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Show EMPTY CHURCH PEWS Crowded Ethical Culture HallsEditor of Vogue Says Why Men do Not Attend the Churches, Except in the "Catholic Communion." Why men do not go to church except in' the Catholic Communion is a matter of grave and continuous con-tinuous concern, and many arc the devices clergymen clergy-men have resorted to for enticing them to the House of God. Sometimes the inducement takes the form o fa smoking club annex, and recently parlor socialism so-cialism has been introduced as a method of pew filling. fill-ing. The religious press and the ministry have been much exercised to determine the cause of this indifference, indif-ference, and many reasons have been advanced, among wheh none surely is more far-fetched than that which attributes it to man's reluctance to hear his business methods and principles rebuked from the pulpit, and to have his sins brought before him by hymns, Bible reading and preaching. When; will the religious press and the Protestant pulpit realize that the fault is With the churches' message, not with the laity, and that the true reason why the majority of both men and women are not church attendants is because they want what one distinguished New York rabbi left his ecclesiastical fold and became an independent ethical leader to i give them ethical truth stripped of ccclesias-ticalismi ccclesias-ticalismi Heresy trials, the higher criticism, and progressive Christianity, which result in the revision revi-sion of creeds, are all great shocks to generations brought up to believe that the creeds, and the ecclesiastical ec-clesiastical interpretation of Scripture, and the Bible Bi-ble itself, are all the word of God. and the will of ' God; but when the authority of creed interpretation, interpreta-tion, and the Holy Book is assailed, not by infidels." or by those of opposing faiths, but by reverent and intelligent erstwhile creed adherents, it must inevitably inev-itably beget in the laity a loss of confidence in religious re-ligious leaders and communions, and dispose it to question the soundness of anything now put forward for-ward as ecclesiastical truth".' ""Why. it asks, if the churchmen have been deceived all these centuries as to the inerrancy of the Scriptures", and the religious authority of creeds, may not what is now proclaimed pro-claimed latter day ecclesiastical truth be quite as much error as were the earlier teachings? The Protestant church has, in a large measure, lost authority, -and that is what keeps its pews empty of men and women while the ethical culture halls are crowded. Its decadence or its further development de-velopment depends upon the message it has for a world that hungers for religious truth. ' . |