ades of itself. The deep stillness of the late night is broken
by a stirring, and the morning star of creedless faith, the last and
brightest of the stars, the star that owes its light to the coming sun
is in the sky.

There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir
before a breeze. Men are beginning to speak of religion without the
bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence. The
Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never did that.
Their "Supreme Being" repudiated nothing. He was merely the whittled
stump of the Trinity. It is in the last few decades that the western
mind has slipped loose from this absolutist conception of God that has
dominated the intelligence of Christendom at least, for many centuries.
Almost unconsciously the new thought is taking a course that will lead
it far away from the moorings of Omnipotence. It is like a ship that
has slipped its anchors and drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and
vanishing stars, out to the open sea. . . .

2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this renascent
faith.

For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief in
an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds trained
under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which have hitherto
been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between pseudo-Christian
religion or denial, but also it opens the way towards the completest
understanding and sympathy and participation with the kindred movements
for release and for an intensification of the religious life, that are
going on outside the sphere of the Christian tradition and influence
altogether. Allusion has already been made to the sympathetic devotional
poetry of Rabindranath Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism
parallel with and assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.

It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is
entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an evil
entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is too easily
assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with renunciation, not
merely of self but of being, with the escape from all effort of any sort
into an exalted vacuity. This is indeed neither the spirit of China nor
of Islam nor of the every