Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be an
exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little while ago
and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found in existence,
and already in a state of diffusion. People have begun to hear of the
new belief first here and then there. It is interesting, for example,
to trace how Christianity drifted into the consciousness of the Roman
world. But when a religion has been interrogated it has always had
hitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story of a founder. The
renascent religion that is now taking shape, it seems, had no founder;
it points to no origins. It is the Truth, its believers declare; it has
always been here; it has always been visible to those who had eyes to
see. It is perhaps plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.
It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of those
who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of Christianity.
Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley’s, speak of it as Christianity
without Theology. They do not know the creed they are carrying. It has,
as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle theology, flatly opposed
to any belief that could, except by great stretching of charity and
the imagination, be called Christianity. One might find, perhaps, a
parallelism with the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far
more probably an accidental rather than a sympathetic coincidence. Of
that the reader shall presently have an opportunity of judging.
This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only the
opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an extreme
neglect of definition. It was not at first anything more than a sect
of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst the uproar
and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more enthusiastic
Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in affected horror at
the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal mystery of the Trinity
was established as the essential fact of Christianity. Throughout those
three centuries, the centuries of its greatest achievements and noblest
martyrdoms, Christianity had not defined its God. And even to-day it has
to be noted that a large majority of those who possess and repeat
the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from
unthinking childhood, that only in the slightest way do they realise the
nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak
and think of both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the
doctrine of the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire
fabric of all the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly
Arians as though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the
world forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to give
Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement possible.
Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its maturity,
whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions of its
decay. The renascent religion that one finds now, a thing active and
sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come to self-consciousness.
But it is so coming, and this present book is very largely an attempt
to state the shape it is assuming and to compare it with the beliefs
and imperatives and usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian,
philosophical, and agnostic cults amidst which it has appeared.
The writer’s sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that he
speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence,
therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as
fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon
with this bias. He has found this faith growing up in himself; he has
found it, or something very difficult to distinguish from it, growing
independently in the minds of men and women he has met. They have been
people of very various origins; English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians,
French, people brought up in a “Catholic atmosphere,” Positivists,
Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans. Their diversity of source is as remarkable
as their convergence of tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon
parallel lines has come out to the same light. The new teaching is also
traceable in many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be
heard from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.