble and beauteous edifice, the Cathedral Church of Wichita. A place it is where, from hearts and lips, praises will ascend to the throne of the Lord of heaven and of earth; where thanks will be spoken for the gracious mercies already received, prayers for the continued outstretch of protecting love; where God will be adored as the Creator and Sovereign Master, and man will prostrate himself as the creature and the dependent. The Cathedral Church of Wichita — "How terrible is this place! This is no other but the house of God and the gate of heaven" — a house made sacred to the worship of the eternal and almighty God.

The worship of God is man's first and supreme duty. This duty neglected, man is fatally deficient in the ethics of justice and moral goodness: whatever else he is, whatever else he does, he fails in the essential, and by naught else can he make amends. This duty neglected, the prime foundation is lost to all other duties: in the whole sphere of human conduct it is chaos and ruin.

Men Do Not Go to Church

He is not the enemy of his age who, while acknowledging in gladsome thought and word its glories and achievements, tells its misfortunes and mistakes, to the end that of those misfortunes and mistakes correction be made and perils hidden within them be put beyond reach. The question is often asked — Is the world of men growing better or worse as its years are prolonged? Better, certainly, we must say, as we view its conquests of earth and air, its marvellous gains in material wealth and power. But the problem assumes a very different aspect when we query: What of its spiritual and ethical life? And since it is indubitably true that the value of human life lies chiefly in those higher elements, that they only are the enduring fount of human greatness and felicity, the answer to the question — is the world of men growing better or worse — must be in ultimate analysis that which we give to this other question — What today in practice and in tendency is the spiritual and moral condition of ourselves, and of the multitudes of fellow-men who with us compose its life and determine its onward course?

I quote from an article in a recent number of The Atlantic Monthly — "Should Smith Go to Church?":

Smith and I attended the same Sunday school when we were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a matter of course. Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or pottering about his garden, or in his club or office, and after the mid-day meal he takes a nap and loads his family into a motor for a flight countryward . . . Smith is the best of fellows — an average twentieth-century American — diligent in business, a kind husband and father, and in politics anxious to vote for what he thinks to be the best interests of the country. In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were not affiliated with some church were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts . . . yet in the same community no reproach attaches today to the non-churchgoing citizen. A majority of the people I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church. Most of them are in no wise antagonistic to religion; they are merely indifferent.

We all know Smith: we know too many like him: the number of those like him is yearly on the increase among our neighbors and acquaintances. The cry of alarm has been raised through the land, and with good reason: men no longer go to church. It was not so a generation or two ago. Says the New York Evening Post in a comment on the article in the Atlantic Monthly:

There are literally multitudes of persons who can remember whole communities where it was not respectable to miss Divine service. The changes in this regard, if quiet, have been tremendous.

Today, to stay away from church is rather the fashion, the up-to-date style. We need not travel far to meet the men, who would blush before their comrades, if reminded that they had been in church, there, on bended knees, with downcast head, adoring the eternal and almighty God. So far, women and children are more guiltless than men in this regard. But, in course of time, the example set by men prevails: gradually, in silent tribute to their superior thought, women and children conform to the mental and social practices of men. Where today it is said — Men do not go to church — tomorrow it will be said — none there are, or few, of men, women or children who still go to church.

As things are moving, the question is surely the issue of the day whither the drift of men and women — whither the drift of society and of country?

The Evil Is Indifference toward God

I take the evil as it is: God is not denied: He is forgotten, left aside, exiled, so far as men may exile Him, from the world of human thought and action.

No, God is not denied. Cold, repulsive atheism is not the vice of the people of America. Questioned, they are loyal to the deep and persistent music of the human soul, the persistent vibration within it of echoings of the voice of a Being higher than itself, whom it instinctively recognizes as author and master, from whom alone, it confesses, come relief to its needs, quietude to its aspirations. Questioned, they are loyal to the ceaseless proclamation of reason and judgment, that to all transient things there is a cause, absolute and everlasting, in whom reside in degree super eminent all truth, all beauty, all goodness, scintillating in the works of His power and love-loyal to the ceaseless proclamation that the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made," that the life of things visible, the sublime order of movement and action within them, bespeak a creator all-powerful, a mover and ordainer all-wise, all-perfect — an ever-living and ever-acting personality, God infinite and eternal.

