takes for granted,
and in the understanding of which he is more hindered than helped by the
current philosophy of the schools. It takes philosophy a good while to
reach the man in the street, and even then its conclusions have to be
much popularized and made specific before they mean much for him. We
shall know better fifty years from now what philosophy is doing for
religion and life than we know to-day. There are, however, as has been
said, aspects of philosophy which religion generally is beginning to
take into account.

The failure of Christianity to create for itself a distinctly Christian
environment has also had much to do with dissolving old religious
stabilities. Strongly felt social injustices are releasing forces of
discontent and creating a fertile soil for revolutionary experiment,
though it must be said that modern religious cults and movements have
not gained so much from this particular form of discontent as have those
movements which look toward radical social readjustment. But the whole
situation has created a shaken state of public opinion. The fierceness
of modern competition, industrially and economically, finally carried
through to the tragic competition of a world war, has put our tempers on
edge. The extremes of wealth and poverty and the baffling fluctuations
in modern industry have brought the existing order into disrepute. The
very great number of the socially unfit and the grievous number of
social misfits, along with crime and poverty and the deposit of human
sediment in our cities, not only trouble men of good will but create a
human element easily misled. Such conditions as these are in such
painful contrast with the ideals of the Gospel, the spirit of
Christianity and even the potential productive force of modern society
as to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many are
persuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is socially
sterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them
have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned
religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would
dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our
vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated
itself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been a
disintegrating force.

_An Age of Confusion_

In such ways as these, then, the accepted religious order identified