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This decline of faith in Christian dogma and history has not, however, produced by any means a decline in religious sentiment, but it has deprived religion of a good deal of its power as a means of moral discipline. Moral discipline is acquired mainly by the practice of doing what one does not like to do, under the influence of mastering fear or hope. The conquest of one’s self, of which Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the acquisition of the power of doing easily things to which one’s natural inclinations are opposed; and in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully aided–indeed, we may say, have to be aided–by the prospect of reward or punishment. The wonderful results which are achieved in the army, by military authority, in inspiring coarse and common natures with a spirit of the loftiest devotion, are simply due to the steady application by day and by night of a punishing and rewarding authority. The loss of this, or its great enfeeblement, undoubtedly has deprived the church of a large portion of its means of discipline, and reduced it more nearly to the role of a stimulater and gratifier of certain tender emotions. It contains a large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a succession of sensations not far removed from one’s enjoyment of music and poetry; and another large body, to whom it furnishes refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-defined sort in times of sorrow and disappointment. To these persons the church prayers and hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field, but soothing melodies, which give additional zest to home comforts and luxuries, and make the sharper demands of a life of the highest integrity less unbearable. Nay, the case is rather worse than this. We have little doubt that this sentimental religion, as we may call it, in many cases deceives a man as to his own moral condition, and hides from him the true character and direction of the road he is travelling, and furnishes his conscience with a false bottom. The revelations of the last few years as to its value as a guide in the conduct of life have certainly been plain and deplorable.

The evil in some degree suggests the remedy, though we do not mean to say that we know of any complete remedy. Church-membership ought to involve discipline of some kind in order to furnish moral aid. It ought, that is to say, to impose some restraint on people’s inclinations, the operation of which will be visible, and enforced by some external sanction. If, in short, Christians are to be regarded as more trustworthy and as living on a higher moral plane than the rest of the world, they must furnish stronger evidence of their sincerity than is now exacted from them, in the shape of plain and open self-denial. The church, in short, must be an organization held together by some stronger ties than enjoyment of weekly music and oratory in a pretty building, and alms-giving which entails no sacrifice and is often only a tickler of social vanity. There is in monasticism a suggestion of the way in which it must retain its power over men’s lives, and be enabled to furnish them with a certificate of character. Its members will have to have a good deal of the ascetic about them, but without any withdrawal from the world.

How to attain this without sacrificing the claims of art, and denying the legitimacy of honestly acquired material power, and, in fact, restricting individual freedom to a degree which the habits and social theories of the day would make very odious, is the problem to be solved, and, it is, no doubt, a very tough one. General inculcation of “plain living” will not solve it, as long as “plain living” is not defined and the “self-made man” who has made a great fortune and spends it lavishly is held up to the admiration of every school-boy. The church has been making of late years a gallant effort to provide accommodation for the successful, and enable them to be good Christians without sacrificing any of the good things of this life, and, in fact, without surrendering anything they enjoy, or favoring the outside public with any recognizable proof of their sincerity. We do not say that this is reprehensible, but it is easy to see that it has the seeds of a great crop of scandals in it. Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be, accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to scale “the toppling crags of duty.”