It must be confessed that many a candidate for the Christian ministry nowadays enters upon his course of professional study with misgiving. He is quite clear as to his own purpose, to serve God in his day and generation most directly and effectively by showing Him forth in word and deed. But he has a vague feeling that the curriculum of the theological seminary has nothing very definite to contribute to the preparation for this lifework. A glance at the announcement shows him that it concerns itself largely with the distant past—the writings of the Old and New Testaments, the vicissitudes and controversies of the Church, the theological problems set by dead religious thinkers. While he is eager to rush into the thick of the fray, he is bidden to stay and devote some of his most precious years to a laborious survey of ancient ground. Would it not be better to leave tradition and the traditional disciplines on one side, and give his time and attention at once to the consideration of the present needs of society and of the men and women who compose it? to learn what there is to do, and how to do it?

The Lord's Prayer has of late received renewed study, and fresh material has been brought together for determining its form and meaning. The problems have not been fully solved, but the discussion has reached a point at which a general survey of its present state and results is interesting and profitable.

This College cherishes the memory of its founder, whose benefactions were untrammelled by denominational conditions, but whose faith in the principles of his communion was lifelong and profound. It is therefore appropriate to set apart one day in the year when some aspect of these principles shall be presented to the College, not only as a tribute to the founder, but as a recognition of the religious comprehensiveness and ecclesiastical catholicity which it is the privilege of students here to enjoy.

There are not a few circles in our day in which social progress and religious faith are regarded as being in at least a semi-unfriendly relation. The leaders in the cause of the industrial classes indeed, like the Social Democrats and the Syndicalists, often thoroughly denounce religion. Workers for general social amelioration are frequently indifferent to religious faith. Great masses of people are convinced that religion does not help toward social progress and so regard it as at best a dead weight upon society. On the other hand, when churches or religious groups become vigorously active for social progress, the alarm is sure to be raised that their religion is becoming “mere social ethics.” When social topics are considered in the pulpit or at the mid-week service, the fear is expressed that real religion is being crowded out. When religious leaders throw themselves into social causes, they are suspected of having lost faith in “spiritual” forces. Not infrequently we hear people say that they are “tired of the social uplift”; though it is barely more than a decade since there arose any wide-spread interest in our country in social questions.

In the October number of this Review for 1912 there appeared, as many readers will doubtless remember, a striking article by Professor Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, under the caption “Christless Christianity.” This is his rather clever designation for the religion of those who hold that belief in the historicity of Jesus, however valuable to the Christian, is nevertheless not absolutely indispensable to Christian faith. The article shows a wide acquaintance with the recent literature of the subject, is written in a spirited and forcible manner, and altogether makes an appreciable contribution, as it seems to me, to the clearing up of this interesting question.

As making for this devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, however, what we have chiefly to thank Professor Warfield for is the way in which, having chosen his presuppositions, he carries them through to their logical conclusion, and states the result with all the candor that could be desired. He plays the game; he is never “off side.” And when he intimates that, in his judgment, the exponents of this “Christless Christianity”—among whom the present writer finds himself included—are not Christians at all, there is no just ground for complaint; it is all in the game. It is a case where, in strict logic, everything depends upon how Christianity is defined.

“We shall read today in the Book of Experience.” These words of Bernard of Clairvaux serve well as an adequate preface to the six short novels by “Mark Rutherford,” which constitute an important contribution to the intimate religious literature of the last century. For, although cast in the form of fiction, these narratives clearly belong to that comparatively small class of inevitable and significant works which are best described as “confessional.” Indeed, neither the form of the books, nor the shelter sought behind his now familiar pseudonym, served long to conceal the identity of the author, or to divert attention from the autobiographical aspects of his works.