God is not denied. Atheism is not the evil of America. The evil is the forgetfulness of God, as if we would confine Him to the far-away regions of eternity, as if we would forbid Him all contact with, all emission into the affairs of revolving time, where man lives and moves, where man, the creature, fain would arrogate to himself the authority and the independence of the Creator. The evil is the cauterization within us of the sense of our dependency on God, of the sense of our need of God.

Duty of Divine Worship

Men do not go to church: they have lost the idea, the sentiment of Divine worship. Yet, Divine worship is man's first and supreme duty. Justice and gratitude demand that we make acts of worship before the eternal and almighty God.

To God, the First Cause, we owe what we are, what we have. "The heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands." "All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made." Amid what was made is man — the masterpiece, fashioned a little less than the angels, crowned with glory and honor, God's own image and likeness, set over other works of Divine power as monarch and chief beneficiary. Yet knowing all this, every chord of his being throbbing with life and motion received from the author of all life and motion, all things else at his service from the blade of grass in the field, the rose-bush in the garden, to the mighty armies of suns and stars arrayed in majesty through the measureless firmament, narrating, in the laws by which they are governed, the comeliness of which they are adorned, that they are the outpourings of Divine love and wisdom — knowing all this, man refuses to speak to God a word of adoration in acknowledgment of his dependency, of God's sovereignty, refuses to send towards God a chant of praise, a signal of love and gratitude! That man could be silent before the majesty of the Most High, is the mystery of blindness of eye, and of hardness of heart: yet this the blindness, this the hardness of heart of men, whose ears are deaf to the appeal — "Come, let us praise the Lord with joy: let us joyfully sing to God, our Saviour . . . For in His hands are all the ends of earth, and the heights of the mountains are His . . . Come let us adore and fall down, and weep before the Lord who made us."

Were sun, moon and stars suddenly made conscious beings, at once they should dip their glory to Him from whom their glory has sprung. And man, conscious by special gift of Divine predilection, is silent — heart never moving in gratitude, lips never trembling in the salute: "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name."

Rather, a hundred times rather, I do not fear to say, the soul of the untutored Indian, hearing in the flutterings of forest leaves the whisperings of the Great Spirit, or of the turbaned child of Allah, kneeling at noon-hour on the dusty highway, than that of the proud son of choicest culture, who, whatever his services to fellow-men, dares be silent before his God.

Man is not unmindful of justice and gratitude to fellow-men. This, his first-born instinct. The babe in the cradle smiles to mother or father, and lifts itself to reach their embrace. This, the imperious rule of all social relations. Friend gives salute to friend; the receiver of favors thanks the giver; the citizen bares the head to the symbol of the nation that guards his life and property. Alone among fathers and mothers, friends and benefactors, alone among saviours and guardians, God is forgotten, unheard, unhonored! The mystery of blindness of eye, and of hardness of heart!

Above all creatures is the Creator: above all other duties is the duty of Divine worship. "Master," said a doctor of the law, "which is the great commandment of the law?" And Jesus answered "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first Commandment." Other Commandments there are but the greatest and the first Commandment is that which bids us worship God: other duties fall into a secondary place. Indeed, the greatest and the first duty thrown to the winds, the foundation crumbles beneath other duties. Why, we may logically ask, the observance of secondary duties, when the chief duty is deemed undeserving of attention.

No Natural Virtues Take the Place of Duty to God

It is of no avail to repeat: "Smith is the best of fellows, diligent in business, a kind husband or father, and in politics anxious to vote for what he believes to be the best interests of the country." Smith may be all that a hundred times over: he fails in the essential duty — the worship of the almighty God.

Of no avail is it to recount the many private and public virtues a scrutinizing eye is able to discern in Smith — the many acts of benevolence one must put to his credit, the high and disinterested patriotism of which he has been the willing actor. Virtues be there, never more noble; deeds be there, never more high-minded, more conspicuous — when the list of human duties is read out before the tribunal of eternal justice, the chief duty for which man is responsible, Smith has neglected; the chief deed in man's legitimate activity, Smith has left undone.

