en
guilty of crimes, persecutions, wars and greed--still the Church has
never quite forgotten him who went about doing good, nor freed itself
from the contagion of his example. No age has been so responsive to the
needs of man as our own; whatever doubts men have as to the doctrines or
the cults there is an agreement wider than in the past in the good works
whose inspiration is a divine love.

Theories of development.

Yet the intellectual crisis cannot be ignored in the interest of the
practical life. Men must rationalize the universe. On the one hand there
are churchmen who attempt to repeat the historical process which has
naturalized the Church in alien soils by appropriating the forces of the
new environment, and who hold that the entire process is inspired and
guided by the spirit of God. Hence Christianity is the absolute
religion, because it does not preclude development but necessitates it,
so that the Christianity that is to come shall not only retain all that
is important in the Christianity of the past and present but shall
assimilate new truth. On the other hand some seek the essential
Christianity in a life beneath and separable from the historic forms. In
part under the influence of the Hegelian philosophy, and in part because
of the prevalent evolutionary scientific world-view, God is represented
under the form of pure thought, and the world process as the unfolding
of himself. Such truth can be apprehended by the multitude only in
symbols which guide the will through the imagination, and through
historic facts which are embodiment of ideas. The Trinity is the
essential Christian doctrine, the historic facts of the Christian
religion being the embodiment of religious ideas. The chief critical
difficulty felt by this school is in identifying any concrete historic
fact with the unchanging idea, that is, in making Jesus of Nazareth the
incarnation of God. God is reinterpreted, and in place of an
extra-mundane creator is an omnipresent life and power. The Christian
attainment is nothing else than the thorough intellectual grasp of the
absolute idea and the identification of our essential selves with God.
With a less thorough-going intellectualism other scholars reinterpret
Christianity in terms of current scientific phraseology. Christianity is
dependent upon the understanding of the universe; hence it is the duty
of believers to put it into the new setting, so that it adopts and
adapts astronomy, geol