People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1896 — A Word to the Church. [ARTICLE]

A Word to the Church.

Bishop Potter, of the Episcopal church, at the dedication of Grace chapel, in New York city recently, made use of these strong words: The growth of wealth and luxury, wicked, wasteful and wanton, as before God I declare that luxury to be, has been matched step by step by a deepening and deadening poverty which has left whole neighborhoods of people practically without hope and without aspiration. At such a time, for the church of God to sit still and be content with theories of its duty outlawed by time and long ago demonstrated to be grotesquely inadequate to the demands of a living situation, this is to deserve the scorn of men and the curse of God! Take my word for it, men and brethren, unless you and I and all those who have any gift or stewardship of talents, or means, of whatever sort, are willing to get up out of our sloth and ease and selfish dilettantism of service and get down among the people who are battling amid their poverty and ignorance—young girls for their chastity, young men for their better ideal of righteousness, old and young alike for one clear ray of the immortal courage and the immortal hope—then verily the church in its stately splendor, it apostolic orders, its venerable ritual,, its decorous and dignified conventions, is revealed as simply a monstrous and insolent impertinence.