THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 261 



Jesus Christ. The evil of sectarianism is not, therefore, in the ex- 

 ternal divisions which it permits. It is no more to be anticipated 

 that there shall be one form of religious expression than that there 

 shall be one language, one nation, or one form of government. The 

 evil of sectarianism is its provincialism, the assumptions and con- 

 tentions which proceed from the shut-in life, the isolation of spirit 

 which breeds ignorance or contempt of the larger purposes of God. 

 The sects are not to be distinguished from each other as false and 

 true. They are, as it were, cross sections through religion. Each 

 is true when looked at as a section, yet each is but a fragment of the 

 growing whole. " Nothing is diviner in the Christ," says one of the 

 greatest of modern theologians, " than the impossibility of identify- 

 ing him with any church, though he is in all." The deliverance from 

 sectarianism is to be 'attained, not by patching and softening and 

 compromising and reorganizing, but by the simple appreciation 

 of the magnitude and many-sidedness of the revelation of God to 

 men. It is not a matter of a better machine, but of the expansion 

 of motive power within the machine. Christian unity is not to be 

 attained by a consent to opinion, but by an ascent to a larger horizon. 

 It is not the giving up of much, but the believing more. It is rescued 

 from provincialism by discovering the comprehensiveness of God. 



The expansion of religion is, further, the problem now confronting 

 the Christian Church in its missionary activity. The audacious 

 dream of a world made obedient to Christ has, during the nineteenth 

 century, taken shape in a vast business enterprise, magnificently 

 conceived, lavishly endowed, and sagaciously organized. Never 

 before was missionary machinery so well devised or its operation so 

 smooth. Yet together with the new mechanism for the conversion 

 of the world has come a new respect for the world, and a new ap- 

 preciation of other religions which have been long conceived of as 

 forms of spiritual blindness. Refined and subtle philosophies, great 

 historic personalities, and noble literature, have become a new pos- 

 session of the western world. What is to be the effect of this new 

 knowledge upon Christian missions? Does it make them super- 

 fluous and intrusive? Does the new recognition of the unity of the 

 world extinguish missionary zeal? On the contrary, this expansion 

 of religious appreciation is the essential preliminary of rational 

 missionary progress. Many missionary undertakings, with all their 

 heroism, have been provincial in spirit. They have assumed 

 a contrast of absolute truth with unmixed error, of light with dark- 

 ness, where are now known to have been sages, scholars, mystics, 

 great literatures, and great traditions, sources of instruction as much 

 as objects of missionary effort. What an expansion of opportunity, 

 what a new demand for insight, appreciation, and comprehensive- 

 ness, is thus demanded of the message of Christianity! Other 



