A Number of years ago Mrs. Eddy, as Leader of the Christian Science movement, inaugurated the present order of service in all churches of the denomination, and since that time the old-fashioned sermon has been a thing of the past in the Christian Science churches. The wisdom of this move was confirmed by the subsequent increase in the size of the congregations then in existence, and by the continued growth of the denomination through the organization of new congregations, all of which use the identical Lesson-Sermons, which are prepared in advance by the committee appointed for that purpose. Other religionists are now finding that the giving out of some one's mere personal opinion in the guise of a traditional sermon is not reaching the public, nor is it accomplishing the purpose for which religions services are maintained, and this is made evident by the lecture of Rev. Johnston Myers, recently delivered to a class of divinity students at the University of Chicago. The Chicago Tribune reports Mr. Myers' lecture as follows:—
Sermons and discourses from the pulpit belong to the passing order are out of date. Like the crusades, they have had their day in the religious world and now must give way before a new era in the manner of getting people into close association with the Church. The new period in religion is "personal work." This is the belief of the Rev. Johnston Myers, pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church, expressed before an audience of more than one hundred young divinity students at the University of Chicago yesterday [June 26]. The occasion was Dr. Myers' second lecture of a series on the general topic of "Modern Evangelism." He did not strike a hard blow at the sermon in itself, but he classified it as too antiquated to be of great use in the modern world. He pointed out as proof that it was not the failure of congregations to grow in size, the indifference with which church members attended services, and the competition of sermons with the Sunday paper that caused the new era.
"Mere preaching ceases to hold a large place in the work of the church nowadays," he declared. "People are tired of it. However, it is given still a more or less prominent place and the clergy are still trying to preach; with a certain amount of success. Compared with the congregations of a few years ago, and considering the enlarged size of the neighborhoods from which they have to draw, there are few large congregations in the country to-day as large as those to which Beecher, Talmage, and Spurgeon preached.
