The Persistence of Religion

THERE is a theory which finds the spire of the New England meetinghouse in the mountain peaks of Arabia.

Tracing back the process of evolution, we come first to London, where the clean sweep of the Great Fire gave Sir Christopher Wren his opportunity to experiment in steeples; and then to Venice, where the campanile is a shining example of a tower beside a church but separate from it; and then to Alexandria, where the famous lighthouse on the isle of Pharos contributed to the religion of Mohammed both the form and the name of the minaret; and then to the ‘Tower of Babel’ at Borsippa, and the zikkurats of the temples of Babylonia and Assyria. A zikkurat is a huge quadrangular mass of brick, rising in diminishing stories,—as a child places a big block on the floor, and puts a smaller one on it, and on that a smaller still, — and is ascended by a winding balustraded stair to a shrine on top.

This, according to the theory was the ritual equivalent of a mountain.

Into the flat lands between the Tigris and Euphrates came the ancestors of the Babylonians and Assyrians out of the mountains of Arabia. There they had worshiped the storm-god, who dwelt upon the heights among the clouds; with whom they communed, like Moses, by climbing up and making their offerings and saying their prayers upon the summit. And because there were no mountains in their new country, they erected beside every temple a little mountain in the yard. Thus the zikkurat, and then the minaret, and then the campanile, and then the steeple of the parish church!

Professor Jastrow suggests this explanation of the origin of church spires in his Religious Belief in Babylonia andAssyria!¹ The theory is but a minor incident in an illuminating book, like the suggestion of Professor Carter in his Religious Life of Ancient Rome,² that the lack of bath-tubs in English houses in the period of the Georges was due to the action of Witigis, King of the Goths, in cutting the aqueducts of Rome when he besieged that city in the sixth century. The aqueducts being cut, the Roman habit of bathing ceased; and since Rome prescribed the fashions of Europe, the Germans, the Franks, and finally the English, learned a civilization in which the bath had ceased to be a luxury and had become an infrequent necessity. Whether the theory is capable of proof or not, the fact remains that the present grows like that out of the past. Thus the spire becomes a convenient symbol of the persistence of religion.

The word which Bergson uses in his Creative Evolution³ is not persistence, but duration. This denotes not merely a lapse of time but a continuous contribution to progress. Bergson finds that time is an integral factor of life. It both implies and produces change. The duration of religion signifies an everlasting reality which is forever changing. It means that the fact of change, instead of discrediting religion, shows the kinship of religion with all living things. It is expressed now in the peak of a mountain on which it builds an altar, and now in the tip of a steeple to which it fastens a cross, and through all differences endures and grows.

Bergson says that ‘our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment.’ Meanwhile, our soul is endeavoring to bring to adequate realization and expression the relation between man and God. One of these processes results in the gradual development of civilization, whereby we are fitted to the conditions of the visible world. The other process results in the gradual development of religion, whereby we are fitted to the conditions of the invisible world. Religion, therefore, is one aspect of that unfolding life of which the other aspect is civilization. Like civilization, it proceeds out of the imperfect by a series of experiments. Some of these experiments fail, a few succeed; but the failures are almost as important as the successes, and make almost as valuable a contribution to religious betterment. Thus fetichism and polytheism and pantheism were experiments in religion, as absolute monarchy and slavery and the feudal system were experiment s in civilization.

This doctrine of duration is opposed to the theory of a closed universe. Thus Bergson rejects two current explanations of the world.

The explanation which he calls mechanism affirms that the world in all its possible developments was contained in the primordial cosmic vapor, so that a ‘sufficient intellect,’ examining that vapor before the beginning of time, could have accurately foreseen what animals would be found in the woods of England in 1869, — that being the year in which Huxley made the statement. Bergson says that in such a doctrine time is indeed still spoken of, but without serious meaning. ‘One hears the word, but does not think of the thing. For time is here deprived of efficacy, and if it does nothing it is nothing.’

The explanation which he calls finalism affirms that the world is being made, not only out of materials contained in the cosmic vapor, but according to a plan formed from all eternity. The universe has been thought out completely; all things were determined before the world was; whatever happens is in accordance with a programme arranged to the last detail. Finalism, however, is only mechanism inverted. For an infinite push, the ‘impulsion of the past,’ it substitutes an infinite pull, the ‘attraction of the future.’ It does not take time into account. ‘If there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again.’ It is ‘a perception which would vanish, like a rising mist, for a mind seated at the centre of things.'

