f the past, eager for
unity, anxious for something big and interpenetrating. Historically this
temper has from time to time emerged, particularly in the latter phases
of Roman paganism, and there is likely to be a larger interchange of
religious faith and understanding in the future than there has been in
the past.

In general, this desire for a universal religion, simple and wanting in
distinctive characters, follows a weakening of conviction, a loss of
passion for accepted forms. If anything should deepen again amongst us
in religion what corresponds just now to the passion for nationality
these more general religious quests would suffer. A strong feeling for a
church or a creed or one's own movement would displace them. They have,
on the other hand, in their favour the general tendency of all religion
toward simplicity, the reduction of faith, that is, to a few broad and
generally shared elements. But there is no reason to anticipate a speedy
breakdown of what one may call particularist religion and the
substitution therefor of a faith built up out of many diverse elements
and held in common by widely separated tempers.

_There is Likely to be Some Absorption of the Cults by a Widening
Historic Christianity_

If the past supplies analogy or suggestion there will be some tendency
for the cults and movements to be reabsorbed by the dominant religious
forms from which they have broken off. A careful analysis of this
statement would involve the consideration of a finality of Christianity
as now held in the Western world. That is impossible in the range of a
study like this. Any general statement is of course coloured by the
temper of the one who makes it and to a certain extent begs the whole
great question. But a careful and dispassionate examination of
present-day cults would seem to indicate that they really have nothing
to offer which the dominant Christianity does not possess either
explicitly or implicitly. There is a solidity of human experience behind
its forms and creeds which cannot be lightly left out of account. They
represent the travail of twenty centuries and have behind them far
older confidences and hopes. If Christianity should widen itself to the
full limit of its possibilities, it would leave little room for that
which seeks to supplant it and would meet the needs which have begotten
the cults in far richer and more reasonable ways.

As far as the cults are mistakenly distinctive, as far as they