The Nineteenth Century was ushered in with trumpet-calls to self-assertion and social freedom. A vague but long-cherished hope of the elect of humanity that the masses, each and all, might yet become persons, crystallized during the eighteenth century into a popular assertion of “equality of rights” in the body politic as “the first of rights” and essential to the process of universal individuation. Thus was born the democratic State. The Church in Christian civilization had long before recognized the independent personality of all, even of slaves and of women, in its spiritual Magna Charta, which secured to every human being the right to own his own soul and laid upon each the burden of saving it. The Protestant Reformation added to this the duty of understanding “the plan of salvation,” and hence reinforced, and in many instances initiated, the demand of the State for an intelligent electorate. Thus Church and State worked together to call into being the free, tax-supported school, and to make compulsory some minimum of formal education. The democratic State and the democratic school have worked together to create slowly legalized freedom of association for manual laborers. Labor reform organizations, springing up at once as soon as legal restrictions upon such associations were removed, have initiated the collective struggle for common industrial betterment. Of the five basic institutions of society, therefore—the family, the Church, the State, the school, and the industrial order—four are already well on their way toward thorough-going democratization. It is necessary to remind ourselves of these familiar facts in order to escape the common error of treating some one institution of society as a detached social structure, the problems concerning which are to be solved independently of other human relationship. The first, the most vital, the most intimate, and the most universal of social institutions, that of marriage and the family, has longest resisted re-adjustment to the new ethics involved in the now accepted principle of equality of human rights.

These passages, which I have printed elsewhere, I venture to reproduce on the ground that they state, if somewhat baldly, not indeed all that is important for an individualistic philosophy, but what is most distinctive and necessary. And thus they enable us to see the full dimensions of the question which I shall endeavor to answer, namely, whether the spirit of a free man is compatible with that reverence for the universe and desire for unity with the universe, conceived always as a personal universe—or, more concretely, with that worship and love of God—which I shall assume to be implied in any genuine religion. I need hardly say that the usual answer to the question would be negative. Those who stand firmly enough for the right of self-assertion in the presence of our fellows would be likely either to deny the authority of religion or at any rate to hold that self-assertion has properly no place there. And traditional Christianity, while teaching the doctrine of a personal relation to a personal God and, in the doctrine of personal immortality, affirming, almost distinctively, the worth of the individual soul, treats this worth, hardly as a right, but as a gift, and holds that though a man may stand upright in the presence of his fellows, in the presence of God his attitude must be one of self-abnegation and self-effacement—of submission. On the other hand, in Mr. Bertrand Russell's essay, A Free Man's Worship, in which I should say that the motif of the “free man” is rendered for the most part admirably, it seems to be implied that a free man's religion is necessarily a religion of self-sufficiency. This states my question: Does the individualistic motive imply a spiritual self-sufficiency?

More and more there is being brought to our attention the news of a great spiritual awakening in Southwestern Asia, that home of the prophets and birthplace of religions. At first it was called Babism, and centered around the brilliant youth, Mirza Ali Mohammed, the Bab, who after six years of teaching was martyred at Tabriz, Persia, in 1850. Later, most of his followers accepted the leadership of Mirza Husain Ali, generally known today as Baha'u'llah, and following his more universal teaching called themselves Bahais. Baha'u'llah after forty years of heroic teaching in exile and imprisonment closed his earthly existence at Acca, Syria, in 1892. The present leader of the movement, Abdul Baha (Abbas Effendi), under whose guidance the Bahai gospel has spread with remarkable rapidity into many countries, has recently spent more than a year in Europe and America, making its principles known, and through his great kindness, his words of wisdom, his sweet persuasiveness, has reflected its pure spiritual light. Apparently, it is not so much an organization as a spiritual attitude, not so much a new religion as religion renewed. Its followers are found in all sorts of ecclesiastical organizations. To be a Bahai a man need not sever his previous religious affiliations; he may remain a Buddhist, or Hindoo Braman, a Parsee, a Mohammedan, or a Christian. He becomes one of the Bahai Movement when he catches the Bahai spirit.

With eager expectations and with wistful yearning men have always turned to the poets as to watchmen of the night. The great poets see beyond the sunset and the stars, and read the writing of the wind upon the darkness. They are our prophets. God has whispered his secrets to them. And what they hear in the silence of the eternal, they proclaim in the streets of men. The poets are the pioneers of the spirit. They wander in desolate places; they are voices crying in the wilderness; and by the rivers of Babylon they see visions. The poets, at their best, have been leaders in religion.

So for these reasons many people ask today, Who are the new poets, and what message do they bring?

