As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new
religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations
are still uncertain and incomplete. But that is no augury for the
continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may be
coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night. It may
seem at present as though nothing very much were happening, except for
the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology have become
a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of points. But
nothing fades of itself. The deep stillness of the late night is broken
by a stirring, and the morning star of creedless faith, the last and
brightest of the stars, the star that owes its light to the coming sun
is in the sky.
There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir
before a breeze. Men are beginning to speak of religion without the
bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence. The
Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never did that.
Their “Supreme Being” repudiated nothing. He was merely the whittled
stump of the Trinity. It is in the last few decades that the western
mind has slipped loose from this absolutist conception of God that has
dominated the intelligence of Christendom at least, for many centuries.
Almost unconsciously the new thought is taking a course that will lead
it far away from the moorings of Omnipotence. It is like a ship that
has slipped its anchors and drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and
vanishing stars, out to the open sea. . . .