e the effort to reconcile the
church with modern thought and fit it to modern society was carried
farther and farther by Coleridge, Arnold, Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley,
and Stanley; till the advance has met a sharp check at the point where
rejection of miracle involves a collision with the formularies of
worship. In America, a like advance has had the advantage of that more
elastic polity which allows to churches of the Congregational order an
easier change of creed and worship. The leaders have been, in the
Unitarian line, such as Channing, who purified Christianity of its
Calvinistic harshness and then of its Athanasian metaphysics; and Parker,
who took the great step to simple theism,--Christian in ethics and piety,
but purely naturalistic in theology. In the other great branch of the
New England church,--for in New England alone has America shown religious
originality,--Bushnell in a scholastic way, and Beecher with poetic and
popular power, resolved the dogmatic system into a supremacy in the
universe of love and holiness, embodied in a deity who became actually
incarnated as Christ. Phillips Brooks, exercising a spiritual power of
extraordinary purity and intensity, and so unspeculative that he felt no
difficulty in the formulae of the Episcopal church, taught a religion in
which Christ represents a sublimed and perfect humanity, a realized
ideal, the inspiration and helper of men who are his brothers.

In the Catholic church, two Popes stand as representative, Plus IX. and
Leo XIII. Under the first, the monarchic system of the church was made
complete, and the highest function of the Council, the definition of
religious truth, was assigned to the Pope. By Leo XIII. this autocracy
is administered in sympathy largely with modern ideas. The church allies
itself less with the temporal monarch than with the common people. It
throws much of its force into ethical channels. Its characteristic
interest is in education, temperance, social reform; and along with these
it still ministers publicly and privately to that communion with God in
which it places the foundation and secret of human life. Its limitations
are that it still claims not only to persuade but to rule--a useful
function toward some classes, but impossible toward other classes; that
its pretension to infallibility obliges it to misread history; and that
its foundation of dogma admits no frank and full reconciliation with
modern knowledge.

But to