The Religion of a Mature Mind

the great commandments will not weaken the authority of the first. Possibly, in the age that is dawning, God will make of the newly invigorated social sense a chief instrument of his own self-revelation. Such being the influences that tend to give a special stamp to our age, it remains to ask How these Things Affect the Modern Man's Religion. Here, as before, it is possible to speak only of massive tendencies. Many an individual lives largely apart from them; many more are affected by them without knowing it. The official utterances of a whole communion may condemn them at the very moment when the mass of its membership is under their sway. The statements that follow, accordingly, should not be tested by reference to picked individuals or communities, or by comparisonwith official formulas, but by the actual habits of conduct, speech, and institutional life that may be observed, particularly in the centers of modern life. Such observation will show,. in the first place, that fear has practically ceased to be an influential factor in religion. Preachers are no longer accustomed to appeal to it as a motive, probably because such appeal is found to be useless. The modern man cannot be scared by the thought of death or of the judgment, and if he could be, the modern code would require him to conceal his terror. We may attribute this to callousness of heart, or to doctrinal looseness, or to the three influences just described. I believe that, apart from the incre...