Christian atonement, and deliverance through
mystical disciplines for that forgiveness of sin and assurance of
salvation in which Christianity has found its peace.

There is, of course, a vast deal of action and reaction between the
newer movements themselves and between the new faith and the old. There
are elements common to all religions; there are frontiers where all
religions meet and somewhat merge; at some point or other almost every
faith touches its contrary or becomes uncertain and shifts its emphasis.
Religion is always dependent upon changing tempers and very greatly
upon varying personalities; it is always in flux, impatient of
definitions and refusing the rigid boundary lines within which we
attempt to confine it. Though it be clearly possible, therefore, to find
three distinct points of departure for the whole of the border-land
cults and religions, there is running through them all a certain unity
of driving force. They are in general a quest for a new type of
religious reality; they are largely due to certain marked inadequacies
of the more accepted religious teachings and to the want of the more
accepted religious experiences to satisfy certain types. They have come
to light in our own time through the failure of authority in both
Catholicism and Protestantism, through the failure of the accepted
understandings of the Bible to satisfy those who are still persuaded
that it has a real message and through the reaction of the modern spirit
upon religious attitudes. They owe much to the deficiency of the
traditional explanation of sin, sorrow and suffering; they owe something
to the failure of Christianity to create a Christian environment; and
they owe not a little to the natural longing for some positive assurance
of life after death, as well as to the quest of the soul for deliverance
and its longing for a satisfying communion with God. And they are
reinforced in every direction by the restless and unsettled temper of a
time subject to great changes of habit and outlook through the breaking
up of old industrial and social orders and the impact of new forces
driving in from every direction.

We shall need to relate these conditioning causes more definitely to the
various cults and movements as we go on to study them, but here at least
are the backgrounds against which they must be studied and the lines of
testing down which they must be followed. We shall begin in our more
detailed study of these movemen