THE UNIVERSAL AND ABSOLUTE RELIGION 383 



is that enables the soul to make an instant beginning anywhere, 

 and with whatever measure of truth it has, in the school of Christ. 

 I freely grant that this idea has not always prevailed, and is even 

 now far from universal among Christian religionists. True, there 

 are those that hold that in order to salvation in any sense or degree, 

 there must first exist in the mind a certain intellectual concept, 

 or set of concepts, which, in themselves, must be dogmatically 

 believed, before the soul can come into vital relation to Christ. 

 Such a position assumes that faith is primarily and essentially an 

 intellectual belief; belief in a doctrine about God, or Christ, or the 

 Bible. But this is not the truth concerning Christian faith, and 

 never was. There is a place for intellectual beliefs, but this in the 

 school of method is not now, for the soul we have in mind. 



Saving faith at its heart is a moral attitude of personality; it is 

 the collective, executive act of the entire soul. As such, there- 

 fore, any soul, anywhere, whatever its degree of intelligence or 

 light, is capable of exercising such faith in principle the moment it 

 is appealed to. Christianity alone of all religions takes note of so 

 elemental a thing as this. Christianity alone can afford thus to 

 accommodate itself to man's present mental furnishing, irrespec- 

 tive of his own religious classification of himself. Christ in his 

 school requires of no soul more than one step at a time, and that 

 step a relative one, in view of all the conditions it faces. Doubt- 

 less at this point many Christians have sadly misunderstood their 

 own religion, and so they still place the cart before the horse in 

 their initiative appeals to men. This really embarrasses Chris- 

 tianity and makes it needlessly slow of acceptance. 



It is always a tactical mistake to put religion as a philosophy 

 over against any other form of religion as a philosophy, in a com- 

 petitive way. Those who proceed as if Christianity were a competi- 

 tive religion, always do so to the damage of Christianity; they 

 misrepresent its spirit and distort its method. Christianity is 

 not in the field to gain a partisan victory. Such victories as 

 Christianity wins, it wins from intrinsic desert because it comple- 

 ments the limited or vitalizes the expiring hope in other systems. 

 Christianity never seeks victory for its own selfish sake, but because 

 of its genuine and exhaustless love for those whom it would win 

 from error and short-sightedness; it came " not to destroy, but to 

 fulfill." It comes as sunrise comes, not to obliterate the starlight, 

 but to suffuse it with a more original glow. 



What the seeker after God chiefly needs is to find the right clue 

 leading to the truth absolute at the end of the search. No soul 

 conditioned in this world as it is, really ever does much more than 

 follow a clue, with some aberrations, to the solutions of the mys- 

 teries involved in its religion. Nor is it the first business of the 