Creative Evolution, as distinguished from mechanism and finalism, recognizes in the factor of time a continual cause of change. Life is affected by matter as water is affected by earth. Down comes the water from the spring and makes its way in directions which are determined by obstacles. Here it flows freely, there it cannot flow at all. Thus flows life. Hence the difference between plants and animals and men. Between the impulse of the past which makes the water spring out of the earth, and the attraction of the future which makes it flow downhill, are all the changes and chances wrought by time and matter. The universe is forever growing by combinations ever new. Nothing can be perfectly predicted, because into every equation enters the indeterminable factor of time. Halley’s comet returns, indeed, according to the calculations of astronomers, but never to the same world. Now it alarms the army of Harold and encourages the army of William, now it attracts the intelligent interest of people with telescopes, and even in the sky its behavior perplexes the most learned observers.

Bergson does not discuss the nature of the force which is thus mysteriously and continually making use of time to construct this perpetually unexpected world. Alfred Russel Wallace, in The World of Life,⁴ states his owm conviction within his first few pages. He maintains that these complex outgrowths imply ‘ first, a creative Power, which so constituted matter as to make these marvels possible; next, a directive Mind, which is demanded at every step of the process which we term growth; and lastly, an ultimate Purpose,’ which he holds to be the development of Man. Nothing so plain as this appears in Bergson’s book, whose excellent index does not contain a single mention of the word ‘religion.’ But the religious implications of this philosophy of life are evident.

Bergson’s doctrine of duration forbids us to consider religion as a closed matter. It is a process of adjustment to the world invisible. Primitive religion is as imperfect as primitive civilization. The instinct of adjustment is imperative, and man is trying to accomplish it as regards his whole environment. He must be in right relations with the physical, and the social, and the spiritual world in order to attain peace and happiness. The history of religion reveals his unceasing endeavor to live aright with the unseen powers. Thus it is varied and progressive, like the history of science. Thus also it is unfinished. Each new age writes its new chapter. Man increases in his knowlege of God as in his knowledge of the world.

It is an interesting coincidence that the literary year whose most important contribution to the discussion of human life is Bergson’s Creative Evolution should be uncommonly rich in studies of various phases of religion. Here, for example, is a group of books beginning with Professor Jastrow’s account of the religion of Babylonia and ending with Professor Carter’s account of the religion of ancient Rome, and including between them The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East,⁵ by Alfred Jeremias of the University of Leipzig; Great Religious Teachers of the East,⁶ by Alfred W. Martin of the New York Ethical Culture Society; Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism,⁷ by Franz Cumont of the University of Ghent; and The Five Great Philosophies of Life⁸ by William DeWitt Hyde, President of Bowdoin College.

These books agree in describing the ancient world as profoundly religious. Its surviving literature is almost entirely religious; its remaining buildings were most of them erected for the purposes of worship; and its outstanding men were either religious leaders or else kings, commanders, and statesmen who believed themselves to be the sons or servants of the gods. Of course, the history of the past is only in small measure a history of the people. It is only in recent times that the historian has concerned himself with the affairs of plain citizens. Very likely the various importunate interests of the visible world competed then, as now, with the interests of the world invisible. The perspective may possibly throw out of proportion the emphasis which was then placed on religion. Beside the temple stood the palace, and around them both were the dwellings of the people. The towers of the temples overtopped the other buildings, but so do the steeples of our churches, except in a few great cities where the officebuildings exceed them.

It is nevertheless true that, next to law and war, the most conspicuous fact in the life of the ancient world was religion. And law and war were servants of religion. Professor Jastrow describes in detail how the state decided its policy in peace and its movements in war by divination, seeking to discover the divine will in the appearance of the livers of sacrificial animals, and in the combinations of the stars.

Professor Jeremias sees a faint shining of the stars in many a cloudy page of the Old Testament. His idea is that ancient life was so lived under the stars that these mysterious lights entered into all thought and language, and survived emigration and changes of religion. Centuries after the Hebrews had outgrown the star-worship of their remote ancestors, they still talked in terms of the stars. The signs of the zodiac are found in Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons. Many of the illustrations which are cited to prove this astral inheritance are unconvincing, but there is enough to show that the Old Testament people were the descendants of generations of deeply religious ancestors.

Then out of these vague regions, whose old cities are both dead and buried, and whose old creeds are filled with names which we cannot remember, where our guides are anthropologists and archæologists, appear at last the forms of men with whose greatness we are familiar.

