266 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



religion not only does not lose it ascendency, but 

 is found to increase in estimation and in power. 



The same increasing recognition of the human 

 rational spirit as the measure of religious truth 

 is shown still more significantly in the general 

 historical development of religion, taken on the 

 largest scale. The movement from the Oriental 

 pantheisms, on the one hand, and from polytheisms, 

 especially of the Occident, on the other, into mono- 

 theism ; the movement from simple monotheism to 

 Christianity ; from Greek or Eastern Christianity 

 to the Christianity of the West ; from the Latin 

 Christianity of Rome to the Germanic Christianity 

 of Protestantism ; from Calvinistic Protestantism 

 to Arminian ; from Evangelicalism to Liberalism, — 

 this vast movement has in all its stadia one steadfast 

 trend, diverge as it may, now on this side and now 

 on that, from the straight and shortest path to the 

 manifest goal. It is a persistent movement from 

 the non-recognition of the divine-sonship of man 

 to the fuller and fuller recognition of it ; to the 

 consequent acknowledgment that rational human 

 nature is the true witness to the Divine thought 

 and will, the true medium of revelation. Ever 

 stronger and clearer, in the successive stages of 

 man's religious history, — ever stronger and clearer, 

 and ever more and more unreserved, — becomes 

 man's growing conviction of the final authority of 



