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Show THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. A very common phrase with some writers and preachers is: ''There is no room in the life of t he-future he-future for the church which aims to be merely a church of the future life." The remark would le hardly worthy of notice did it not voice a certain rampant spirit which is growing up around us. The desire to do away with the supernatural in religion, especially the belief in a future life, is too preposterous prepos-terous to appeal to American people in whom the teachings of revelation have a strong hold. Hence the method of certain propagandists to introduce their atheism under a cloak of humanity and natural nat-ural religion. The determination which underlies all their methods is to replace the worship of God with the worship of that fcVtract and indefinable deity whom they would call "humanity' ' Hence they speak of ''ethics" more than of morality imaging im-aging apparently that ethics can serve to introduce a morality in which religion shall have no part. When, however, they speak of a church of the future life, we ask: What kind of a church is it that is not concerned with the future life? The sunshine societies that bring flowers to the sick who are in greater need of something to eat, the donations of millions for books to men who are asking for bread, the idiotic proposal of enthanasia to mothers nursing sick babes, and to men who have the courage to suffer sickness until God shall send His angel to call them these and a thousand such are examples of ''ethics" without " religion. The church of the present life alone is a contradiction contra-diction in terms, and humanity the true humanity will never accept the teaching which would set it up in place of that great and enduring Church of Christ which speaks of the future life as the final end towards which all that is in the present life should -tend. The Catholic Church is the Church of the present as well as of the future life, and needs not the observations of half-instructed disciplinarians to tell 'her the relations existing between the present and the future. The Church speaks plainly, in unmistakable contrast to the stupid stu-pid contradictions of her critics. Pilot. |