The last quarter of a century has seen a vast change in the general attitude toward organized religion. To some extent that change has had its points of pause and punctuation; we could tell where one paragraph ended and another began. In thought, a Robertson Smith or a Briggs case marked a period. The real range of a theological debate can never be measured by the resolution of an ecclesiastical assembly. Its main repercussion is upon the crowd, which becomes gradually conscious of the significance of the issue. The great change has come, however, almost without observation, and it may be said to have affected religion rather than theology. It has shown itself in lessened church attendance, and in the challenging of the right of the church to assume the monopoly of religious interest. The reduction in the number of men seeking to find their life-work in the Christian ministry is a grave feature; for the temper of the martyr and the soldier is not dead among us and the call for sacrifice has always in it a peculiar ring and compulsion. The Christian ministry is a great and noble calling, in which a man, if he is to have any happiness in his work, must deliberately put the world behind his back. But that particular form of sacrifice is losing its urgency. The war revealed, to those who were actively engaged in it, not so much a changed condition as unpleasant actualities in the old condition. It became wofully apparent that religious instruction had not penetrated as deeply as the religious organizations had imagined. One never knew whether to wonder most at men's ignorance of what the Christian Church should have been teaching them, or at their indifference to some matters which the peace standard of domestic ethics regarded as vital, or at their continual and magnificent gaiety of spirit, their glorious comradeship, their mastery of fear. The war showed how little conventional religion stood for. It also made it plain that the great words of the Gospel--joy, peace, love, righteousness, sacrifice--were of the very heart of high conduct as men understood high conduct, face to face with death, in those most desperate conditions.
If one asks oneself what it is that has been going on beneath the surface to bring about so profound a change in religious outlook, one may say that it has been the challenging of the seat of authority in religion. In organized religion there have been two main conceptions of the seat of authority.