The future life of Christianity is safely vested in the free Churches. The freedom will be progressive, and may possibly embrace a vista of unfettered interpretation and application of Christian knowledge which will be as remote from the dogmatism of to-day as is our present attitude from the intolerance which kindled the Inquisition and made possible the night of St. Bartholomew. Religious intolerance has already lost three-fourths of its hold on faith. Catholic will now slaughter Catholic without the stimulus to hostility afforded by heretical opinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably hear His call to action.
Some will see in the decay of intolerance an
indication of the general evaporation of Christian articles of faith, and the possible loss of identity in some new form of religion. There is no danger. No religion can live in opposition to the evolution of the human spirit. It must be sufficiently deep to meet the most exacting need of individual religious experience, and it must be sufficiently broad and elastic to correspond to the ever-changing phenomena of social evolution. Christianity has this depth and this breadth. Two parallel lines of its development are clearly discernible at the present time. One is the transubstantiation of faith in social service; the other is a demand for individualized experience of spiritual realities. It is becoming more and more difficult to believe a thing simply because you are told you ought to believe it, or because your father and grandfather believed it. Authority in matters religious is being superseded by exploration. He who feels with Swinburne that
Save his own soul he has no star,
and he for whom space is peopled with living souls mounting the ladder to the throne of God, share the desire to experience the truth. Mysticism is passing through strange phases
of resurrection. Its modern garb is made up of all the hues of the past, and, in addition, contains some up-to-date threads of severely utilitarian composition. The number of those who claim direct experience of spiritual verity as against mere hearsay is greater than ever. The discovery of the soul is attracting students of every description. The powers of suggestion, and the creative possibilities of the subconscious mind, have opened up new fields of religious experiment and adventure. The art of controlling the mind, so as to make it immune against the depredations
of evil thought, or fear, or worry, is pursued by crowds of amateur psychologists who delight in the happy results. They are learning to live in tune with the infinite or cultivating optimism with complete success. To the objection that they live in an artificial paradise they reply that thought is the essence of things, and that they are but carrying into practice the oft-repeated belief that we are such stuff as dreams are made of.
“Religion,” says Professor William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egoism. The Gods believed in—whether by
crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing a personal call.” How could it be otherwise? The solitariness of each human soul is the first fact in religious consciousness. Altruism and communion with other souls are perforce attained through concern with the state of the ego. The spiritual egoism which demands pure thought, peace wherein to gather impressions of goodness, beauty, and truth, time for the analysis of psychic law, direct knowledge which is proof against the disease of doubt, is, after all, the most valuable contribution which the individual can make to society. The people who are now greatly concerned with the exact temperature of their own minds are, at any rate, to be congratulated on having made the discovery, which is centuries overdue, that hygiene of the soul is more important than hygiene of the body.
Placid contentment with the religious systems of the past is greatly disturbed by this assertiveness. There is a demand for a new message, couched in terms suited to the mental level of the twentieth century. A message delivered two thousand years ago to a small pastoral people, altogether innocent of the complicated