in some cases for
generations alongside the main current of religious development, until
they finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from such
historical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate for
the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here
for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither
failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure.
The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend its
force and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin Catholic
Christianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realization
to-day, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need to
remember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiative
and judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely ever
to be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whipped
back into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sort
is likely to happen now.

No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action and
reaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow a
period of undue self-assertion, but it is not likely that we shall ever
find recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion can
hereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well marked
channels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardous
business but it is safe to assume that these modern religious cults and
movements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, less
formal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach their
term but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and with
other groupings of forces produce something in the future which will at
least be their parallel.

_The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific
Organisation of Psycho-therapy_

As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one's
conclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundations
upon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample and
secure structure. They have been made possible not only by marked
limitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneous
tempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this is
said not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, but
simply because one is loath to believe