ly as New Thought is not
a cult at all but something larger--a free and creative movement of the
human spirit.

Of all these cults it has made the soundest contribution to religion as
a whole. It is also more easily assimilated, more easily absorbed. Its
own distinct field will be limited by the increasing hospitality of
Christian thought to contemporaneous truth. A wholly open-minded church
will go a long way toward taking from New Thought its raison d'etre. Its
future depends, therefore, very largely upon the open-mindedness of the
older and more strongly established forms of religion.

The future of Spiritualism is greatly open to conjecture. We have
already seen the alternatives which Spiritualism is called upon to face
and the uncertainties which attend its conclusions. A fuller
understanding of the possibilities of abnormal personality and the reach
of automatism are likely to work against Spiritualism. If we find
ascertainable causes for its phenomena resident within personality
itself there will be no need of calling in the other world in order to
explain what is happening in this. On the other hand, if there should
evidence an increasing and tested body of facts which can be explained
only in terms of spiritistic communications, Spiritualism will naturally
make headway. But we are certainly standing only upon the threshold of a
scientific interpretation of spiritistic phenomena and until the whole
region has been very much more carefully worked through and far more
dependable facts are in hand, one can only say that Spiritism is a
hypothesis which may or may not be verified, and attend the outcome.

It is hard to believe that Theosophy and kindred speculation will ever
get a strong hold upon the practical Western mind. It owes what force it
has either to an excessive love of the speculative on the part of a few,
or else to that particular temper which always wants something else and
something new, or else to wearinesses and misunderstandings of the more
shadowed side of life. Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of the
positive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing competitor
in the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explains
the apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable terms
will cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism of
which Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to dispose
of. There will always be a temper impatient o