When the Church begins actually to throw the Golden Rule onto its banner, not in theory but in actual practice, actually forgetting self in the Master's service, careless even of her own interests, her membership, she thereby calls into her ranks vast numbers of the best of the race, especially among the young, so that the actual result is a membership not only larger than she could ever hope to have otherwise, but a membership that commands such respect and that exercises such power, that she is astounded at her former stupidity in being shackled so long by the traditions of the past. A new life is engendered. There is the joy of real accomplishment.
We are in an age of great changes. Advancing knowledge necessitates changes. And may I say a word here to our Christian ministry, that splendid body of men for whom I have such supreme admiration? One of the most significant facts of our time is this widespread inclination and determination on the part of such great numbers of thinking men and women to go directly to Jesus for their information of, and their inspiration from him. The beliefs and the voice of the laymen, those in our churches and those out of our churches, must be taken into account and reckoned with. Jesus is too large and too universal a character to be longer the sole possession, the property of any organisation.
There is a splendid body of young men and young women numbering into untold thousands, who are being captured by the personality and the simple direct message of Jesus. Many of these have caught his spirit and are going off into other lines of the Master's service. They are doing effective and telling work there. Remember that when the spirit of the Christ seizes a man, it is through the channel of present-day forms and present-day terms, not in those of fifteen hundred, or sixteen hundred, or even three hundred years ago.
There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that prevents many men and women from subscribing to anything to which they cannot give their intellectual assent, as well as their moral and spiritual assent. They do not object to creeds. They know that a creed is but a statement, a statement of a man's or a woman's belief, whether it be in connection with religion, or in connection with anything else. But what they do object to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on credulity, that is therefore destructive of the intellectual and the moral life of every man and every woman who allows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them, that can be held to if one is at all honest and given to thought, only through intellectual chicanery.