It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say if he were not dead, that that there should be an immediate definition of the “New God.” It is not easy to define the New Woman—not easy to define the New Man, nor to formulate New Ideas, but, in these days, when the passion for money getting over-shadows everything else in life, and colors our religion and philosophy, with the cheap cynicism of poor cheated greed, it is easy to define the New God. In the first place, He is everything that the Old God was not; and that is saying everything that the Modern Dives wishes said—and for which he pays his preacher. The successful modern preacher has to be a man of great intellectual parts, and some knowledge of affairs. He must be a man of the world, for it is the function of a new prophet in a successful metropolitan church to preach the New God. And this is most effectively done while occupying the Old Pulpit. An adroit and conservative judicial spirit has entirely renovated and made respectable the gift of prophecy in the Christian church. So we see the churches filled with the social charity of sweet and silken equality, and all things are kept as sweet and peaceful as possible in this atmosphere that once reeked with sulphurous fumes for the wicked. But the sweet savor of camphor and smelling salts has stifled the sulphur,—and all other disagreeable odors in God’s House.

The churches of today are mostly mausoleums in which rest the crumbling remains of the ancient God. But an intellectual age still delights in the glamor of impressive ritual, and his name and attributes are enshrined in Creed, Decalogue and Hymn. But the old Law is serenely disobeyed, with the assurance that the New God is much too good or much too distant to perplex himself with the peccadillos of good society. As a certain French countess said in the court of Louis XV., “The good God would surely think twice before damning people of quality”—and undoubtedly the New God is more liberal and refined than the old one.

The New God, like the cynic man of the world, takes the world as he finds it. He is a being of an infinite indifference to syndicates (sin-di-cates!), deals (in which lurks the de’il!), coal oil monopolies (whence come endowments that throttle free speech on social questions), sugar trusts (that capture Congress), and the ways of a man with a maid—or, what is quite as wonderful—the ways of a new maid with an old man.

The New God is a dilettante in religion, who winks (when bribed with a good service in a fine church) and looks the other way when broad-cloth and satin sow unto the flesh.

It is to be suspected that the New Girl in her way is better than the New God. If the New Man becomes any worse, he ought to—well, it would be impolitic to say what he ought to do. But between the New God and the cynics of Mammon this world does not seem to promise the millennium or Utopia just yet a while.

L. Lemmah.