out of account the essential conservatism
of human nature, a conservatism more marked in religion than anywhere
else.

There is also a strong and telling group which is seeking so to recast
and interpret inherited faiths as to make them more consonant to modern
needs and more hospitable to new understandings. Such as these have
accepted gladly the tested conclusions of science, the results of
Biblical criticism and the revealing suggestion of both psychology and
philosophy; they have sought to disentangle the essential from the
unessential, the enduring from the transient. They have found in science
not the foe but the friend of religion. Those intimations of unfailing
force, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and reality
toward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of the
very presence and method of God, and they have found in just such
regions as these new material for their faith. They have dealt
reverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms which
Christianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduring
experiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality is
the finality of the deep things of the soul itself. They have been able,
therefore, to make new truth tributary to old faith and to interpret the
central affirmations of Christianity in terms of present-day facts. They
have sought to share their conclusions with others and they have really
been able to carry Christianity through the transitional period of the
last fifty years and continue it open-minded, strongly established,
reverent and enriched rather than impoverished.

What they have done has been doubly hard, once through the sheer
difficulty of the task itself, and once through the hostile and too
often abusive temper with which they and their endeavours have been
opposed. None the less, they have saved for Christendom a reasonable
faith. Science has of late gone half-way to meet them. It is rather
painfully revising a good many of its earlier conclusions and on the
whole walking rather humbly just now before its God, recognizing that
the last word has not yet really been said about much of anything.

_An Age of Doubt and a Twilight-Zone in History_

But the apparently unchanged traditions of the older forms of faith and
the relatively strong position of the Church must not blind us to the
generally disorganized condition of religion to-day. There is much in
eviden