tive to Spiritism--The Investigations of Emile
Boirac--Geley's Conclusions--The Meaning of Spiritism for
Faith.

XI. MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE CHURCH 326

Border-land Cults--Bahaism--The Bab and
His Successors--The Temple of Unity--General
Conclusions--The Cults Are Aspects of
the Creative Religious Consciousness of the
Age--Their Parallels in the Past--The Healing
Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by
the Scientific Organization of Psycho-therapy--New
Thought Will Become Old Thought--Possible
Absorption of the Cults by a Widening
Historic Christianity--Christianity Influenced
by the Cults--Medical Science and the
Healing Cults--A Neglected Force--Time and
the Corrections of Truth.

I

THE FORMS AND BACKGROUNDS OF INHERITED CHRISTIANITY

Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the
decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do.
It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the
outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and
Barrack Room Ballads--too far away for their guns to be heard in the
streets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaper
head-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It was
the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphant
Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution.
Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulae, sure
of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's
hand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere a
general agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benign
development. The world seemed particularly well in hand.

The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism and
Protestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheres
of influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. The
divisive force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. Since
Alexander Campbell--dead now for a decade and a half--no Protestant sect
of any importance had been established. The older denominations had
achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution
and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy
and though these controversies were severe enough they produced no
schisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leader