study of religion has tended to broaden sympathy by
promoting the frank recognition of the varieties of religious
experience. More allowance is made for temperament, and there is less
anxiety to force all spiritual life into the same mould or scheme. The
sacramentalist and the non-sacramentalist, the mystic and the
intellectualist, the man of feeling and the man of action, those who
experience sudden changes and those who are the subjects of more gradual
growth--each receives his due, and neither need despise the other. There
are dangers associated with our constant reference to temperament. It is
really a condemnation of a Church to say that its position appeals to a
particular temperament, while it is often no real kindness to an
individual to be excused from attempting to enter into a particular
phase of religious life on the ground that he is temperamentally
disqualified. But it is clearly a gain to challenge an over-rigid
standardization of religious life. It is pathetic to hear people protest
that they have no religious experience, when they are simply blinded by
too narrow an interpretation of the term. In so far as the psychology of
religion throws into relief the manifold appeal of religious ideas to
different minds, it helps to create a new sense of unity in difference.

Accompanying the growth of the scientific spirit and in part stimulated
by it, more distinctly religious and philosophical influences are at
work quickening the desire for wider and deeper fellowship. Considering
first the problem within the borders of the Christian Church, I think we
may claim that there is a growing willingness to co-operate and a
revival of the hope of reunion. We may further claim that certain
advances in thought, in the understanding of Christianity itself, have
already been made, and render co-operation if not reunion less Utopian
than before. Of these I would put first the acceptance of the principle
of toleration as an essential element of Christian faith. It has been
suggested by Mr. Norman Angell that the religious wars of the
seventeenth century came to an end through economic exhaustion and
through rationalism. Toleration was accepted as a state-principle on the
strength of a common-sense calculation as to the uselessness of
repression. I am not disposed to ignore the forcefulness of the
argument, 'You will starve or go bankrupt, if you do not cease to
persecute heretics or fight Protestants,' nor would I underesti