It is centrally and quite distinctly
an attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of science
and philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind of
nebula out of which future theologies will be organized. For a great
theology is always the systematic organization of a complex of forces, a
massive structure wrought through the years by manifold builders
subduing a rich variety of material to their purposes.

The teaching of the Scriptures, old traditions, the needs of worship and
organization, political and social circumstances, changing moral ideals,
the trend of philosophies and sciences, the challenge of schisms and
heresies, the sanctifying power of blind custom and the mystical
authority of the Church itself all combine to make a theology. Once a
great theology is so constituted it possesses an immense power over
life. It shapes character and ideals and gives direction to faith,
orders effort and so becomes, as it were, a mould into which souls and
societies are cast.

Theologies may be changed, in fact they are always in the way of being
changed, but they yield slowly to transforming forces. Nothing is so
persistent as organized faith and yet the very strength of a great
theology is always its weakness. It is never really anything else than a
crystallization of past forces. The experiences which voice themselves
in theology have cooled and hardened down; the philosophy which is
implicit in theology is past philosophy; the science implicit in
theology is senescent science.

There is always in evidence, then, in the regions of theology a
disturbing pressure occasioned by the reaction of contemporaneous
movements in science and philosophy and understandings of life generally
upon these old and solidly established inherited forms. Currents of
thought are always, as it were, running past the great formulae since
thought is free and formulae are rigid, and then returning upon them.
From time to time this movement gathers great force. The old has been
rigid so long, the new is so insistent that the conflict between them
fills an age with its clamour, stresses souls to its travail, breaks
down ancient forms without immediately building up their equivalent, and
contributes uncertainties and restlessnesses everywhere in evidence.

Now this is exactly what has been happening in the region of religion in
the last thirty years. An inherited order, strongly fashioned and
organized and long ess