Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/323

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CONTEMPORARY OPINION
321

gone, and with him the old duty to propiate him, so that he might be induced to treat you better than your neighbor. Can anyone question the advance that has been made in diminishing the prevalence of these medieval, essentially childish, and essentially selfish ideas? The new God is the God of law and order; the new duty, to know that order and to get into harmony with it, to learn how to make the world a better place for mankind to live in, not merely how to save your individual soul. However, once destroy our confidence in the principle of uniformity, our belief in the rule of law, and our effectiveness immediately disappears, our method ceases to be dependable, and our laboratories become deserted.

The plain truth is, thousands upon thousands of men and women have gone out of the Church. They take no stock in its obsolete teachings to which they once subscribed in order to become members. After great tribulation, they have made their declaration of religious independence. They have taken the right turn for their own salvation. The churches as a whole do not know that today there is a violent intellectual revolution among all people who think. The so-called theism that is embalmed in the old theology and is still preached is utterly defunct for many persons of this generation. Like it or not, that is a fact.

The creeds of the churches contain conceptions of God's nature and of his action toward the human race which are intolerable to the ethical mind of the twentieth century. The conception of one being, human or