a by-gone age is an anachronism and the sooner we shake ourselves free of him the better. The greatest of all the causes of the drift from the churches is the fact that Christian truth has become associated in the popular mind with certain forms of statement which thoughtful men find it impossible to accept not only on intellectual but even on moral grounds. Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the Fall, the scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned, is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The consequence is that religion has come to be thought of as something apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and Bible readings, instead of what it really is,—the coördinating principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a nutshell,—popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological college Christianity) does not interpret life. Consequently the great world of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about it.

+Theologians and preachers rarely realise the situation.+—One would think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The professional theologian rarely does even as much as this. He takes himself very seriously; sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of deviation from the accepted standards; mounts some denominational chair or other and thunders forth his view of the urgent necessity for rehabilitating truth in the grave-clothes of long-buried formulas. I mean that the language he habitually uses implies some kind of belief in formulas he no longer holds. He hardly dares to disinter the formulas themselves,—that would not be convenient even for him,—but he goes on flapping the shroud as energetically as ever, and the world does not even take the trouble to laugh. Wherever and whenever religious agencies succeed it is rarely because of the driving power of what is preached, but because the preacher's gospel is glossed over or put in the background. We have popular services by the million in which devices are used to attract the public which ought not to be necessary if their framers had any real message to declare. But they have not. Popular pulpit addresses rarely or never deal with the fundamental problems of life. The last thing one ever expects to hear in such addresses is a real living representation of the beliefs the preacher professes to hold. He makes passing allusions to them, of course, such as appeals to come to the cross, and such like, but they generally sound unreal, and the pill has to be sweetly sugared. The ordinary way of preaching the gospel is to avoid saying much about what the preacher believes the gospel to be.

To be sure there are many social activities in connection with Christian churches. If it were not for these the churches would have to be shut up. They are quite admirable in their way, and often produce excellent results, but they imply another gospel than the one supposed to be preached from the pulpits. They ignore dogmatic beliefs, and assume the salvability of the whole race and the possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth. Wherever the churches are alive to-day, and not merely struggling to keep their heads above water, it is not their doctrine but their non-theological human sympathy that is doing it.

This, then, is the situation. The main stream of modern life is passing organised religion by. Where is the remedy to be found?

+We seek to save religion rather than the Churches.+—Let me say plainly that I do not think our object should be to find a remedy which will save the churches. That would be putting the cart before the horse. What is wanted is a driving force which will enable the churches to fulfil their true mission of saving the world, or, to put it better still, will serve to bring mankind back to real living faith in God and the spiritual meaning of life. Hardly anyone would seriously deny that the world is waiting for this. Men are not irreligious. On the contrary there is no subject of such general interest as religion; it takes precedence of all other subjects just because all other subjects are implied in it. Religion is man's response to the call of the universe; it is the soul turning towards its source and goal. How could it fail to be of absorbing interest? What is wanted is a message charged with spiritual power, "Where there is no vision the people perish." Mere dogmatic assertions will not do. The word of God is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of man. That message is here now. It is being preached, not by one man only, but the wide world over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches if they will not hear. Religion is necessary to mankind, but churches are not. From every quarter of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human is the evidence of God, and that Jesus held the key to the riddle of existence. Although this comes to us as with the freshness of a new revelation, it is not really new. It is the spirit which has been the inspiration of every great religious awakening since the world began. In this country and in other parts of the English-speaking world that spirit is becoming associated with the name the New Theology. To associate it with any one personality is to belittle the subject and to obscure its real significance. There are many brave and good men in the churches and outside the churches to-day, men of true prophetic spirit, who would reject utterly the name New Theology, but who are thoroughly imbued with this new-old spirit and are leading mankind toward the light. In the church of Rome the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell, whose teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The present condition of the church of Rome is not unhopeful to those who believe as I do that that venerable church has been used of God to great ends in the past and that her spiritual vitality is by no means exhausted. Father Tyrrell and such as he are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men than are the latter to those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief. It is a curious but indisputable fact that the most extreme anti-Romanist Protestants are themselves in the same boat with Rome: they insist on the absolute necessity for external authority in matters of belief and are unwilling to trust the individual soul to recognise truth as it comes. In all the churches those who believe in the religion of the Spirit should recognise one another as brothers. In the church of England a large and increasing band of men are looking in this direction and are making their influence felt. Of these perhaps the most outstanding is Archdeacon Wilberforce, but he is by no means alone. A movement has begun in the Lutheran church. It has existed for a long time in French Protestantism as represented by the late Auguste Sabatier and his friend Réville. In the congregational and other evangelical churches of England and America the same attitude is being taken by many who are not even aware that the name New Theology is being applied to it. In this country the movement in the free churches is typified by men like the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams of Bradford.