It is asking for light.
It is, indeed, an over-organised world working in the dark.
Canon Barnes, however, is not concerned only with the theological aspects of Christianity.

For him, religion is above all other things a social force, a great cleansing and sanctifying influence in the daily life of evolving man.

One may obtain a just idea of his mind from a pronouncement he made at the last conference of Modern Churchmen: We cannot call ourselves Christians unless we recognise that we must preach the Gospel; that we must go out and labour to bring men and women to Christ.
The Kingdom of God is a social ideal.
Modern Churchmen cannot stand aloof from intellectual, political, and economic problems.
To bring the Gospel into the common life, to carry the message and sympathies of Jesus into the factory, the street, the house, is an urgent necessity in our age.
He sees Christianity, not as an interesting school of philosophy, not as a charming subject for brilliant and amicable discussions, but as a force essential to the salvation of mankind; a force, however, which must first be disentangled from the accretions of ancient error before it can work its transforming miracles both in the heart of men and in the institutions of a materialistic civilisation.

It is in order that it should thus work in the world, saving the world and fulfilling the purposes of God, that he labours in no particular school of the Church, to make the reasonableness of Christ a living possession of the modern mind.
Supreme in his character is that virtue Dr.Johnson observed and praised in a Duke of Devonshire--"a dogged veracity." GENERAL BRAMWELL BOOTH BOOTH, W.BRAMWELL, General of the Salvation Army since 1912; e.s.

of late General Booth; b.