e Presbyterians, Methodists and
Congregationalists in Canada, above all the eirenic manifesto of the
Bishops at the last Lambeth Conference, all indicate a new spirit
working potently in the souls of men. Concrete results are not as yet
conspicuous, but the spirit is there and a beginning has been made. Even
more significant is the wide testimony to the need for definite,
concrete and pervasive religion that is daily given by men whose names
have hitherto been quite dissociated from matters of this kind;
scientists, educators, men of business and men of public life. It may be
testimony in favour of some new invention, some synthetic product of
curious and abnormal ingredients; as a matter of fact it frequently is,
and we confront such remarkable products as Mr. Wells has given us, for
example. The significant thing, however, is the fact of the desire and
the avowal; if we have this I think we may leave it to God to see that
the desire is satisfied in the end by heavenly food and not by the
nostrums of ingenuity. For the same reason we may look without dismay on
certain novel phenomena of the moment. In their divergence from "the
Faith once delivered to the Saints" and left in the keeping of the
Church Christ founded as a living and eternal organism through which His
Spirit would work forever, they are wrong and therefore they cannot
endure, but each testifies to the passionate desire in man for religion
as a reality, and no one of them comes into existence except as the
result of desperate action by men to recover something that had been
taken from them and that their souls needed, and would have at any cost.
Each one of these strange manifestations is a reaction from some old
error that had become established belief or custom. No one who holds to
historic Christianity is interested in them, but those who have found
religion intellectualized beyond endurance and transformed either by
materialism or rationalism, seek for the mysticism they know to be a
reality (to employ a paradox) in the ultra mysticism of Oriental cults;
those who revolt against the exaggeration of evil and its exaltation to
eminence that rivals that of God Himself, which is the legacy of one
powerful movement in the Reformation, rush to the other extreme and deny
the existence of evil and even the reality of matter, while spiritism,
the most insidious, perilous and fatal of all the spiritual temptations
that beset the world at this time, gains as its ad