s were urging
a more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of the
teachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with more
suspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology.

We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of the
whole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorian
epoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge of
the accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked to
meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they
have issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient
orders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It will
be the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessary
material in hand to follow these immense reactions in their various
fields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates but
in the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of
being final--and were not final at all.

Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. We
may date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the last
decades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions not
against a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group of
religious validations which had been built up through an immense labour
of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last century
were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousand
years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked to
wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin,
then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I venture to
call the representative orthodox religious consciousness of the end of
the nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian is of
course assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for Protestantism
has supplied the larger number of followers to the newer religious
movements.

To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by no
means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modern
mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole of
our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all
the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and
that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recent
contributions. The relig