tianity--due, as we have seen also, to many contributing
causes--to offer unusual opportunity to any new movement which promised
deliverance. But one must seek the conditions which have made possible
so many strange cults and movements in America, not only in the
breakdown of the historic faiths, but also in the state of popular
education. Democracy tends, among other things, to lead us to value a
movement by the number of people whom it is able to attract. We are,
somehow, persuaded that once a majority has accepted anything, what they
have accepted must be true and right. Even a strong minority always
commands respect. Any movement, therefore, which succeeds in attracting
a considerable number of followers is bound to attract others also, just
because it has already attracted so many. One has only to listen to the
current comment on Christian Science to feel that this is a real factor
in its growth.

Democracy believes in education, but has not commonly the patience to
make education thoroughgoing. Its education is very much more likely to
be a practical or propaganda education than such training as creates
the analytical temper and supplies those massive backgrounds by which
the departures of a day are always to be tested. In America particularly
there is an outstanding want of background. It needs history,
philosophy, economic understanding and a wealth of racial experience to
give to any people either the power to quickly discriminate between the
truth and the half-truth, or to carry itself with poise through a
transitional period. But one may not dispose of the distinct hold of
Christian Science upon its followers by such generalizations. The real
inwardness of no religion can ever be known from its theology. A sincere
devotion may attend a most deficient theology and we need to be
charitable in judging the forms which other people's faith takes. What
seems unreasonable to one may seem quite right to another and whatever
carries a sincere faith deepening into a positive spiritual experience
accomplishes for the moment its purpose. These studies of Christian
Science are severe--for one must deal with it as honestly as he knows
how--but the writer does not mean that they should fail in a due
recognition of the spiritual sincerity of Christian Scientists. We must
therefore go in to what is most nearly vitally central in the system to
find the real secret of its powers. It continues and grows as a system
of healing an