s and guide their aspirations
without humiliating them. A religion which identifies itself, as
Christianity does, with the cause of freedom in every land, and tends
to unite all men in one great brotherhood under the loving God who is
the Father of all alike, is surely the desire of all nations, and is
destined to be the faith of all mankind.

A bibliography of the recent study of Christianity would be far too
extensive for this book. An excellent statement on the subject will
be found at the hands of Professor Sanday in the _Oxford
Proceedings_, vol. ii. p. 263, _sqq._

CHAPTER XXIII
CONCLUSION

It will not be expected that the result of the great movement traced
in the chapters of this work can be summed up in a few words. We set
out with a definition of our subject which we said could only be
fully verified after religion had accomplished its growth and had
fully unfolded its nature. We also set out with the assumption that
all the religion of the world is one, and that it exhibits a
development which is in the main continuous, from the most elementary
to the highest stages. We shall not now attempt to justify by
argument that definition or that assumption. The history which we
have sought to place before the reader must itself be the proof of
them. All that can be done in bringing this work to a close is to
point out one great line of development, which may be recognised more
or less distinctly in the growth of each religion, and may therefore
be held to be characteristic of religion as a whole. No doubt the
growth of religion, as of other human activities, has many sides and
aspects, but perhaps it may be possible to specify the central line
of growth in which the explanation of all the subsidiary and parallel
forward movements is to be found.

It was stated in our first chapter that religion is the expression of
human needs with reference to higher beings who are supposed to be
capable of fulfilling men's desires, and it was also stated as an
inference from this, that the growth of human needs is the cause of
religious change and progress. If this is true, then the key to the
progress of religion is to be found in the successive emergence in
human experience of higher and still higher needs. If we can discover
the order in which higher aspirations successively emerge in the
growth of humanity, then we shall possess the chief clue to the
course of religious advance. Now while there is infinite varie