Under their leadership, the religions which still rule the East came into being. Mr. Martin has sketched for his Sunday evening congregations the lives and teachings of some of these supreme prophets. It is a curious fact that Confucius and Gotama and Zoroaster lived in the same age. The Apostles of China and of India were contemporaries, and the Apostle of Persia preceded them by so few years that they were born about the time he died. Moreover, Socrates and Plato, and Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides were all alive in that same fifth century before Christ, which may well be called the Golden Century.

The Old Testament world was filled with confusion. The Assyrians were conquered by the Babylonians, and the Babylonians by the Persians, and the Hebrews were under the oppression of each of these dominant powers in turn. The images of the old gods were broken in pieces in the destruction of the cities which they could not save, and the old faith in the gods seemed to be shattered with them. The religions described by Jastrow and Jeremias ceased to exist. But that was only a seasonal change in the everlasting persistence of religion. It was the winter which is followed by the spring and the summer, or the night which precedes the day. The fifth century was a time when the sun arose shining out of the ancient mists.

That Gotama and Confucius are still living forces in the Eastern world is made plain in Professor Reinsch’s timely book, Intellectual and Political Currents in the Far East.⁹ Within the past few years the Japanese have revived the festival of Confucius; that is, they have returned to the ancient custom of paying an annual public honor to the memory of this sage and hero. The Japanese chivalry takes its code of Bushido from the teachings of Confucius. It was under the inspiration of his words that the soldiers of Japan went into the war with Russia. At the same time, there is a restoration of Confucianism in China. The men of the progressive movement are studying the writings of Confucius in the light of contemporary history, and are finding them dynamic. And while Confucius is thus the source of the controlling ethical ideals of the East, Gotama is the supreme teacher of religion. He is the greatest unifying force in the Orient. ‘ His thought and life have been and are the chief centre of the common feelings and enthusiasms of Asia.’

There is a new Buddhism whose emphasis is not on resignation but on energy. Nirvana is now defined not as self-annihilation, but as self-possession and mastery of mind, ‘gained through the application of the most concentrated energy in mental processes through generations.’ Thus these old religions, whose origin was in the Golden Century and whose ministry seemed to be directed only toward the calm and peace of a quiet and unchanging life, are found to contain new and surprising forces. Gotama and Confucius, being re-read, are perceived to be equal to the new day in India, in China, in Japan; and were never more alive than they are at present.

The entrance of Confucianism and Buddhism into the world whose classical religions were those of Babylonia and Assyria had its counterpart in the entrance of the philosophies and the mysteries into the world whose classical religions were those of Greece and Rome. It had come to pass again that the ancient creeds had failed to satisfy the minds and hearts of men. The gods still lived in the epics and in the arts, and in the customary ritual of common life, but they were no longer worshiped. Neither the poetry of Greek religion, nor the prose of Latin religion, gave heed to man’s increasing sense of his need of salvation. They did not take serious account of sin. They were not religions of redemption.

President Hyde shows how the philosophies were brought forward to meet this need. Epicurus taught men to attain happiness by increasing their pleasure; Epictet us, by decreasing their desires; Plato, by subordinating the lower to the higher; Aristotle, by serving the higher with the lower. Professor Cumont shows how the mysteries appealed to those who were indifferent to the philosophies. Cybele and Attis came from Asia Minor. Isis and Osiris came from Egypt. These religions were akin to the nature-worships of the primitive world. Each of them reënacted, in ritual and symbol, the annual tragedy of the winter and the following miracle of the spring. At the heart of each was the death and resurrection of a God. Into that death and resurrection the disciple entered, dying to sin and rising again to a life of righteousness.

The chief of the Oriental religions which contended with Christianity for the control of Occidental life was Mithraism. The philosophies came from Greece, the mysteries from Egypt and from Asia Minor; Mithraism came from that ancient land which alone in the East had survived the wreck of old empires and was still strong enough to rival Rome: the land of Persia. It was the contribution of Zoroaster to the persistence of religion. Professor Cumont knows more about Mithraism than any other scholar, and his chapter on that subject is both valuable and interesting. The ruined shrines of Mithra have been found in nearly all parts of the Roman Empire, from the glens of Scotland to the sand of Sahara. The religion had its sacraments of the divine bath and the divine feast. It exalted Mithra as the saviour of the world. It promised the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell. It gave to our calendar the name of Sunday for the first day of the week, and the date of Christmas, being Mithra’s birthday taken over by the conquering church. In the third century of our era the contest between the faith of Mithra and the faith of Christ was still so close that Renan could say that ‘if Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic.’

