religious understanding, if his
Bible is still for him the authoritative word of God, if his church
meets his normal religious needs with a reasonable degree of adequacy,
if he is resolute in purpose and if he has no excessively trying
experiences in the face of which his faith breaks down, and if the cares
of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, or the strain of poverty do
not too much distract him (and this is a long and formidable list of
ifs) then he is faithful in his church relationships and personally
devout. He grows in grace and knowledge and the outcome of it all is a
religious character admirable in manifold ways, steadfast and truthful
in good works.

* * * * *

The fact that in spite of all hindrances the Protestant churches do go
on, registering from decade to decade a varying statistical growth with
a strongly organized life and a great body of communicants who find in
the religious life thus secured to them the true secret of interior
peace and their true source of power, is itself a testimony to the
massive reality of the whole system. And yet the keystone of the great
structure is just the individual experience of the individual believer,
conditioned upon his longing for deliverance and his personal assurance
that he has found, through his faith in his church's gospel, what he
seeks.

If anything should shake the Protestant's confidence in his creed or his
Bible, or if his own inner experiences should somehow fail in their
sense of sustaining reality, then all the structure of his religion
begins to weaken.

If one may use and press a suggestive figure, here is a religious
structure very much like Gothic architecture; its converging arches of
faith and knowledge lock up upon their keystones and the thrust of the
whole great structure has been met and conquered by flying buttresses.
In other words, sustaining forces of accredited beliefs about science,
history and human nature have been a necessary part of the entire system
and the temple of faith thus sustained may be weakened either through
some failure in the keystone of it which is inner experience, or the
flying buttresses of it which are these accepted systems of science,
history, philosophy and psychology.

_Readjustment of Both Catholic and Protestant Systems Inevitable_

Out of such elements as these, then, through such inheritances and
disciplines the representative religious consciousness of Americ