History of Religious Evolution 747 



the factors for that new and higher reKgion that is surely, 

 if slowly and fitfully, evolving now. 



Sad it is that so many debased spirits have been mixed 

 amongst the incomers, or have descended from them, who in 

 the names of "sharp business .methods" and of "politics" have 

 defiled the high ideal. When they are purged from the body- 

 politic, the national summated ideal will become a practical 

 realization. 



Since the days of Christ and of Paul, marked moral and 

 religious advance have taken place. Marriage and the home 

 have become more santified; monogamy has been definitely 

 accepted as the future rule for man; debauching wine-drinking 

 is becoming a thing of the past; love of man for his fellows was 

 never more sincere and widespread than now; Christian mis- 

 sions, that have been derided by many, have netted over the 

 world with outposts of civilization where self-denying men 

 and women have lived lives of Christ-like love and sacrifice; 

 hospitals, orphanages, shelters, homes for the blind, the deaf, 

 and the dumb are a part of every Christian country; churches 

 vie with each other in preaching and spreading altruistic truths, 

 even though they at times practise these in illogical manner. 



So we would fearlessly assert that we live amid the highest 

 proenvironal plannings, and see the pathway steadily taken 

 that these plannings have projected. But, as will be indicated 

 in future chapters, so long as the law of "struggle for existence" 

 is made the bare rule of life, and the law of "cooperation for 

 social advance" is viewed with distrust, so long will human 

 life advance amid grinding friction and constant death. When 

 Christ's command "that ye love one another" is willingly 

 followed, when the "Sermon on the Mount" is regarded not 

 as a mere rhetorical teaching but as a practical rule of life, 

 when the moving sympathy and heart throbs of Paul's utter- 

 ances meet full response in human life, then another and higher 

 platform of human progress and evolution shall have been 

 reached. 



As being the climax therefore of religious proenvironal aspira- 

 tion, we would define Patritheism as "a reverential and affec- 