The religion of Mithra was equipped for its competition with Christianity by its definiteness of doctrine and of organization. The two faiths brought two new elements into the history of religion. Each presented a creed and a church. ‘There were certain clearly defined things to be believed; and more important yet, there was an equally definite set of things to be done.' Occidental religion, for the most part, had been neither theological nor ecclesiastical. Its teachers had been poets and philosophers, who had interpreted the myths and traditions as they pleased; and its priests had been gentlemen whose ministrations at the altars of the national religion had formed a part of their function as state officials.

Mithraism was handicapped by its endeavor to bring along with it an outgrown and discredited mythology. Religion persists by virtue of its ability to accept the results of experiment and experience, and to start anew and free. The heart of the philosophies was in the teachings of Christ, and the heart of the mysteries was in his death and resurrection. But He stood splendidly free.

Moreover, as Professor Carter reminds us in his interesting lectures, Mithraism had two other serious disadvantages. It was separated from history by the fact that no such person as Mithra had ever actually lived; and it was separated from progress by the fact that it was not concerned with social betterment. ‘To lift up those who have fallen beneath the feet of the progress of the world, to care for those who are of no apparent profit or good to society at large, to give to those who cannot give again, these are the deeds which, even in our modern parlance, we call “real Christianity.” It is this note which has awakened a response in millions of human beings during these nineteen centuries. It is the essentially new thing which has come into the world.’ Mithraism knew nothing of it.

Christianity thus came, like Judaism, into a world already religious. Its most difficult contentions were not with sin, but with religion. Its history was foreshadowed in the experience of Christ Himself, who was opposed and put to death, not by the wicked, but by the orthodox, by the conservative maintainers of the existing religious situation. Already, in the Revelation of St. John, the great fight begins between the Empire and the Church. Dr. Moffat, in his Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament¹⁰ dates the book in the reign of Domitian, when the Roman emperor, not content with allegiance, was beginning seriously to enforce the demand for adoration. The book is written to sustain those who are under persecution. A like condition of suffering and contention appears in the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose splendid roll-call of the heroes of faith in the past is intended to encourage those who were called to be heroes of the faith in the difficult present.

For the militant purposes of this contention the Christian religion developed both the creed and the church. It is indeed true, as Professor Clarke says in The Ideal of Jesus,¹¹ that the early churches were both many and varied. ’They were not all alike, for some were patterned after the Jewish synagogue and some after the local organizations of the Gentile world, but they were all aimed at the one purpose, and therefore all were Christian churches.’ Presently these loosely organized societies were combined into one strong, centralized church. It was patterned after the Roman Empire, as the earlier forms had followed the Jewish synagogue. This ‘one sole organization, single and unique,’ Dr. Clarke seeks in vain in the ‘Mind of Jesus,’ and he is inclined to infer that it is contrary to that ideal. But Bergson’s doctrine of duration carries with it the element of the unexpected. The brook as it trickles down the hill may part into many little streams, but a barrier will bring them all together into a strong river. They must join their forces to get through the barrier.

That is what the churches did when they were confronted by the mighty barrier of the empire. After that was broken, the barbarian invasion made another barrier. There had to be one sole organization, single and unique, one church, one creed. Time implies change, because time is measured by obstacles. The adjustments which are needed to overcome the obstacles constitute the development of the original idea into the institutions which express it.

Thus the organization of religion may vary according to varying conditions. Jesus, as Dr. Clarke says, left in the world ‘a life to be lived.’ He left also a church whose function was ‘to protect it and to utilize it.’ The constant problem, then, was how to construct the church so as to fulfil its function best. The persistence of religion consists in its continual adaptation to its environment. Thus the organization of religion may properly be congregational in an age when that form of polity works; and quite as properly, in another age, episcopal; and, in another, papal.

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The missionaries who went up from Rome to meet the invading barbarians were engaged in a twofold task. They were both to convert and to civilize these new people. They brought with them not only Latin Christianity, but Latin culture. Across the gulf which parted the Roman Empire of the Ctesars from the Roman Empire of the Popes, these men built bridges. They fulfilled a pontifical function. Over they came, carrying in one hand the writings of Augustine, and in the other the writings of Virgil. They found the barbarians receptive. The conquering soldiers realized that beyond their own might of arm was another might of mind, and still another might of soul. Thus they went to school and to church, and the missionaries taught them.

