260 RELIGION 



finds itself in a universe of hitherto unrecognized religious significance. 

 Religion has not less to do in the new world, but finds a new range of 

 interpretative power. The soul is not less because the world is 

 more. It is like the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican 

 conception of the solar system. Instead of a personal centre round 

 which the whole world of circumstance revolves, the person finds 

 himself to-day in an infinitely larger system, set in his own orbit 

 within a universe of other souls; and the grandeur and sanctity of 

 this comprehensive law holds him to his own place with a new 

 authority. Such is the expansion of religion. The one sheep is not 

 lost or overlooked because it is gathered into the one fold. The 

 practice of the presence of God is no longer to be attained by retreat 

 from the world, but by service of the world. Religion is to be rescued 

 from provincialism. The kingdom of God is to be not only within 

 but to come on earth as it has come in heaven. The Church has 

 heard much of religion as apart from the world; it is called to the 

 discovery of the religious significance of the world itself, from aban- 

 donment of the world to interpretation of the world, from what the 

 older theologians called the " body of doctrine " to what is now 

 designed as the soul of doctrine, from the provincialism of religion 

 to the comprehensiveness of God. The religion of earlier centuries 

 has found its mission in saving the soul from the world; the religious 

 mission of the twentieth century is to be the salvation of the soul 

 of the world. 



Let us consider, then, some of the ways in which this expansion 

 of religion in the twentieth century may occur. 



The first and most obvious redemption from religious provincial- 

 ism is by deliverance from sectarianism. During the last century 

 many ways of uniting the fragments of the Christian Church have 

 been devised which were consistent with an age of machinery. It 

 has seemed as though, with a little yielding here and there, an 

 arrangement of ordination, a phrasing of creed, a shifting of organi- 

 zation, a divided church might be reconstructed into a single machine. 

 It had been a disheartening enterprise. The purpose of Jesus, it 

 now seems plain, cannot be expressed in the language of the nine- 

 teenth century. He did not prescribe an organization; he communi- 

 cated inspiration; his call was not to uniformity but to life. The 

 sects which have issued from his influence have not been mechanical 

 failures which should now be supplanted by more modern machines; 

 they have been, for the most part, results of great spiritual awaken- 

 ings, of new vistas of insight, of brave sacrifices for reality, simplicity, 

 piety, and truth. Words like Methodism, Quakerism, Puritanism, 

 do not recall historical events which should be forgotten or depre- 

 ciated, but are memorials of lofty experiences, deep movements of 

 the Spirit, genuine revivals of forgotten elements in the teaching of 



