So I end this compact statement of the renascent religion which I
believe to be crystallising out of the intellectual, social, and
spiritual confusions of this time. It is an account rendered. It is a
statement and record; not a theory. There is nothing in all this that
has been invented or constructed by the writer; I have been but scribe
to the spirit of my generation; I have at most assembled and put
together things and thoughts that I have come upon, have transferred the
statements of “science” into religious terminology, rejected obsolescent
definitions, and re-coordinated propositions that had drifted into
opposition. Thus, I see, ideas are developing, and thus have I written
them down. It is a secondary matter that I am convinced that this trend
of intelligent opinion is a discovery of truth. The reader is told of my
own belief merely to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloofness.
The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can trace it appearing and
disappearing and recurring in the mutilated records of many different
schools of speculation; the conception of God as finite is one that has
been discussed very illuminatingly in recent years in the work of one I
am happy to write of as my friend and master, that very great American,
the late William James. It was an idea that became increasingly
important to him towards the end of his life. And it is the most
releasing idea in the system.
Only in the most general terms can I trace the other origins of these
present views. I do not think modern religion owes much to what is
called Deism or Theism. The rather abstract and futile Deism of the
eighteenth century, of “votre Etre supreme” who bored the friends of
Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little relation to these modern
developments, it conceived of God as an infinite Being of no particular
character whereas God is a finite being of a very especial character. On
the other hand men and women who have set themselves, with unavoidable
theological preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual
teachings and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that
have interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new. There is a
curious modernity about very many of Christ’s recorded sayings. Revived
religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many religious
bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed through its bleak
abstraction and an unspiritual texture. Religion, thus restated, must,
I think, presently incorporate great sections of thought that are still
attached to formal Christianity. The time is at hand when many of the
organised Christian churches will be forced to define their positions,
either in terms that will identify them with this renascence, or that
will lead to the release of their more liberal adherents. Its probable
obligations to Eastern thought are less readily estimated by a European
writer.
Modern religion has no revelation and no founder; it is the privilege
and possession of no coterie of disciples or exponents; it is appearing
simultaneously round and about the world exactly as a crystallising
substance appears here and there in a super-saturated solution. It is
a process of truth, guided by the divinity in men. It needs no other
guidance, and no protection. It needs nothing but freedom, free speech,
and honest statement. Out of the most mixed and impure solutions a
growing crystal is infallibly able to select its substance. The diamond
arises bright, definite, and pure out of a dark matrix of structureless
confusion.
This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the best symbol of the
advent and growth of the new understanding. It has no church, no
authorities, no teachers, no orthodoxy. It does not even thrust and
struggle among the other things; simply it grows clear. There will be
no putting an end to it. It arrives inevitably, and it will continue
to separate itself out from confusing ideas. It becomes, as it were the
Koh-i-noor; it is a Mountain of Light, growing and increasing. It is an
all-pervading lucidity, a brightness and clearness. It has no head to
smite, no body you can destroy; it overleaps all barriers; it breaks
out in despite of every enclosure. It will compel all things to orient
themselves to it.
It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever clouds and mists may be
here or whatever smoke and curtains may be there. It comes as the day
comes to the ships that put to sea.
It is the Kingdom of God at hand.