The service of humanity is substituted for Divine worship; the man who has earned well of fellow-man is accounted the hero, the saint. The service of humanity properly ordered, properly intentioned, merits approval and praise. Approval and praise we gladly accord. But in its best form, the service of humanity always is a secondary duty. To worship God is the greatest, the first Commandment: "And the second is like to this — Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The service of humanity, to the exclusion of Divine worship, is the tacit profession that humanity is the all in all: it is the enthronement of humanity upon the pedestal of the deity, the rejection of the sinaitic mandate: "I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me."

Other Attractions, Besides Divine Worship, Out of Place

To induce Smith, "the average twentieth-century American" to go to church, the writer in the Atlantic Monthly proposes his remedies of predilection, the principal, that churches transform themselves into institutes of social betterment, whither crowds are attracted by popular eloquence, dramatic entertainments, concerts, picture shows, whence influences go forth into the outer world in works of benevolence and human uplift. The writer notes with special emphasis the results obtained through the "Salvation Army," through "Social Settlements" such as flourish in certain of our larger cities, and expresses the hope that here is to be seen the forerunner of the Christian Church of the future.

As to the service of humanity, I assuredly raise no objection. It is intimately linked with the worship of God: it is a consequence of this worship. He who bows to God, loves and serves his neighbor in obedience to God's own Commandment. But always and ever the love of the neighbor is the Second Commandment; never, at its highest flight, does it or can it make amends for the absence of obedience to the first: never, in its most fruitful blossomings, does it or can it leave guiltless the man who puts God away from mind and heart.

Nor do I rebuke subsidiary methods used to draw men towards Divine worship — provided those methods be in all ways legitimate and in harmony with the great purpose held in view, the worship of the Almighty. But it is all in vain to bring men to the church, if, when they are there, God is not adored, the soul is not absorbed in the immensity of His grandeur and love, the whole being of man is not bent before God in adoration and thanksgiving. It is written: "The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve." This, the law of eternal righteousness: naught dispenses from it; naught takes its place; naught liberates from the penalties that avenge the violation of it.

The worship of the Almighty God is the supreme reason why men should go to church. Men do not go to church, because they are not conscious of their duty to God: the way to bring them to church, to hold them to the practice of going to church, is to put into their souls the sense of their dependency upon God, the sense of their obligation to adore, love and serve Him as Creator and Sovereign Master.

Result of Indifference — The Withering of Conscience

Men do not go to church. Whither then are we drifting? The answer is unavoidable: To a world without God — a world of human life gloomy and chaotic, as were the world of matter, were the sun in the firmament to be hidden never again shed over it rays of light and warmth.

It is not easy to understand the perils toward which the forgetfulness of God is precipitating the modern world, because, meanwhile, we are still breathing the influences, living off the habits, created around us by the recognition of the Sovereign Master, to which humanity has been so long wedded, by which it has been so deeply fashioned into forms from which the decline is necessarily slow. The tree in the forest bears itself upright and green, long after poisonous germs have begun to gnaw the roots and deteriorate the sap. With time, however, the decay gains trunk and branches, and the tree falls, the sport of the passing wind.

Men do not go to church: they leave God out of thought and action, with the consequence that within them conscience withers and dies.

Conscience is the sense of righteousness set in our souls by the moral Master of the universe. It is the holiest, the noblest thing in man. Without it man is little better than the brute that knows no other impulse than selfish instinct, no other purpose than selfish pleasure. It is conscience that severs the individual man from slavery to passion; it is conscience that saves the social organism from ruin and degradation.

Of the absolute need of conscience in self and fellow-men, none there are to doubt. Of the fatal ills to follow from the loss of conscience, all make willing confession. Whence then the up-building of conscience? What preserves and fosters in the human soul the deep abiding sense of righteousness that we call conscience? I answer — religion, the subjection of man to God. "Fear God and keep His Commandments: for this is all man."

God set aside, matter remains. The judgments of God forgotten, remain the rewards and the punishments derived from matter. With matter alone before men, the aim of human existence is to grasp as much of it as opportunity allows, to wrest from it as much enjoyment as is possible to it to produce. Success in the chase is virtue: failure, vice and sin. Make matter the all in all — ineluctably the trend of the individual and of society is towards that state of barbarism, where might is right, where pleasure is the coveted goal, where the loss of pleasure is the misery of despair.