The Church is a divine institution, just as all legitimate organizations, like the State, the university, the political party, or the private club, are divine institutions. This is the outcome of any thoroughgoing acceptance of the Protestant position of the essentially divine character of all life, the priesthood of all believers, and the rejection of local divine places. Any special claim the Church can make must be based not on its essential character but upon its purpose and aim, and its special efficiency in pursuit of some end. That some ends in life are higher than others goes without saying. The end of a private club is legitimate and praise-worthy, but it is not in the judgment of thoughtful men on the same level of importance for life as a university. It is true that any scale of importance is finally based upon judgments of value which are in the last analysis extra-rational. The end aimed at by all churches, and among them we must include synagogues, cathedrals, and the lecture-halls of the Ethical Culture Society, is the mediation to men of the unseen and eternal values of religion and ethics. And each particular church bases its claim for recognition upon its assertion that it is attempting to mediate the truest and highest of these values in the most efficient way it knows. We thus see that the Church or churches represent the community, or rather parts of the community, organized for a particular purpose. The older distincrtion between a visible and invisible church should have lost all meaning for a consistent Protestantism, because it was fundamentally based on the false assumption that our relationships with God depended upon the mediation of the church, and that outside of the church there was no salvation. Hence to account for certain obvious facts, an invisible church had to be postulated. The logic of Protestantism makes any such assumption needless. Our relationships to God and salvation are not in the keeping of any church.

The familiar process of the elimination of factors from a confused equation is bringing a new stage of progress and of hope in dealing with the form of delinquency which is most distinctive of the English-speaking nations. Until now the forces of alcoholism have nearly always been given the choice of weapons. Too often unreason and ill-restraint have been matched against their like, with the result of only further intrenching the hostile power.

The purpose of this article is to study the incarnation in ethical terms. And that means to study it as an ethical process, as concerning the whole life of Jesus. It is a common tendency to identify the incarnation with the conception or the birth of Jesus, to make it an event in a moment of time. As the atonement has too often been limited to the death of Jesus, instead of being treated as the outcome of his whole atoning life, so has the incarnation too often been limited to his birth. But if we are to treat it in ethical terms, we have to deal not simply with the incarnate birth but with the incarnate life.

When Darwin first turned the search-light of his genius upon the world of Nature, and under its illumination men were compelled to replace their static views of organic creation by a dynamic representation that made the history of life a connected and, in great part, progressive process from the beginning, attention was mainly concentrated on the fitness of the organism to its environment. The fact of such fitness had long been obvious in differing degrees, but the problem of its causation as a factor in survival was then for the first time philosophically treated in the doctrine of Natural Selection. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that through all the earlier discussions that ranged round these topics the point of view was more or less one-sided. The fitness of the organism to its environment was stressed and stressed again; the question of the fitness of the environment to the organism was seldom raised, or even realized. In some cases, along with views advancedly transmutational, a conception of the environment was maintained that was almost static. The organism, isolated from its environment, was ransacked for its history in the laboratory or made the subject of experiment in order to elucidate its behavior. The conception of the organism and its environment as vitally and reciprocally connected, as a single system undergoing change, had not yet been reached.

From the days of Ignatius Loyola until now the Society of Jesus has bulked large in the imagination of the English-speaking races. The Elizabethan certainty that Jesuits were concerned in plots against the sovereign led with remorseless logic to hangings and quarterings at Tyburn. The Puritan prejudice, common especially in the seventeenth century, that the Pope was Antichrist, made his Jesuit emissaries appear dangerous and almost uncanny. The Enlightenment of the age of Voltaire saw in them a band of obscurantists of darkest dye, whose sinister influence over education and politics properly led the Bourbon courts to expel them from the chief Catholic countries of Europe, and to secure in 1773 from a hesitating Pope their utter and perpetual abolition. In the Brief of suppression the Pope himself enumerated their weaknesses and faults, and declared that these were so great as to outweigh their manifest and signal services; therefore the repudiation.

The decade just passed has witnessed an unusual activity in the production of books about Martin Luther. This activity has been greatly stimulated by the re-introduction of a method of controversy which reasonable men had been hoping was forever silenced. Until about a generation ago there had been two obvious and hopelessly opposed ways of approach to the subject of Luther's character and work. From the one side he was presented as an angel of light; from the other as the type of a depraved and malicious spirit, moved to activity not through any desire to improve the condition of his people but because, being the malignant thing he was, he could not act otherwise. It need hardly be said to the readers of this Review that both of these views of Luther are essentially false. They are perfectly intelligible, one equally with the other. They are the natural precipitation of the bitter controversies that gathered about him in his life, and continued long after his death to complicate the political and economic struggles out of which the new Europe of our day was born. In the light of our modern historical method, both views appear crude and unscientific. They represent a way of looking at historical characters and historical events to which we are apt to apply the crushing word “old-fashioned.” And in fact it did seem, up to a very few years ago, that these primitive judgments, which classified men into good and bad, angels and fiends, had become a thing of the past.

