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The Future of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Stewart Means
Affiliation:
New Haven, Connecticut

Extract

No one who has studied the history of the last century can fail to be struck by the great changes which have taken place in human thought, affecting the whole outlook of man in his relation to the world both within and without and constituting a revolution in the intellectual life of our times. The most permanent forces in human life have been brought face to face with new facts, new conditions, and new ideas, and nowhere do we find the evidences of this change in outlook greater than in the sphere of religion, where the old problems and the old controversies are passed or passing. One of the great questions of today is, as a recent writer has said, “whether Christianity can come to terms with the awakening self-consciousness of modern civilization, equipped with a vast mass of new scientific knowledge and animated for the first time by ideals which are not borrowed from classical or Hebrew antiquity.” But Christianity itself has already been deeply influenced by some of the changes which have taken place. The great forces of history press steadily upon all the institutions of society and the form or expression of the religious life is profoundly affected by the movements of thought or changes in sentiment which take place in human society.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1913

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References

1 R. W. Inge, Faith and its Psychology, p. vi.

2 John Morley, Critical Essays, vol. iv, p. 281.

3 Lectures on Preaching, p. 113.

4 Lecky, History of England, vol. i, p. 490.