d when overcome by superstition,
tradition, and dogmatism, it may stifle the intellect and retard
progress. The history of the world records many instances of this.

The modern religious life, however, has taken upon it, as a part of its
legitimate function, the ethical relations of mankind. Ethics has been
prominent in the doctrine and service of the church. When the church
turned its attention to the {447} future life, with undue neglect of
the present, it became non-progressive and worked against the best
interests of social progress. When it based its operation entirely
upon faith, at the expense of reason and judgment, it tended to enslave
the intellect and to rob mankind of much of its best service. But when
it turned its attention to sweetening and purifying the present,
holding to the future by faith, that man might have a larger and better
life, it opened the way for social progress. Its motto has been, in
recent years, the salvation of this life that the future may be
assured. Its aim is to seize the best that this life furnishes and to
utilize it for the elevation of man, individually and socially. Its
endeavor is to save this life as the best and holiest reality yet
offered to man. Faith properly exercised leads to invention,
discovery, social activity, and general culture. It gives an impulse
not only to religious life, but to all forms of social activity. But
it must work with the full sanction of intelligence and allow a
continual widening activity of reason and judgment.

The church has shown a determination to take hold of all classes of
human society and all means of reform and regeneration. It has evinced
a tendency to seize all the products of culture, all the improvements
of science, all the revelations of truth, and turn them to account in
the upbuilding of mankind on earth, in perfecting character and
relieving mankind, in developing the individual and improving social
conditions. The church has thus entered the educational world, the
missionary field, the substratum of society, the political life, and
the field of social order, everywhere becoming a true servant of the
people.

_Growth of Religious Toleration_.--There is no greater evidence of the
progress of human society than the growth of religious toleration. In
the first hundred years of the Reformation, religious toleration was
practically unknown. Indeed, the last fifty years has seen a more
rapid growth in this respect t