The religious question of an earlier day was, “Are you saved, my brother?” Matters have changed since then. Religion at this moment is but slightly a matter for individual concern or query, while it is very decidedly of serious importance to social thinkers and sociological conferences. As matter of fact, a consideration of the “state of religion” in our present day is no longer a mere courtesy to constituted religion but is a necessary logical preliminary to sociological reconstruction as such. For consider the significance of religion from the social idealist's point of view. One may calculate to the nicest exactitude every needed remedy for our glaring maladjustments, yet that result all by itself will be of no worth until the crucial question is answered whether, after all this information and wisdom has been gained, people of the average sort are going to pay any attention to it, let alone act accordingly. It is or should be plain that in social betterment as in life in general, though men by the grace of science know all mysteries and all knowledge, yet if they have not love, all social panaceas are condemned to be but effervescent dreams and much-whipped syllabub. The perception of values is nothing, except there be a fundamental and innate recognition of values as absolutely and beyond argument binding. The many imposing models of desirable social machinery being prepared by skilled draughtsmen within and without our universities and social settlements and the like, can never be made to go, despite all their glistening cogs and cams and innumerable clever devices, without a certain minimum of that spontaneous energy which we call religion. You may prove never so clearly how wages might be raised and taxes be more equalized and how at last, far off, poverty may be abolished. For those in the saddle there is easy reply, “Why give up our advantage? Why not ‘let us alone’? What are our servants and tribute-givers to us? Why are we our brothers' keepers?” To such blustering self-regarding inertia as this, there could be no answer save the appeal to deep realities, which because they are cannot by any “why” be shouldered aside.

In the present essay I propose to compare certain typical religious philosophies, with a view to discovering what degree of religious hope they justify; or what, in view of the nature of reality, they make of religious ideals. Philosophy, viewing experience roundly, taking into account both the uttermost that man wants and the evidence of reality, has reached different conclusions as to the relation between the two, or as to the consequent status of religious values in the light of critical reflection. There seem to me to be four typical philosophical verdicts of this sort: first, that the ideals of religion are illusory and vain; second, that its ideals are self-sufficient, and independent of reality; third, that its ideals define, or coincide with, reality; fourth, that its ideals are progressively efficacious, or may be realized. These four philosophies of religion may conveniently be termed: disillusionism, symbolism, idealism, and progressivism.

The construction and working of ecclesiastical machinery has always been allowed to be the special function of High Churchmen of every description. For there are High Churchmen not only in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America, but in every church. The division of churchmen into High, Low, and Broad is founded on the different attitudes of the human mind—legal, emotional, intellectual. All Christians reverence the Church, the Bible, and the conscience. But in presence of a problem one man will ask what is the teaching of the Church? Another will turn to consider what the Bible has to say about it. A third will endeavor to trace it to its basis in the necessities of thought and life. Religion is, for the High Churchman, devotion to an institution; for the Low Churchman, to a person; for the Broad Churchman, to abstract truth. Such sturdy guardians of the different important ways by which the soul approaches God are fortunately found in every church. And so the man who stands pre-eminently for the special tenets of the fathers, whether Calvin, Wesley, Swedenborg, or Channing, is as truly a High Churchman as he whose fathers are Ante- or Post-Nicene. And if the faith is regarded as having been delivered to the saints once and for all, the construction of machinery for its preservation will be not only the duty but the delight of the loyal ecclesiast.

The conditions of modern life and the demands for efficiency are pressing the question of salaried workers and wage earners. Salaries and wages are not large enough to enable them to lay up sufficient money for old age. Efficiency demands early retirement from the most active fields of service; division of labor and expert work offer few new openings for those who have passed middle life; the children have not wages or salaries large enough to support their aged parents; adequate life insurance is too expensive for most. The community as a whole must keep its members from suffering and starvation. Hence the demand for retiring- or old-age pensions, under systems whereby all the people in their active days pay taxes for the support of a part of the people in their old age.