OCR Text |
Show No Nation Has Adopted the Sermon on the Mount as a Rule of Life by A. MAUDE ROYDEN, English Woman Preacher. If religion is going out of style, it deserves to. For only those things go out of style which meet no real human need. But in fact and just because it is an eternal need of the human spirit, religion never can go out of style. All that is happoning is that the need for religion, which is simply the need of God, is changing its forms. The change, in this generation, has perhaps been accelerated by the war. There is an uneasy wonder whether a religion that has proclaimed pro-claimed for nearly 2,000 years a God who is the Prince of Peace ought to have been able by now to put a stop to war, at least between nations who profess belief in it. I must admit that if I found nations and individuals persistently living liv-ing up to the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount and finding that the house of their civilization, far from being founded on a rock and standing, was really founded on sand and fell down, 1 should hold myself excused from trying to be a Christian any more. The difficulty, however, has only to be stated to disappear. No nation na-tion and very few individuals have persistently adopted the Sermon on the Mount as a rule of life. |