30 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the general life. The church is inquiring for the cause with com- punctions of conscience and anguish of heart. It has sought to improve its organization, to try new methods, to elicit more funds. It has blamed the tired workers for their lack of success. But still it looks like a losing race. Is it not perhaps true that as the social life of the people grows sordid, as the home and family life are contracted and crushed, and as the future looms up in dreary uncertainty and hopelessness, the religious sense of the people is choked and the natural basis for the reli- gious life dwindles? For one thing, the people of our great cities are cut off from nature and from nature's God. All that they see and touch was made by man. To men in Chicago the heavens do not declare the glory of God, for they are covered with smoke. To us in New York the firmament showeth but an insignificant fragment of his handiwork between the cornices and fire escapes of the tenements. Her children in the city suck no sweetness from the bosom of mother earth, for her bosom is cov- ered with asphalt and flagstones. Suppose a modern Job were sit- tingwith his friends inatenement in New York and reasoningabout God. Suppose God wished to reveal his majesty to him, as he did to ancient Job ; how would God do it ? The wild ass and behe- moth and leviathan convey no impression of ungovernable free- dom, and of a strength yielding only to God, as they munch their food behind the bars at Central Park. The rain and the snow carry no sense of awe, for the street-cleaning department attends to such things promptly. The reverence in face of the vast- ness of nature, the delight in her beauty and her gifts, and the fear of her power, are almost eliminated in a great city, and thereby one of the influences which predisposes to religion and educates us for the spiritual life is wiped out. Men see and know the works and the cleverness of man and in that they believe. As for God, they know of him by hearsay. And so the soil in which the church has to sow its seed is trodden hard or washed away, leaving the bare rock.
Has the church no stake in the social movement ?
.v YORK CITY. WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH.
