THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 



BY FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY 



[Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummet Professor of Christian Morals, since 1886, 

 Harvard University, and Dean of the Divinity School, b. Boston, Massa- 

 chusetts, December 4, 1847. A.B. Harvard, 'i860; A.M. ibid. 1872; D.D. 

 Yale, 1886. Pastor, First Parish Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 187480; 

 Parkman Professor of Theology, Harvard Divinity School, 1880-86. Author 

 of Mornings in the College Chapel; Afternoons in the College Chapel; Jesus 

 Christ and the Social Question ; The Religion of an Educated Man ; Jesus Christ 

 and the Christian Character.] 



I DO not propose in this introductory paper to attempt any con- 

 tribution to theological or philosophical science, or to discuss any 

 specific application of religion. The first has been impressively ac- 

 complished by the paper of President King; the latter will be pre- 

 sented in many ways by the meetings which are to follow. I have 

 in mind nothing more than a point of view, a cursory survey of the 

 present horizon of religious opportunity, from which we may descend, 

 with a sense of common understanding, to the consideration of the 

 religious needs and problems of our own time. What is the message 

 of the twentieth century to religion? What is the possible expansion 

 which is offered to religion by the new conditions of a new age? 



No sooner does one thus approach the general characteristics of 

 modern religious progress than he is confronted by the besetting sin 

 of religious people, which has always obstructed the expansion of 

 religion and still blocks the way to its larger use. This sin of the 

 saints is neither moral obliquity, nor doubt, nor heresy, nor schism. 

 It is provincialism; the dealing with a great theme as though it were 

 a small one, the magnifying of the local until it shuts out the universal, 

 the exaggeration of the unimportant, the loss of perspective, the 

 failure to appreciate the dimensions of the purposes of God. A 

 person of cosmopolitan experience finds himself some day in a secluded 

 village. He listens to the conversation - - the gossip of the highway, 

 the parish, and the cottage hearth and what most impresses him 

 is the meagerness of the interests which most occupy these rustic 

 minds. The cold and the crops, the price of hay and the gossip of 

 the rival churches, - - these things which are near shut out the re- 

 moter concerns of the larger world; and the wars of nations and of 

 industry, the achievements of science and art, excite less real emotion 

 than the condition of the corn and the problems of the town-meeting. 

 These interests are not fictitious or discreditable; they are simply 

 provincial. This rural life is side-tracked from the main line of the 

 world. The alert and energetic youth of this provincial village are 

 drawn by the law of natural direction toward a larger centre where 



