The Pulpit and the People
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The Pulpit and the People.
The Sunday Car Question, after a thorough discussion on the part of the speakers, preachers, and writers of the city, has well nigh disappeared, but there have been facts evolved during the discussion which yet remain to be considered, with a carefulness proportioned to their grave importance.
Brooklyn, by general consent, has received the appellation of the City of Churches, and in common with others who had not examined into the subject, we heretofore cherished a vague idea that the church-going portion of the community constituted a large majority of the inhabitants. From a rough estimate which it occurred to us to make during the progress of the controversy, we found this idea to be entirely erroneous; and that even upon the most favorable calculation, it could be presumed that more than one-third of the population were habitual attendants at places of worship. Subsequently the City Judge (a gentleman whom no one can suppose to be actuated by a desire to underrate the influence of religion in our midst) estimated the proportion of church-goers so low as one-fourth of the population.
We are aware that the cognomen "City of Churches" belongs to the Western District, the original Brooklyn, rather than to the consolidated city; and that the proportion of churches to population is greater there than in the Eastern District; yet the fact cannot be hidden, and ought not to be suppressed, that in neither Brooklyn proper nor Williamsburgh does the number of worshippers in our churches approximate to what it ought to be in a professedly Christian country.
We make these remarks with sorrow and regret; we desire not to impair the influence of Christian teachers, but rather to stir them up to a consideration of the matter, and to an earnest effort to devise a remedy for that which they cannot but blush to find existing. Let them compare the number of persons who take an active interest in politics, or of those habitually attending theatres, or who uniformly peruse the daily papers, with that of those who attend church, and they must conclude that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
To say that the genius of the age is unfavorable to Christianity, that the spread of information and the march of intellect tell against the influence of the pulpit on the people, would be to confess the incompatibility of human freedom with Christian devotion, and this is what no sincere believer in Christianity can admit.
The fault, then—that which has caused the alienation, to such a degree, of the popular mind from the religious truth—must be traced to something repulsive in the manner in which that truth is presented. What is that something? We cannot conceive of a query so urgently demanding the attention of the religious world, as this.
We have not space to suggest more than one of the causes of the want of sympathy between the pulpit and the masses, now so glaringly apparent—though others readily occur to us. We need go no further than the Sunday car discussion in this city to illustrate our meaning. When the people at large, who unquestionably desire the cars to run, see the pulpit rising en masse between them and their wishes, denouncing healthful exercise as sinful, and proscribing innocent recreation as vicious, will not the ideas of religion and asceticism, of devotion and gloom, of piety and austerity, become synonymous in their minds? By pulling the reins of duty tighter and yet tighter still, and so drawing the line of demarkation between right and wrong, that the area of the former becomes immeasurably smaller than that of the latter, are not the clergy provoking a reaction, and thus widening the divisional gulf which unfortunately exists between themselves and so large a proportion of the people?