ay be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious
possibilities if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of
everyday life. There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its tune,
which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it, as it takes
the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its inner point in
the directest contact with God. Religion may suffer from aphasia and
still be religion; it may utter misleading or nonsensical words and yet
intend and convey the truth. The methods of the Salvation Army are older
than doctrinal Christianity, and may long survive it. Men and women may
still chant of Beulah Land and cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the
tambourine, that modern revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum,
may still stir dull nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call
beyond the immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of
Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.

The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies may
be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release among types
and strata that by the standards of a trained and explicit intellectual,
may seem spiritually hopeless. It is not necessary to imagine the whole
world critical and lucid in order to imagine the whole world unified in
religious sentiment, comprehending the same phrases and coming together
regardless of class and race and quality, in the worship and service
of the true God. The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than
hieratic tyranny must have this universality of appeal. As the head
grows clear the body will turn in the right direction. To the mass of
men modern religion says, "This is the God it has always been in your
nature to apprehend."

11. GOD AND THE LOVE AND STATUS OF WOMEN

Now that we are discussing the general question of individual conduct,
it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that relationship,
propositions already made very plainly in the second and third chapters.
Here there are several excellent reasons for a certain amount of
deliberate repetition. . . .

All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with
religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a part
in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from m