thority of
religion--or make science supreme, submitting religion to its scrutiny
and judging it like other phenomena. Under this investigation
Christianity does not appear altogether exceptional. Its early logic,
ontology and cosmology, with many of its distinctive doctrines, are
shown to be the natural offspring of the races and ages which gave them
birth. Put into their historical environment they are freed from adverse
criticism, and indeed valued as steps in the intellectual development of
man's mind. Advanced seriously, however, as truths to-day, they are put
aside as anachronisms not worthy of dispute. The Bible is studied like
other works, its origins discovered and its place in comparative
religion assigned. It does not appear as altogether unique, but it is
put among the other sacred books. For the great religions of the world
show similar cycles of development, similar appropriations of prevalent
science and philosophy, similar conservative insistence upon ancient
truth, and similar claims to an exclusive authority.

With this interest is involved an attitude of mind toward the
supernatural. As already pointed out, nature and super-nature were taken
as physically and spatially distinct. The latter could descend upon the
former and be imparted to it, neither subject to nature nor intelligible
by reason. In science the process has been reversed; nature ascends, so
to speak, into the region of the supernatural and subdues it to itself;
the marvellous or miraculous is brought under the domain of natural law,
the canons of physics extend over metaphysics, and religion takes its
place as one element in the natural relationship of man to his
environment. Hence the new world-view threatens the foundations of the
ecclesiastical edifice. This revolution in the world-view is no longer
the possession of philosophers and scholars, but the multitude accepts
it in part. Education in general has rendered many familiar with the
teachings of science, and, moreover, its practical benefits have given
authority to its maxims and theories. The world's problem is not only
therefore acute, but the demand for its solution is wider than ever
before.

The attitude of the Roman Church.

The Roman Catholic Church uncompromisingly reasserts its ancient
propositions, political and theological. The cause is lost indeed in the
political realm, where the Church is obliged to submit, but it protests
and does not waive or modify its clai