and given him apparent
reason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effect
which binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflection
or variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin,
meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. So
that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiation
of central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement brought
about, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and the
new and living problems offered them for practical solution. Thus the
generation now ending has been carried beyond the point of combating
ancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has become
comparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of
God, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needs
and the material manifestations of human personality.

Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new steps in the
expanding humanistic movement, so in these last days, critical
scholarship, itself largely a product of the humanistic viewpoint, has
added another factor to the group. The new methods of historical and
literary criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and the
other arts, have exerted a vast influence upon contemporary religious
thought. They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitrary
and fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notion
of equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present
tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the source
of all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness;
particularly to derive it all from group experience. Here, then, is
a theory of religious origins which once more turns the spirit of man
back upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejecting
an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not in
contemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perception
of something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the group
experience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy
imparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the _Religion
of the Semites_,[9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of
ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers as
part of an organic society." Durkheim goes beyond this. There are
not at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group