+The decline of organised Christianity.+--For a generation or more in every part of Christendom there has been a steady drift away from organised religion as represented by the churches, and the question is being seriously asked whether Christianity can much longer hold its own. Protestant controversialists frequently draw attention to the decline of church-going in Latin countries as evidence of the decay of sacerdotalism, particularly in the church of Rome. But outside Latin countries it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of Rome than in any other church. The masses of the people on the one hand and the cultured classes on the other are becoming increasingly alienated from the religion of the churches. A London daily paper made a religious census some years ago and demonstrated that about one-fifth of the population of the metropolis attended public worship, and this was a generous estimate. Women, who are more emotional, more reverent, and more amenable to external authority than men, usually form the majority of the worshippers at an ordinary service. Mr. Charles Booth in his great work on the "Life and Labour of the People in London" asserts that the churches are practically without influence of any kind on the communal life. This I believe to be an exaggeration, but it will hardly be denied that the average working, business, or professional man looks upon the churches almost with indifference. In many cases this indifference passes into hostility or contempt. Intelligent men take little notice of preachers and sermons, and the theologically-minded layman is such a rarity as to be noteworthy. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that much of the moral earnestness of the nation and of social redemptive effort exists outside the churches altogether. I am well aware that there is a great deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs from selfish materialism, and I gladly recognise that in almost any ordinary church to-day brave and self-denying work is being done for the common good, but this does not invalidate my general statement. The plain, bald fact remains that the churches as such are counting for less and less in civilisation in general and our own nation in particular. One of the ablest of our rising young members of Parliament, a man of strong religious convictions and social sympathies, recently declared that we were witnessing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. To be sure, the same thing has been said before and has proved to be wrong. It was said in the eighteenth century when men with something of the prophet's fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights of Man, declaring at the same time that institutional religion was at an end, utterly discredited, and impossible of acceptance by any intelligent being. In France during the Revolution the populace turned frantically upon the established faith, tore it to shreds, burlesqued it, and set up the worship of the Goddess of Reason, as they called it, typified by a Parisian harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its chilly hand not only upon the world of scholars and men of letters, but even upon the church. An English king is reported to have said that half his bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion reasserted itself all over the civilised world. Napoleon with shrewd insight realised that the people could not do without it, and so effected the Concordat with Rome which has now been dissolved; Wesley began the movement in England which has since created the largest Protestant denomination in the world; Germany produced a succession of great preachers and scholars the like of whom had hardly ever been known in Europe before.