ily task?" "New Thought recognizes no authority save the
voice of the soul speaking to each individual. Every soul can interpret
aright the oracles of truth."

_Tends to Become a Universal and Loosely-Defined Religion_

Worship becomes, therefore, contemplation rather than adoration, and a
vast deal of the liturgical material which Christianity specifically has
heretofore supplied becomes useless for this cult. Christian hymnology
would need much editing before it would serve New Thought purposes; the
whole conception of prayer would need to be altered. Naturally, then, on
its more distinctly religious side New Thought is at once fluctuating
and incomplete. It is the proclamation, to quote one of its spokesmen,
of a robust individualism and, in the individual, mind is supreme. Right
thinking is the key to right living. New Thought affirms the limitless
possibilities of the individual. Here perhaps it is more loose in its
thinking than in any other region. It makes free use of the word
"infinite" and surrounds itself with an atmosphere of boundless hope as
alluring as it is vague.

The interest of New Thought is most largely in the present tenses of
life; its future in an eternal progress which should, of course, imply
immortality. New Thought is hospitable to truth from whatever source
derived. It is particularly hospitable to the suggestions of oriental
religions and, as far as it has taken form as a distinct religious
movement, it is becoming more and more markedly a kind of syncretism, a
putting together of religious elements drawn from widely universal
sources and it patently seeks nothing less than a universal religious
fellowship in which the values of all true faith are recognized and
which is to be under the control of what science has to say about the
world without and psychology of the world within. In a sentence New
Thought is an outstanding aspect of the unconquerably religious in human
nature, seeking to subdue to its own ends and inform with its own spirit
the new material which science, psychology and comparative religion have
put at our service in the last two generations.

If New Thought diverges from the accepted Christian theology in many
ways, it runs parallel in other regions with what is enduringly true in
the Gospels, and it runs parallel also with not a little of that
endeavour after theological reconstruction which is loosely known as the
New Theology. We are generally under a compulsion to