ogy, biology and psychology. With this
accomplished, Christianity will resume its ancient place. Consciously
and of purpose the attempt is made to do once more what has been done
repeatedly before, to restate Christianity in the terms of current
science.

From all these efforts to reconstruct systematic theology with its
appropriations of philosophy and science, groups of Christians turn to
the inner life and seek in its realities to find the confirmation of
their faith. They also claim oneness with a long line of Christians, for
in every age there have been men who have ignored the dogma and the
ritual of the Church, and in contemplation and retirement have sought to
know God immediately in their own experience. To them at best theology
with its cosmology and its logic is only a shadow of shadows, for God
reveals himself to the pure in heart, and it matters not what science
may say of the material and fleeting world. This spirit manifests itself
in wide circles in our day. The Gordian knot is cut, for philosophy and
religion no longer touch each other but abide in separate realms.

In quite a different way a still more influential school seeks essential
Christianity in the sphere of the ethical life. It also would
disentangle religion from cosmology and formal philosophy. It studies
the historic development of the Church, noting how element after element
has been introduced into the simplicity of the gospel, and from all
these it would turn back to the Bible itself. In a thorough-going
fashion it would accomplish what Luther and the Reformation attempted.
It regards even the earliest creeds as only more or less satisfactory
attempts to translate the Christian facts into the current language of
the heathen world. But the process does not stop with this rejection of
the ancient and the scholastic theology. It recognizes the scientific
results attained in the study of the Bible itself, and therefore it does
not seek the entire Bible as its rule of truth. To it Jesus Christ, and
he alone, is supreme, but this supremacy does not carry with it
infallibility in the realm of cosmology or of history. In these too
Jesus participated in the views of his own time; even his teaching of
God and of the future life is not lacking in Jewish elements, yet none
the less he is the essential element in Christianity, and to his
life-purpose must all that claims to be Christianity be brought to be
judged. To this school Christianity is the