For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action. Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and Æschylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.
Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus, I feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and the politics of idealism.
If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my theory that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious things.
Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes of its author—a book which attempts to throw off all those long and hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation of a strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning to use.
INTRODUCTION
By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to discover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the Church in the affections of men.
My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because it has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of the Church to impress humanity with what its documents call the Will of God—a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful devotion, sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern Church.
As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a consequence of the late War.
The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which has for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of a Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and unworthy forces within his own breast—envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness—which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."