Philosophers of a godless world are at hand with their cobweb theories of private and social righteousness, only to reveal, through the impotency of those theories, the abyss of woe they open beneath our feet when they tell us that we may in safety close the portals of the skies and look to sole earth for salvation. They extol the beauty of righteousness: it is pointing to the rose of the garden at the approach of the hurricane to speak of the beauty of virtue, while the mad instincts of passion are gathering within the human soul their violent fires. They exhort us to take into heed the welfare of human society, the welfare of humanity yet unborn. But what cares the individual, quivering under temptation, for society, for humanity present or future? To some philosophers of unbelief, humanity, today or tomorrow, has slight worth. To Mr. Spencer it is a "bubble," a "dull leaden-hued thing"; and to Sir James Stephen, it is a "stupid, ignorant, half-beast of a creature." It is certainly all this to the man, or to the crowd in wild search for possession and enjoyment, incapable of attaining either except in breaking through the harriers of ordinarily-accepted morality. The appeal is to the commands and the prohibitions of legislatures. Then, the effort is to win, in skillful defiance of the law — to take up arms against the law — to seize in hand the lawmaking power and compel it to cease its prohibitions and alter its mandates. The imparting and wide diffusion of knowledge is invoked. Here is one of the most baseless fallacies of modern times. It is assumed that mere knowledge of nature's laws induces virtue and estranges vice: no expenditure of money and labor is spared in the building of school-houses where this knowledge is imparted, in the belief that there the youth of the land will be trained into good and honorable citizenship. But knowledge is not conduct. It simply tells the roads that may be traveled over. That the road leading to virtue may be followed despite trial and temptation, strong moral principles must be present to strengthen the soul in its deepest fibres, and compel it to hold itself erect beneath the fierce tornado of passion. This, mere knowledge is never able to do. Rather, in the absence of moral principles, knowledge is a peril, as it lends power to him who otherwise is disposed to evil and makes easier and safer for him the pathway to illicit possession and enjoyment.

Bring together in support of morality, private and public, all the theories, all the combinations, that human mind may invent, and human hand may apply-the words of Scripture remain "Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it."

Evils Already Too Manifest in Society

Meanwhile Smith does not go to church. Meanwhile the fashion spreads: the multitudes do as Smith does. Meanwhile the youth of the land pass through schools, and colleges from which God is exiled. The children of today, the men and citizens of tomorrow, are taught the secrets of matter, the manipulations of matter, the values of material possessions, the methods of acquiring them — no mention made of the rights of the Creator, of the duties of the creature, the whole teaching in its secular exclusiveness begetting the idea that God no longer counts in human affairs, no longer exacts from men worship and obedience. And meanwhile philosophers of unbelief are making proclamation, daily louder and louder, that matter is the all-sufficient entity, that a personal God is unnecessary, that the human mind and will are so many movements of chemical atomism, that all men, all nature are mere pieces of blind mechanism, that, consequently, moral responsibility is the dream of wild fancy. Well may we ask — whither are we drifting? Well may we query: Is the modern world growing in its years better or worse?

We are marching forward on the highway of religious indifference, of unalloyed secularism. The happenings we are compelled to witness are by no means reassuring. Today the United States ranks next to Japan in the annual number of divorces. Suicides are so frequent as to call no longer for special censure. The whole moral tone of the population is being lowered to a pitch that would have affrighted our ancestry of two or three generations ago. The foundations of the Republic, built as they are of reverence for law, of respect for the rights of others to life and property, are, in alarming frequency, driven into jeopardy by popular turbulence, bordering on wildest anarchy.

America, as perhaps no other country, is in need of conscience consequently, of religion, the formative power of conscience. America proposes to itself the most arduous of social problems — to maintain a government that will hold in check the passions of the people, while it entrusts to the people more or less immediately the right to control the government. What, then, of the government of the republic, if conscience recedes from the bosom of the people, if the day comes when religion, in the general thought of the people, is merely a memory of blessed things that once were and now have ceased to be?

I do not despair of America — because I do not despair of the commonsense and the religious conviction of the American people. But the trend is fatal: a godless philosophy of life is marching onward: and it will continue onward unless the reaction be quick and resolute. Meanwhile the men who do not go to church are lending to the fatal trend their impetus of influence and example.

