it is doing so at the expense of the younger generation and
sacrificing continuity with the future. It may conciliate those who have
power to make trouble in the present; but it is only the young who are
now silently abandoning the Church, that have the power to give life in
the future. It is always safer to agree with the old, but it is
infinitely more important to convince the young; and the reason for the
failure which troubles "A Gentleman with a Duster" is that
ecclesiastical life in England is failing to convince the young. Is it
better here?

CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.,
February 5, 1922.

INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

Some of the men whose personalities I attempt to analyse in this volume
are known to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think,
represent schools of thought in which America is as greatly interested
as the people of Europe.

Therefore I may presume to hope that this present volume will find in
the United States as many readers as _The Mirrors of Downing Street_ and
_The Glass of Fashion_.

But, in truth, I hope for much more than this.

Perhaps I may be allowed to say that I think America can make a
contribution to the matter discussed in these pages which will outrival
in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the
contribution she has already made to world politics by the inspiration
of the Washington Conference.

For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat
fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about
serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action.
Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always
young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and AEschylus. He
is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new
paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all
things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the
exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the
dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.

Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus,
I feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any
other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of
the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human
race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and the
politics of idealism