398 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 



what religion can do for a man or what a man can do for religion, 

 but to impress ourselves anew with the fact that religion means 

 the impact of God on the human soul, and the communion of the 

 human soul with God. 



This simple fact, which might be taken as an axiomatic defini- 

 tion of religion, needs to be enforced on our generation. In our 

 thinking to-day, which is inevitably sociological, there is the 

 equally inevitable danger of the individual being submerged in 

 the mass. In practice also our social organization is becoming 

 ever more complex, so that we are compelled to lay less and less 

 stress on the individual. We see that man can never be consid- 

 ered in isolation, that he has become what he is through society, 

 that the social reactions are responsible for every stage of his pro- 

 gress. The family, the industrial conditions, the civic relation, the 

 state, are not merely the different spheres in which man's abilities 

 and energies are employed, but they have conditioned these very 

 abilities and energies. We are what the social forces have made us. 

 Development and environment are the great watchwords of our 

 day, and the mighty truth in them can bear constant repetition. 

 It carries with it much hope for the future in improved conditions 

 and in practical efforts for the betterment of all classes. So full 

 are we of this thought that we attempt to explain all life and the 

 history of all thought and progress in broad lines of cosmic develop- 

 ment. The individual drops out of our calculations. We make 

 less of personal initiative and more of the environment that molds 

 men. We are tempted to look upon the single life as merely a 

 plastic material on which society works. And, perhaps, there 

 never was more necessity for a protest, and for some reassertion 

 of the place of the individual. The current of modern thought 

 runs so strongly in one direction that most of our systems would 

 have no place for this section of the Congress, a section entitled, 

 " Personal Religious Influence," even when much would be 

 made of the following section on Social Religious Influence. All 

 who know the thought of our time will admit the existence of this 

 tendency. We find it not only in the material sciences, but even 

 more strongly in sociology and in all the branches of history 

 which deal with man and his progress. * The modern school of 

 history itself boldly preaches and practices this doctrine, and the 

 importance of it for us in our present connection is simply this, 

 that if they are right, then there is no room for the consideration 

 of our subject at all. 



We see the tendency very marked in the protest against such a 

 doctrine as that of Carlyle's doctrine of heroes, a protest made so 

 strongly by Lord Acton, who more than any other man of our time 

 has influenced the study of history in England. With him the 



