Religion_

WHEN we refer to the self-adjustment of religion to modern conditions,
our concern is not with the vast hinterland of ignorance and
superstition that is still inhabited by large numbers of the
unthinking of all creeds, Jewish as well as Christian. The destiny of
religion is, primarily, in the hands of those who are in the vanguard
of intellectual progress, and as long as its place in their lives is a
problematic one its future is uncertain. Since the days of the
Renaissance, religion has practically been busy adjusting itself to
the ever enlarging human experience. It was otherwise during the
middle ages, when the men of intellect threw the weight of their
influence on the side of tradition and authority. They devoted their
mental powers to the support of truths that were accepted at their
face value without further scrutiny and analysis. All the resources of
intellect were spent in interpreting the few facts they had in their
possession. Many centuries elapsed before the cry was raised for more
facts; but when, at last, the cry was answered, and new knowledge
concerning the world in which men lived began to pour in, the
foundations of tradition were shaken. Since then the religion of the
intellectuals has no longer been marked by the naivete and
self-assurance of its earlier years. Its existence has been one of
storm and stress. It has resisted all attempts to crowd it out from
the new world that man has conquered for himself, and in order to be
accorded a place in that world it has submitted to considerable change
and self-adjustment. We may note three distinct stages in these
efforts of religion to accommodate itself to life, corresponding in a
large measure with the great thought movements of the eighteenth, the
nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively.

The first stage in the process was the rationalistic. With Copernicus
and Galileo defeated by the Vatican, with Descartes having to defend
his orthodoxy, it seemed to the English and French philosophers of the
eighteenth century that the only way man could save his spiritual
nature from falling a prey to animalism or materialism was by
consigning to destruction the special forms in which religion existed
in the established faiths. The dreamers and the visionaries of that
day, who were moved by a sincere desire to further man's higher life,
entertained the hope that natural religion would revive with the
downfall of revealed religion. But hum