Penalty of Secularism

Secularism carries with it its own penalty. My enemy, "out of thy own mouth I judge thee."

To men who do not go to church, the present life is the idol. To this idol they so sacrifice time and labor that no freedom, they say, is allowed them to worship the Almighty God. Indeed, some go further and say that worship of the Almighty imposes upon "the life that now is" a harm they cannot pardon, inasmuch as it begets in the mind a spirit of otherworldliness, slackening interest in the present life, and impairing in no small degree the zeal and energy needed in the amelioration of the human race.

St. Paul writes: "Godliness is profitable to all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come." In godliness it is that even the present life should put its trust if it should insure to itself upon earth health and prosperity.

I accept the ideals of present-day humanity — social charity, social justice, social peace — but I contend that secularism nullifies those ideals, while in and through the worship of the Almighty God there awaits them fruitful realization.

Destruction of Social Charity

Love one another: serve one another: serve especially the poor, the wretched, the slave of sin and vice. That we do so, however, there must be inspiration, there must be motive. But whence in the philosophy of secularism, derive inspiration and motive? The emotion the sight of misery bestirs within us? But this is momentary, soon exhausted by fatigue in the server, by ingratitude in the served. The charm of a renewed human race? But this is a vision of possibilities, quickly losing in the presence of repeated failures its brightness of color. Personal interest involved in the welfare of others? But personal interest, too often, lies in injury to, or in carelessness of the welfare of others: and, at best, the advantages to come from service to others, especially when others are unable or unwilling to return service for service, are too slight or too remote to wrest from the human breast sacrifice and self-denial without which charity is but sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal.

Would we see what social charity is where secularism reigns. Back we go to Greece and Rome of pagan ages, where one-half the population were the slaves depending for very life on the whim of relentless masters, where womanhood and childhood were without respect, where the orphan and the infirm were loathed, where physical strength and abundant pelf were the sole measure of honor and reverence. Secularism does not have its trial in social charity, amid modern conditions. Christian conditions still are strong in our world; Christian teachings still invigorate our humanity. Time, however, gives room to the logic of philosophies: and, in a broadened and unconfined field of influence, secularism is sure to revive the spirit, if not the exact forms, of olden paganism.

Social charity, strong in command and sacrifice, so much needed in the life of humanity, so loudly called for by those needs, is born of religion: it flowers or withers, as flowers or withers religion. Social charity, heroic in devotion, heavenly in the sweetness of its fragrance, in the abundance of its gifts, capable of healing the sores of humanity, of wrenching it from misery and sin, laying no stress on human gratitude, no hope on human reward, is the daughter of religion. It springs into life and vigor from the conviction that God commands and rewards the giving of one's self to relieve poverty and suffering, from the deep insight of the soul beholding the Incarnate God in the thirsty and the hungry to whom food and drink are tendered, in the naked who is clothed, in the ignorant who is instructed, in the victim of any and every ill who is solaced and healed.

Destruction of Social Justice

Social justice is the consequence of social charity; it issues from the same principles. A primordial right of every man is the right to live: the Creator in putting him on earth gives him this right. He is to live, however, from the fruits of his labors. To find in those fruits a sufficiency for a befitting livelihood, is the normal condition to which each human being is entitled. This much secured, each one receives portions of the common inheritance; proportioned to talent, industry and the use of opportunities. Hence inequality in society: hence the peril of over-reaching cupidity on the one hand, of discontent and jealousy on the other. Hence, too, the peril of contention and warfare. That men be brought to respect the rights of others even when those rights presuppose a diminution of one's own gain, or require calmness of resignation in one's own inferior lot, is the problem of human society. This problem secularism does not solve. Let each man be the separate atom of matter: let each one have no other conscience but such as origin and ending in matter beget: let each one be concerned in the other only so much as one grain of dust is concerned in another grain of dust, as the one and the other are moved in the general mass, without slightest care for the other — the strife is one of might, not one of right. Naught will still the fury of the turmoil, but the voice of the Omnipotent Master, telling in tones of sovereign truth and authority that all are His children, that the social organism, no less than the individual member, is His creation, that its laws are His laws, and that of them He is the avenger in time and in eternity. The social war is upon us. The future — we should not conceal the fact from our vision — looms up dark and menacing, because on both sides the war is being fought, in large measure at least, outside the field of religion, in forgetfulness of God, in forgetfulness of rights accorded by His justice, of duties imposed by His authority. Men who do not go to church — setting aside religion — hasten the reign of secularism: they are the foes of social justice.

