aces and
the telescope and the spectroscope plumb the depths of the universe,
resolving nebulae into star drifts, faith is bound to reflect the change.
The power which manifests itself in the universe becomes thereby a
vaster power, operating through a vaster sweep of law. Our changed
understandings of ourselves must be reflected in our faith and our
ethical insights as well. And because there is and ought to be no end to
these changing understandings, religion itself, which is one outcome of
them, must be plastic and changing.

What we ask of God is equally subject to change. True enough, the old
questions--Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselves
to be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensity
wherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightly
distrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, the
more insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less,
there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time is
manifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is than
a happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifies
experience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with God as an end in
itself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of God
in happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction govern
this whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his own
salvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants were
chiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of the
physical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselves
and the possibilities of personality.

Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself in
the universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on the
other, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what is
most distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of the
combination of these two variants. What an age asks of the God whom it
knows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movements
do not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of our
time, of course; a great deal of that same creative religious
consciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxies
of the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it
has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than