The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1908-10-12
CHURCH MUST
NOT BE BLIND
Social Questions of Today Are
Living Issues, Says Uni
tartan Preacher.
is IN DECADEMCE
PASTOR ASKS IMPORTANT PER-
TINENT QUESTIONS.
WORLD is IN DECADENCE

The Rev William Thurston Brown
spoke yesterday on THE Mission of a
Unitarian Church in the Light of Its His
tory and of the Revelations of Science and
the Moral Demands of Modern Life In
part he said:
DO you want a Unitarian church here
that is, a church in whose pulpit, for
example. William Ellery Claiming could
stand and speak even the social message
which he spoke seventy-five years ago?
Do you want "A pulpit here which bids a
man be faithful to the new light and
the larger truth of today as Claiming
and Parker were to the new light and
larger truth of their time, without fear of
losing his job and making his family des-
titute? Do you think there is nothing
wrong in a social system under which it
is practically impossible for a preacher to
say all the truth which urges him to ut
terance or to discuss every moral Ques
ton without losing his job? Are you in
favor. and do you wish to say by the use
you make of your money that you are in
favor of excluding from the pulpit all dis
cussion of the living issues of today? Are
you in favor of putting the whole burden
OF giving voice TO the insistent social de-
mandS OF this age of vast impending
change upon the shoulders of street agi-
tators, padlocking the lips of the preacher
in the pulpit by the menace of losing his
livelihood? If it was noble and good in
the ministers of other days to see the
damning iniquity of one form of Industrial
slavery affecting Immediately four mil
lions of black people and indirectly the
whole nation, is it any less noble or good
for men now to see the menace of a far
more subtle and far-reaching industrial
slavery involving the degradation of our
whole American society, the destruction
of our ethical ideals and the certain doom
of our so-called social order, or less praise
worthy to champion fearlessly this new
abolition now long overdue? Does any
one think that a religious organization
whose nOhlQst SnOkpS0aD all dead and
buried gives better evidence of it's vitality
and genuineness than one whose leaders
are open-eyed to the larger light of a new
day and trumpet-tOngued to proclaim its
divine message?
In Decadent Age.
You and l are living today. whether
we know II or not. in a decadent age. an
age that is passing away. an age whose
moral deCddenCe and spiritual impotence
cry aloUd on all the streets, which reflects
on every hand with startling vividness all
those moral and social and political symp-
toms which the world agrees to have
marked every period of decadence in the
past The decline and fail of the Roman
impotence or vice and immortality which
present-day civilization does not mirror
with disheartening clearness-
Not only so. but the advance of science /
and philosophy has swept completely
away the foundations on which religion
has been alleged to rest. This age knows
no imperative demand than that it shall
lind ana proclaim new moral sanctions.
that it shall rebuild the religious structure
from the ground up. The loss of religious
sanctions and beliefs upon which conduct
and character have been built is the su-
preme calamity which can befall man.
kind, unless there shall come in their
place higher and more convincing sane
tions and faiths. A genuine church bears
no responsibility comparable to that OF
religious reconstruction. But in the very !
nature of things this religious recOnstTuc-
ton is an utter impossibiity today with
out radical social reconstruction. The
God of supernaturalism is gOne-every
leading philosopher and scientist, every
man whose scientific discoveries are being
used without challenge in the public
schools viii tell you that. That God does
not exist and ii is as impossible ever to
make men and women think he exists, as
II is to make them really believe in the
PtOlema1c astronomy. If men are to have
in the coming days. if your sons and
daughters are to have any adequate or
real or uplifting faith in God, they must
find ii in and through social regenerat ion /
They viii not find il each for himself or
herself-that atheistic notion borrowed
from an irreligiOus commercialisn-they
will find it, if at all, because and when !
all are finding it. Unless mankind itself /
in human society shall incarnate a deity, /
so clearly and persuasively that none can |
help knowing ii, the coming generations /
are to be without God and without hope in /
the world.
Subject to Scrutiny.
Nothing is more certain-nothirg /
should seem more certain in the light OF I
recent events-than that all the occupa- |
lions of men and women. all the ways i'm I
which they get their living or their !
wealth, are going to be subjected to the (
closest moral scrutiny and analysis. We /
are going to know all about it, down to |
the last item. and no one will escape. And |
nothing Is more certain than that in the !
inevitable reconstruction which is even
now in process no commercial or indus
trial process or method will escape the /
consuming fire of an aroused conscience /
bent on justice. which cannot bear the
light of plainest truth, which cannot sur
vive the passion for justice and frater-
nifty. For the pulpit of any church to re-
main mute in the presence of this divinest I.
incarnation of deity is for it to confess