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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

State of Religious Organisations

page 6

State of Religious Organisations.

The late Rev. Professor Dinan, in an able article on "Religion in America," written in 1876, describes the most recent phase of American religious culture as "the æsthetic phase," in contradistinction to the ethical and the theological phases which preceded it. He observes that the present tendency of American Christianity is to assign to "sentiment" a more prominent function in religion; that a wide-spread reaction has set in, not so much against any particular tenet of the old theology as against the whole dogmatic apprehension of Christianity, while at the same time, owing to the quickening of ecclesiastical activity and the impulse to ecclesiastical development, there exists a strong conservative preference for stable ecclesiastical order, and a decided tendency to aggregation, in a few great denominational types. This description may be extended to Great Britain and to these colonies of Australia, and it will represent with tolerable accuracy, I think, the present state of religious organisations in the Mother Country and amongst ourselves. Everywhere, in all Protestant churches, dogmatic truth is either not presented at all to the intellects of the educated laymen, or is presented in such a manner as that the large majority cannot understand it, and will not accept it The reasoning intellect of man demands ideas as its needful and sole proper aliment. It is only through ideas that the human intellect can be enabled to render that service which the religion professed by all the Christian Churches claims from the intellect as well as from the affections of our human nature.