ss of each
human soul is the first fact in religious consciousness. Altruism and
communion with other souls are perforce attained through concern with
the state of the ego. The spiritual egoism which demands pure thought,
peace wherein to gather impressions of goodness, beauty, and truth, time
for the analysis of psychic law, direct knowledge which is proof against
the disease of doubt, is, after all, the most valuable contribution
which the individual can make to society. The people who are now greatly
concerned with the exact temperature of their own minds are, at any
rate, to be congratulated on having made the discovery, which is
centuries overdue, that hygiene of the soul is more important than
hygiene of the body.

Placid contentment with the religious systems of the past is greatly
disturbed by this assertiveness. There is a demand for a new message,
couched in terms suited to the mental level of the twentieth century. A
message delivered two thousand years ago to a small pastoral people,
altogether innocent of the complicated economic, and industrial
conditions of our times, must necessarily appear incomplete to minds
which can only reproduce the simplicity by an effort of the imagination.
Jesus, they maintain, was a Jew who spoke to Jews, and who had to deal
with simple fishermen and agriculturists, with Eastern merchants and
narrow-minded scribes. He never met great financiers to whose chariots
of gold whole populations are chained, or great masters of industry who
profitably run a thousand mills where human flesh and bone are ground in
the production of wealth. He knew naught, they feel, of the history of
philosophy, or the psychology of religion, or the researches of
physiology and chemistry. His language, coming to us as it does through
the medium of interpreters of a bygone age, and through the simple
symbols of less sophisticated minds, has poetic beauty, but lacks our
modern comprehensiveness.

There is a feeling that it is unreasonable to believe that God spoke
once or twice, thousands of years ago, and that He cannot or will not
speak now. Revelation cannot have been final; it must surely be
progressive, gradual, fitted to the needs and the receptivity of souls.
The written word is not the only word. The living word must be spoken
now, and will be spoken with greater effectiveness in the future. Hence
the expectation that a new world-teacher will appear, that a master will
be born who will gather up