reconstruct our
creeds and adapt our religious thinking to whatever is true about us in
our understanding of our world and its history and its mechanism and the
laws of our own lives. Theology must take account of a creative
evolution and a humanity which has struggled upward from far-off
beginnings along a far-flung front and the findings of Science and the
intimations of Psychology.

It will need a deal of pioneering to find roads through these new
regions and such adventurous souls as seek new paths, with a daring
disregard for ancient landmarks and a true passion to find religious
meanings in new facts and forces, are really serving us all. There is
the danger, however, that in the very freedom of their speculation they
may be too impatient of old experiences and hallowed certainties, for
these old experiences themselves are deeply rooted and testify to
realities which we may be compelled to let in by the window, once we
have put them out at the door.

IX

THE RETURN OF THE EAST UPON THE WEST

THEOSOPHY AND KINDRED CULTS

_Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East. The
Far-Reaching Results of This Process_

Christianity in its beginning belonged neither to the East nor the West;
it was born where they met and its subsequent development was greatly
governed by the direction of the dominant tides of historical
development. But from the beginning of the Christian era the main
currents of human action flowed West and they carried Christianity with
them. It is, therefore, outstandingly an occidental development. This is
not to minimize the influence of the East in the earlier phases of
Christianity. There was doubtless a measure of give and take, some
blowing of the winds of the spirit in changing directions across vast
regions and a confused time, which carried the germinal forces from one
religion to another. But in the main, Christianity, to use Gardner's
fine phrase, was baptized into the forms and forces of the West. I say
in the main, for Asia Minor was in the time of St. Paul the meeting
place of manifold religions and his first Gentile converts brought with
them into their new faith a very great deal of what their old faiths had
made them.

There was, generally, in the Apostolic world a very great longing for a
spiritual deliverance and a mystic temper which easily took over and
transformed those elements in Christianity which lent themselves to
mystic interpretations. Someth