a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may come
after death. Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vital
and most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church,
and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly passed
by. This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid
by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowship
with a great company.

Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the next
development of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be most
clearly seen in America. By Jonathan Edwards there was begun the
application of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and to
experimental religion. In Edwards almost the only result was a more
lurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the old
requirement. But the New England mind, speculative, practical, and
intense, worked rapidly on. In Channing and his associates came the
renunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity. In the next
generation, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker as
simple theism. A little later than the Unitarian movement, the old
Orthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy. The foremost
interpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnell
translating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness,--not as
a transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simply
the truth that Love is sovereign of the universe. To Bushnell and
Beecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnation
of God. By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, Phillips
Brooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfect
humanity, and in this sense a manifestation of God and the spiritual
leader of mankind.

But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existence
from an entirely different side from that whence the church takes its
outlook. They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totally
unconnected with any supernatural sphere. First, they made such
discoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, but
doubly revolving. And so they went on. The stars, the plants, the
animals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge. New
powers came into men's hands through this knowledge; new avenues to
happiness were opened. Facts wove themselves togethe