with equal justness how science (these very sciences at first so hateful), has helped to purge religion of its dross and bring out its higher values, by substituting the Ascent for the Fall of man, the Eternal Law of Righteousness for petty dogma, oracles, and fetishistic observances.

By way of summary let us reiterate that theology has hindered rather than helped human development, except through its by-product, the habit of speculation. Priesthoods have been enormously expensive, consuming unproductively vast amounts of capital; they have served to a limited degree as patrons of the arts, as healers, as teach-. ers, but their political influence has been nefarious. Organized cults have served to nurture the religious impulse, have fostered the arts of literature, music, and decoration, and have furnished foci for the creation of common bodies of belief and opinion, valuable alike for personal and group stability; that is, they have added their ballast to the other conservative and stabilizing institutions; but stability finds all too easily its final term in the fossil and the corpse. The only value that attaches apparently to dogma is the negative virtue of breeding heretics. And it is in terms of these innovating personalities that religion's contribution to the stock of moral ideas is to be interpreted. Finally, if progress be interpreted as an expansion, wherever religion has been conceived of and actually lived as love, sympathy, tolerance, optimism, and a widening of human personality, there it has served progressive ends.

As to the future, it may be true that there is a worldwide drift in the direction of secular education rather than religion for social control, and that science, not religion, will be the guide to specific action. But there are still vast hinterlands of savagery in all of us which need to be tamed and reduced to order by constructive means if we are to move forward. Rightly viewed, religion ought to

function positively here; whether a religion of Humanity, or the Great Unknowable, or Divine Principle, or the Heavenly Father, matters little. With the separation of the church from government, and particularly from control over education; with the growing concept of a free church in a free state; with the development of tolerance and liberalism in creed; with the constant iteration of the principles of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and above all with the perception of its mission as a helper in healing this world's social ills, religion seems to be in the way of freeing itself from many of the objections herein set forth. When it gains once for all the vision of God as developing, and conceives that its only possible service to Him is in the service of human society; when it displays itself as an altogether spiritual activity, resorting to persuasion and relinquishing the last remnant of coercion, then it will have freed itself completely from them. Three significant proofs of having reached that stage will be freedom from fatalism (the acceptance of a fully. wrought-out order into which we find more or less subserviently our appointed place), deliverance from a professional priestly class, and absolute tolerance. Furthermore, it will have nothing to fear from science or the critical mind. There will always be a place for faith and imagination to complete the circle of knowledge: that circle must be completed, but since the problem is infinite and science though mighty is limited, the imagination, or faith if you choose, clarified and adventurous, must do it. It seems almost gratuitous to add that in the light of future social progress religion will be taught through actual practice in healing and stimulating self-help in men rather than by catechising anybody.

IDEOLOGIST INTERPRETATIONS

CHAPTER XXX

THE IDEALISTS

"MIND alone is the cause of bondage or liberty for men," said the sages who indited the Upanishads. Ideals are the direct and only progressive forces, echo the idealists for progress is but the struggle of man out of physical and mental bondage to spiritual liberty. Ideas are not the effects but the causes of public events, declared the most learned English historian of the nineteenth century. To the idealist history is a transcendental process, whether like the Greek and Roman philosophers he believes in a long past Golden Age from which men have degenerated and to which they must once more attain; or whether with the Church Fathers and their successors in Christian theology and poetry he accepts the Garden of Eden with its story of

"Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat

or whether with Vico or Ranke he sees in terms of historical forces rather than in terms of God's interfering Providence and Plans; or whether with Hegel he feels the historical development of the race as a cool unfolding of an eternal Idea; or whether with Kidd he believes in biology and ruthless selection yet can see in an ultra-rational sanction the one firm basis for not only the progress of human society but even its very constitution.