its interest to all mankind. It has aimed at universal
brotherhood. It has defined and called out loyalty. It has conceived
this loyalty as a service of God and as a loyalty to the cause of all
mankind. Its traditions, the lives of its servants, its services, its
teachings, have been and are an inexhaustible source of religious
insight to the vast multitudes whom it has influenced and, in its
various forms and embodiments, still influences. Not unnaturally,
therefore, those who accept its own doctrines regarding its origin and
history view such a visible church not only as by far the most
important source of religious {278} insight, but also as a source
occupying an entirely unique position.

The deliberate limitations of the undertaking of these lectures forbid
me, as I have just reminded you, to consider in any detail this
supposed uniqueness of the position which so many of you will assign
to some form of the historical Christian church. After what I have
said as to the nature and the variety of the forms which the spiritual
life has taken, and still takes, amongst men, you will nevertheless
not be surprised if, without attempting to judge the correctness of
the traditions of the visible church, I forthwith point out that, to
the higher religious life of mankind the life of the visible church
stands related as part to whole; and that very vast ranges of the
higher religious life of mankind have grown and flourished outside of
the influence of Christianity. And when the religious life of mankind
is viewed in its historical connections, truth requires us to insist
that Christianity itself has been dependent for its insight and its
power upon many different sources, some of which assumed human form
not only long before Christianity came into being, but in nations and
in civilisations which were not dependent for their own spiritual
wealth upon the Jewish religious traditions that Christianity itself
undertook to transform and to assimilate. Christianity is, in its
origins, not only Jewish but Hellenic, both as to its doctrines and as
to its type of spirituality. It is a synthesis of religious motives
{279} which had their sources widely spread throughout the
pre-Christian world of Hellenism. Its own insight is partly due to the
non-Christian world.

As a fact, then, the unity of the Spirit, the religious life which has
been and is embodied in the form of human fraternities, is the
peculiar possession of no one time, o