The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-07-16
THE PRESENT NEED

Of course the world today needs religion. In this one thing the need of the world is constant. There never was an age that did not need religion, nor ever shall be, so long as men are men and God is God. But do not think, when you have said that the world needs religion, that you have said 1t all. It needs a certain kind of religion; certain interpretation of God adapted to meet the conditions of modern life, and un- less you are prepared to give the world the sort of religion it needs, you had better give it none at all. To say that the world needs religion is like saying the body needs food. It has always needed food, but the body of a man cannot thrive on the food of children. The food must be altered to match the bodys growth. If it is true of the body, it is true of the soul as well.
 Beyond doubt the soul of the world is sick. There are wounds left from old wars, and rumors of new ones to come. There are strikes, bloodshed and lynchings. There is a loosening of the moral fiber of men and women, and a growing desperation in the heart of pleasure-seeking youth. The mag azines are filled with discussion of these things; they are common talk wherever men and women meet. The pulpits thunder their time-worn anathemas-and the world jogs merrily along to hell! The soul of the world is, sick I think it is dying of malnutrition. It demands meat, and is being fed with milk-upon which it thrived in the days of its youth, but which now it has outgrown.
 Of course Jesus Christ is the same yes terday, today and forever, but this does not mean that there shall be no change in our understanding of Him, nor in our presenta- tion of the Truth as it is in Him. The law of gravity was the same yesterday, and probably shall be forever, but we do not teach physics as it was taught 300 years ago. The truth of the matter is that this is a social age. Wars and strikes and immo- rality are social evils, born of our interde- pendence, of our relationship to each other, and we are ministering too largely to a socialized world with the gospel of individual salvation, which was good gospel when the, world was individualistic, But that was long time ago. The world today needs the religion of Jesus Christ-who went about doing good; who had compassion upon the multitude scattered abroad as sheep with out shepherd; who never regarded men as individuals without corporate responsibility whose chief end was to save their own souls, but who ever saw them as brethren to each other, because children of one common Father. The world needs the religion of Jesus Christ, who entered with joy into the social life of His day and time; who carried the love of God into the home of the sor- rowing sisters of Bethany, and into the midst of the marriage feast at Cana.
 The old religion which we have outgrown is this:
 A charge to keep have, God to glorify, A never-dying soul to save and fit it for
 the sky.
 There is no heroism, there is no love in this, only cowardice which shrinks from loss and seeks to save itself It must be changed. ''To serve the present age, my calling to full fill;
 Oh, may it all my powers engage to do my
 Masters will"