advent of the Saint Paul of
the humanitarian faith of the future, should gather up provisionally
such fragmentary illustrations of this new faith as are to be found in
the records of the old. Whatever form may be ultimately imposed on our
vague religious aspirations by some prophet to come, who shall unite
sublime depth of feeling and lofty purity of life with strong
intellectual grasp and the gift of a noble eloquence, we may at least be
sure of this, that it will stand as closely related to Christianity as
Christianity stood closely related to the old Judaic dispensation. It is
commonly assumed that the rejecters of the popular religion stand in
face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and
pagan rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if
he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come,
is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew.[20] Science, when
she has accomplished all her triumphs in her own order, will still have
to go back, when the time comes, to assist in the building up of a new
creed by which men can live. The builders will have to seek material in
the purified and sublimated ideas, of which the confessions and rites of
the Christian churches have been the grosser expression. Just as what
was once the new dispensation was preached _a Judaeos ad Judaeos apud
Judaeos_, so must the new, that is to be, find a Christian teacher and
Christian hearers. It can hardly be other than an expansion, a
development, a readaptation, of all the moral and spiritual truth that
lay hidden under the worn-out forms. It must be such a harmonising of
the truth with our intellectual conceptions as shall fit it to be an
active guide to conduct. In a world '_where men sit and hear each other
groan, where but to think is to be full of sorrow_,' it is hard to
imagine a time when we shall be indifferent to that sovereign legend of
Pity. We have to incorporate it in some wider gospel of Justice and
Progress.

I shall not, I hope, be suspected of any desire to prophesy too smooth
things. It is no object of ours to bridge over the gulf between belief
in the vulgar theology and disbelief. Nor for a single moment do we
pretend that, when all the points of contact between virtuous belief and
virtuous disbelief are made the most of that good faith will allow,
there will not still and after all remain a terrible controversy between
those who cling passionately to all