The result of this combination of culture and Christianity was what Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor calls The Mediœval Mind.¹² The two influences worked together — now culture prevailing, now Christianity prevailing— to shape both the persons and the events of the Middle Ages. Thus they appear in Charlemagne and in Bernard, in Héloïse and in Santa Clara, in Thomas Aquinas and in Dante. These interactions Mr. Taylor traces in his learned and delightful book.

The changes which were thus wrought in the institutions of religion are symbolized by the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic in architecture. The church which had worshiped in the sunlit sanctuaries of Italy, amidst wide wall-surfaces and clear windows and broad spaces open to the eye, now erected in Germany those vast cathedrals whose spires and clustering chapels and stained windows expressed both a new sense of individuality and a new sense of mystery.

All this was dominated by a new authority. For the men who brought the old culture and the old religion were manifestly the intellectual and spiritual superiors of the men who were remaking Europe. The conquerors could neither read nor write. In the presence of their teachers they were like children, who are not to be reasoned with, but to be instructed. Accordingly, as Mr. Taylor says, ‘an attitude of humble inferiority before Christianity and Latin culture was an initial condition of mediæval development.’ And, as he says again, ‘when this Christianity, so mighty In itself and august through the prestige of Rome, was presented as under authority, its new converts might well be struck with awe. It was such awe as this that acknowledged the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman and Catholic Church — the most potent unifying influence of the Middle Ages.’

Against the conventionalizing influence of such an authority, there were two mediæval protests. The monks and the mystics proclaimed the independence of the individual. The monk freed himself from the regulations made by the priests. He was a layman who had determined never to go to church again. He turned his back upon the altar and upon all the ancient order of worship, and found what seemed to him a better church in a cave or in the woods, where he had no sermons and no sacraments, but sought God in his own way. The mystic freed himself from the limitations set by the theologians. In the place of the ancient creeds, and even in the place of the ancient scriptures, he had a new, immediate, and individual revelation of divine truth.

Mr. Taylor makes his readers acquainted with these independent and original persons, from whose writings he quotes freely. Some were hermits, like Bruno the Carthusian; some lived in a monastery, but came out to take part in the affairs of the great world, like St. Bernard; some lived outside the monastery, and devoted themselves to preaching, like St. Francis. At the same time the devotion which thus comes to flower and fruit in monasticism appears in another form in chivalry. Beside the saints are the knights, Roland and Tristan and Lancelot and Parsifal.

The time came, indeed, when the wise church won back these individualists. The original protest survived mainly in the chronic quarrel between the abbot and the bishop, and between the friar and the priest. The altar was the heart of the monastery. But at the beginning, as Dr. Allen says in his Christian Institutions, the monks, ‘taking their flight from the world, practically left the church behind them, carrying with them no bishops, making no provision for ritual or sacrament. To these things they were indifferent, if not averse.’

These men are all alike in their enthusiasm for ideals. They have set before them a way of life along which they are advancing through many obstacles to a celestial city. This city the mystics saw in vision. In silence and solitude, asking no help from sacrament or book, they contemplated God. They addressed themselves to meditation.

This exercise Hugo of St. Victor compares to the kindling and final clear burning of a fire. First, there is smoke, with flame flashing here and there; then the victrix flamma, ‘ darting through the heap of crackling wood, springs from branch to branch, and with lambent grasp catches upon every twig; nor does it rest until it penetrates everywhere and draws into itself all that it finds which is not flame. At length the whole combustible material is purged of its own nature and passes into the similitude and property of fire; then the din is hushed, and the voracious fire, having subdued all, and brought all into its own likeness, composes itself to a high peace and silence, finding nothing more that is alien or opposed to itself.’ The spiritual victrix flamma, burning out all that is hostile and unworthy in us, flames up into ardent and pure love of God.

Mediæval mysticism was a revolt against a presentation of religion which took little account of experience. In it, the individual asserted himself in the midst of religious conditions which suppressed or at least subordinated individuality. Dr. Workman, in his Christian Thought to the Reformation,¹³ describes the situation. The salvation of the individual ‘was conditioned from first to last by his belonging to a corporation in whose privileges and functions he shared; through whose sacraments his life was nourished; by whose graduated hierarchy, though but the meanest servant of the Church, he was linked in the supreme Head; whose saints shielded him by their merits or helped him by their intercessions. Through this corporation alone he was brought in touch with the Saviour; outside the corporation his soul was lost.’ It was a sublime idea. It made its effective contribution to the persistence of religion. It was needed for the spiritual good of a majority of mediæval men. But it was only one aspect of the truth. Over against the priest, emphasizing the institution, has always stood the prophet, emphasizing the individual. In the Middle Ages the prophet was a mystic.

