with historic Catholicism and Protestantism has in the last fifty years
been greatly altered. Science, Biblical criticism, psychology and
philosophy, and social unrest have all had their share in making people
impatient of the inherited order, or doubtful or defiant of it. We have
been asked to relate our old creeds and confidences to new insights and
understandings. The old answers to the questions Whence? and Whither?
and Why? have been challenged by new answers; our horizons have been
pushed back in every direction and a strange sense of mystery both in
personality and the external order has perplexed and stimulated us.
Along with all this and in no little way growing out of it, has gone
impatience of discipline and an undue haste to gain the various goods of
life.

Evolution misled us, to begin with. If the longing for deliverance be
one of the driving forces in religious life, then the vaster scientific
conclusions of the latter part of the nineteenth century offered a new
definition of deliverance. It was not, after all, so much in the travail
of the soul as in a serene and effortless self-commitment to a power,
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, that we were to be saved.
We had only to push out upon tides which asked of us neither rudder nor
oar, to be brought to our appointed havens. How greatly we have been
disillusioned in all this and how bitterly we have been taught that life
is not so much a drifting with the tide as making brave headway against
it, we all know well enough to-day. Somewhere back of a vast deal in
these modern religious cults and movements, is the smug optimism, now
taking one form and now another, which was the misleading bequest of
the nineteenth century to the twentieth.

The great scientific discoveries and their application to the mechanism
of life led the nineteenth century to believe that nothing was
impossible. Everything we touched became plastic beneath our touch save
possibly ourselves; there seemed to be no limit to what man might do and
he consequently assumed that there was no limit to what he might become.
He disassociated his hopes from both his disciplines and experiences;
everything seemed not only possible but easily possible. A general
restlessness of temper, due in part to the breaking up of the inherited
order, in part to the ferment of new ideas and in part to a general
relaxing of discipline, began to manifest itself.

The demoralizing influence of migrat