ts, the cults need also to
remember it as they appraise the churches. Multitudes of Catholics and
Protestants secure from a religion which the cults think themselves
either to have corrected or outgrown exactly what the cults secure--and
more. Such as these trust God, keep well, go happily about their
businesses and prove their faith in gracious lives. There is room for
mutual respect and a working measure of give and take on both sides.

The writer is inclined to think the churches at present are more
teachable than the more recent religious movements. For a long
generation now the churches have been subject to searching criticism
from almost every quarter. The scientist, the sociologist, the
philosopher, the publicist, the discontented with things as they are and
the protagonist of things as they ought to be, have all taken their turn
and the Church generally, with some natural protest against being made
the scapegoat for the sins of a society arrestingly reluctant to make
the Church's gospel the law of its life, has taken account of its own
shortcomings and sought to correct them. The cults are as yet less
inclined to test themselves by that against which they have reacted. But
this is beside the point. The movements we have been studying can only
be fairly appraised as one follows through their outcome in life and
that either in detail or entirety is impossible. But it is possible to
gain from their literature a reasonable understanding of their
principles and interrelations and this the writer has sought to do.

_The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of the
Age_

Certain conclusions are thus made evident. These movements are the
creation of the religious consciousness of the time. They are aspects of
the present tense of religion. Since religion is, among other things,
the effective desire to enter into right relationships with the power
which manifests itself in the universe there are two variants in its
content; first, our changing understanding of the power itself and
second, our changing uses of it. The first varies with our knowledge and
insight, the second with our own changing sense of personal need. Though
God be the same yesterday, to-day and forever, our understandings of Him
cannot and ought not to be the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Our
faith is modified by, for example, our scientific discoveries. When the
firmament of Hebrew cosmogony has given way to interstellar sp