The mystic stood upon the basis of his own actual experience. He knew that God could be found without the assistance of the church, because he himself had found Him. He had no need of any theologian to teach him. Thus Tauler said, ‘The dwelling in the Inner Kingdom of God, where pure truth and the sweetness of God are found, is not something that can be learned from the masters of Paris.' The effect of t his faith was to change plain people into saints. Dr. Rufus Jones, who this year follows his Studies in Mysticed Religion with a sympathetic account of The Quaker in the American Colonies,¹⁴ shows how in this country as in Europe, and in modern times as in the Middle Ages, mysticism has transformed the common life into holiness and beauty: —

‘ Farmers, with hands made rough by the plough-handle, in hundreds of rural localities not only preached messages of spiritual power on meeting-days, but, what is more to the point, lived daily lives of radiant goodness in simple neighborhood service. Women who had slight chance for culture, and who had to do the hard work of pioneer housekeeping, by some subtle spiritual alchemy were transformed into a virile sainthood which made its power felt both in the Sunday gathering and in the unordained care of souls throughout the community.'

The collision between the Puritans and the Quakers illustrates the inevitable collision between the mediæval church and the mystics. In the church, religion had been resolved into a system; the mystics perceived that it is a life. They protested against a completed revelation of God, as Bergson protests against the idea of a closed universe. The spirit, they said, still speaks to man. Truth, they insisted, is not static and complete. Man is meant to grow in all knowledge, whether of heaven or of earth. The process of making formulas and using them to build walls across the way of progress was opposed by the mystic, as it is opposed by the man of science. Whenever he came upon such a wall, he tried to break it down. He wanted a free thoroughfare for truth in all directions.

Then came Luther with a sledgehammer. All the old protests of the monks against the regulations of the priests, and of the mystics against the limitations of the theologians, were magnified, centred, and made effective in him. Dr. McGiffert’s Martin Luther, the Man and his Works,¹⁵ and Dr. Preserved Smith’s Life and Letters of Martin Luther,¹⁶ bring us into the near presence of the man who changed the course of history. He came, like Gotama in the midst of a conventionalized Brahmanism, insisting on realities, demanding to know whether traditions were true or not, and maintaining that every age must have the right to express itself in its own way in religion. ‘I propose,’ he says, ‘to terrify Satan’; and by Satan he meant all hindrance to the free pursuit of truth and the free living of the Christian life. He exalted the individual. ‘He gave Protestantism a new conception of the relation between religion and life. Instead of finding its highest manifestation apart from the ordinary relationships and occupations of this world, it is in them, according to Luther, that religion best expressed itself. Asserting the great sacredness of all callings, he changed the whole tone of society.'

Thus Luther belongs to the company of those great men who have vindicated, each in his own time, the principle of the development of religion. He is akin to Francis and to Benedict, and akin also to Plato and to Gotama and to Confucius. It was made manifest again in him that religion cannot be confined within a system, and cannot be restrained by any church or creed. It possesses the irresistible dynamic of growth. Periodically in the course of history it has been thought to be completed. Now, say the ecclesiastics, we have a perfect church; now, say the scholastics, we have a complete formula of truth. But always a new generation makes these great claims ridiculous.

Religion is as incomplete as civilization. It is true, indeed, that the heart of the one as of the other, is to be found in the life and words of Jesus Christ. But it is also true that our understanding of the implications of His life and words, whether for civilization or for religion, is like our understanding of the implications of the earth and of the stars.

‘Any claim for finality in the Christian religion must be based on its power of perpetual development.' This is said by Dr. Rashdell in his Philosophy and Religion.¹⁷ He adds, ‘Belief in the continued work of the Holy Spirit is an essential element of the Catholic Faith.' And again he says, ‘In the pregnant phrase of Loisy, the development which the church is most in need of at the present moment is precisely a development in the idea of development itself.’

Religion will develop, in spite of all opposition of conservatives, and of all errors of radicals. It has changed, and is changing, and will change. The process calls for no apology, and requires no defense of indefensible positions. It is not a retreat, but an advance. It is a part of the everlasting vitality of religion.