e clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to
isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system
has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there
would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder
tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a
matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This
truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the
individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of
religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been
connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The
building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West,
and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear
predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack
of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease
with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own
particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether
this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The
emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their
permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States
was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a
period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people
absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least
suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing
will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further
socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual
life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in
the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a
century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as
that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of
our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from
religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which
in a measure has created the tension which we feel.

B. THE BACKGROUND

Deism

In England before the end of the Civil War a movement for the
rationalisation of religion had begun to make itself felt. It was in
full force in the time of the Revolution of 1688. It had not altogether
spent it