Or, indeed, he _might_ found a church or endow a minister. For are we to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it will be a very different church from the churches with which we are familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this animistic and supernatural survival in religion.
But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance upon church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living, seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration, it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person, the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are to live.
The new type of church will indeed call men to the remembrance of the divine life—it will point upward—but it will be their own divine life to which it will call them. It will find their divine life in their own ideals and in their loyal service of these ideals. Hence its primary interest will be not in what some perfect God wants of men, but what the God in themselves wants of them,—what types of things they long for, what powers of mind and body they are willing to devote to securing them. It will make far more difference to the new church whether its communicant is fighting child labor with all his power of mind and soul than whether he is a regular attendant upon weekly prayers. Indeed, it will know no true and rounded prayer save actual service. Hence its body of communicants will be first and foremost men and women engaged in human service. The condition for admission to the new church will be not a profession of faith but an exhibition of deed. Does a man care enough for anything worth while to put strenuous effort into its accomplishment; does he care for it not for his own sake primarily but for the sake of enhancing the life of his fellows and his world—it may be to discover a cancer cure, or to invent a dishwasher, or to make a better school—such a man or woman is welcomed into the new church. However circumscribed his ideal may be, inasmuch as it is an ideal of service it is the divine in him that is coming to life. He is already a worshipper.