26 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



western world has within the past two thousand 

 years exercised a far-reaching influence upon the des- 

 tinies of the race. 



But I am going to go farther and express some con- 

 victions about the relation of those ideals not only to 

 the past but also to the present and to the future. I 

 am going to affirm that those ideals are the most 

 potent and significant element in the religion of the 

 western world to-day. It Is true that many indi- 

 vidual western religions contain some elements in ad- 

 dition to these, some of them good, some harmless, 

 some bad, and that the good and the bad are so mixed 

 in some of them that it is not always easy, even from 

 my own point of view, to determine whether a given 

 branch of religion is worth while or not. Neverthe- 

 less, looking at western religion as a whole, the fol- 

 lowing facts seem to me obvious and very significant. 



First, that if the basis of western religion is to be 

 found in the element that is common to all its branches, 

 then the one indispensable element in it now is just 

 that element that formed the center of Jesus' teaching; 

 and that I have called above the essence of religion. 

 Second, that no man who believes in the fundamental 

 value for the modern world of the essentials of re- 

 ligion as defined above, and in the necessity for the 

 definite organization of religion for the sake of 

 making it socially effective, needs to withdraw himself 

 from the religious groups, and thereby to exert his 

 personal influence against the spread of the essential 

 religious ideals, since in America, at least, he will have 

 no difficulty in finding religious groups who demand 

 nothing of their adherents more than the belief in the 

 foregoing ideals, added to an honest effort to live in 