Destruction of Social Peace

Social peace! Social peace means peace in the individual soul: this springs from religion. Do our best in the service of humanity, invoke as we may by wish and act charity and justice, clouds still hover over human life. In spite of valiant labor many fail in their ambitions: there is poverty; there is agony of mind, suffering of body; over most vivid enjoyments and brightest prospects there rise the shadows of illness, of old age, of death. Multiply as we may the roses, thorns still defy us; levy as we may tribute from science in battle against pain and infirmity, the triumph is only partial; and the end of all life is the gloom of the grave. The call for help from the material world, within us and around us brings back the answer of impotence and despair. What then? Let God be seen above us; let His smiles radiate our pathway. In the teachings of religion, pain reveals itself as a trial to be borne in patience, to be made the price of rich reward. Poverty is the privation of the things which quickly pass, not that of the things which endure. Death, so fierce in its march, is the closing of the journey from mortality to immortality. With religion there is the peace of the soul, of which naught can deprive us, which naught else but religion can purchase. With religion life is ever worth living: it is the pathway to the skies. And with peace in our souls, there is peace in the world for men around us — the one not envying the other, the one not compassing the other to wrest from him the glittering toy which alone is believed to give happiness — all praying together to the common Father: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Men do not go to church: they are emptying their souls and the souls of fellow-men, of God's peace: they are doing their best to make of this present world a world of discontent and unhappiness.

The truth remains, that the nearer men in their daily life come to the teachings of religion, the better and the sweeter their life becomes: the farther they recede from those teachings, the blacker it is and the more despairing.

Penalties in the Life to Come

"Godliness is profitable to all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come." For the sake of the life that now is, which they profess to serve so earnestly, men should worship God, men should go to church. But yet more should they do so, for the sake of the life which is to come.

"It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment." As to the judgment to come, I need not do more than make the announcement of it. The teachings of reason and revelation are clear and positive. The soul of man is not as his body, an atom or an aggregation of atoms of matter. The overwhelming law of the soul is the law of righteousness, of obedience to God, God, the lawgiver of righteousness is also its avenger. His laws none may violate with impunity. On earth the hand of justice is often held back: in another world it reaches out in the fullness of its power and majesty.

What must the man expect in the presence of the Supreme judge, who will say to Him: Lord, Creator and Sovereign Master, Thee I did not serve while I was on earth. The first and the greatest Commandment, worship of Thee, I did not observe. The day especially sacred to Thee and to Thy worship I spent in rest, in recreation, in meditation of earth and of the interests of earth. For Thee I had no time: of Thee I had no care. I await my judgment. "It is a fearful thing," writes St. Paul, "to fall into the hands of the living God," when God by His own justice is compelled to punish the injustice of men.

Therefore let there be the churches: let the music of their bells summon to their sanctuaries the men and the women of the land thence let inspiration go forth that will purify and sanctify private and public life. And to the churches let men and women hasten when thither called; there "to adore and fall down, and weep before the Lord who made us"; there to learn the Commandments of God's righteousness and obtain from His love and mercy the strengthening grace needed, that they hold themselves pure and unsullied amid trial and temptation.

Houses of commerce, forges of industry, railroads and steamboats increase physical comfort and material wealth. Schools, colleges, libraries spread knowledge of nature and of its laws, of men and of their doings: they will not subdue passion and extirpate sin. Armies and navies enable the nation to win in war; they do not beget self-restraint, honesty, charity, the cementing principles of the family and of the social organism, the vital elements of regulated liberty and social order. The barriers against social decay, the props of family and of nation, are sound morals: sound morals are had only through religion, by faith and trust in the everlasting God. And what is still more vital, still more necessary, because the outcome is one of unending ages, only through religion is there salvation for man's immortal soul.

"Godliness is profitable to all things, having the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come." That is why men should go to church.

© Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.

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