human being, it does not follow
that religion cannot organise every other human affair. It is indeed
essential to the idea that God is the Invisible King of this round
world and all mankind, that we should see in every government, great
and small, from the council of the world-state that is presently coming,
down to the village assembly, the instrument of God's practical control.
Religion which is free, speaking freely through whom it will, subject to
a perpetual unlimited criticism, will be the life and driving power of
the whole organised world. So that if you prefer not to say that there
will be no church, if you choose rather to declare that the world-state
is God's church, you may have it so if you will. Provided that you
leave conscience and speech and writing and teaching about divine things
absolutely free, and that you try to set no nets about God.

The world is God's and he takes it. But he himself remains freedom, and
we find our freedom in him.

THE ENVOY

So I end this compact statement of the renascent religion which I
believe to be crystallising out of the intellectual, social, and
spiritual confusions of this time. It is an account rendered. It is a
statement and record; not a theory. There is nothing in all this that
has been invented or constructed by the writer; I have been but scribe
to the spirit of my generation; I have at most assembled and put
together things and thoughts that I have come upon, have transferred the
statements of "science" into religious terminology, rejected obsolescent
definitions, and re-coordinated propositions that had drifted into
opposition. Thus, I see, ideas are developing, and thus have I written
them down. It is a secondary matter that I am convinced that this trend
of intelligent opinion is a discovery of truth. The reader is told of my
own belief merely to avoid an affectation of impartiality and aloofness.

The theogony here set forth is ancient; one can trace it appearing and
disappearing and recurring in the mutilated records of many different
schools of speculation; the conception of God as finite is one that has
been discussed very illuminatingly in recent years in the work of one I
am happy to write of as my friend and master, that very great American,
the late William James. It was an idea that became increasingly
important to him towards the end of his life. And it is the most
releasing idea in the system.

Only in the most general terms can I trac