ard-looking
that it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. It
must offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practically
minded and deliverance to the despairing. It must be able to build into
its structure new sciences and philosophies and yet it must touch the
whole of life with some sense of the timeless, and above all, it must
include the whole of life, nor depend upon particularized appeals or
passing phases of thought. Historic Christianity has more nearly met all
these tests than any other religion, for though under the stress of
meeting so great a variety of needs and conditions it has organized
itself into forms as different as Latin Catholicism and the Society of
the Friends, so losing catholicity of organization, it has secured
instead a catholicity of spirit and a vast elasticity of appeal which
are the secret of its power and the assurance of its continuing and
enduring supremacy.

_Their Parallels in the Past_

Now by such tests as these what future may one anticipate for such cults
as we have been studying? Are they likely to displace the historic forms
of Christianity, will they substantially modify it, or will they wear
away and be reabsorbed? Evidently one of these three things must happen.
This is not the first time in the Western world that historic and
authoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps,
to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then we
should find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism an
unexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us.
Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation,
undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality to
possess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build its
fabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave the
patristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline of
the Church was too strong for it. Its own weaknesses proved eventually
its undoing and Gnosticism remains only as a fascinating field of study
for the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for the
generality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may do
when permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spurious
rationalism for pilot and imagination for wings.

There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many other
movements possessing a great staying power and running