ment of Western
civilization and its position as chief representative of the religious
interpretation of the universe makes our selection of it for study
natural. To identify traditional religion with a low stage of its
development, in which it is inextricably bound up with crude myth and
ritualistic magic, is not a fair procedure. We must take theology at
its best and place it over against science and philosophy before we can
rightly judge it. Only then can we be certain whether it stands for
anything vital, significant and true. For the Western {59} world, at
least, Christian theology is generally acknowledged to represent the
high-water mark of theology. If it is intrinsically inadequate and
untrue to modern experience, the only course open to a morally and
intellectually courageous man is to resign it as a view outgrown. No
matter how much pain may arise from a break with old associations and
from the relinquishment of false hopes, intellectual morality permits
only one course. It may be that social morality will gain new life
when the old forms are broken, for the letter killeth. I mean that
Christian ethics will operate more freely and creatively in the world
when it is given an entirely humanistic setting. In dreaming of a
super-mundane god, man has only too often forgotten his fellow man. In
yearning for the coming of the divine kingdom, he has allowed his hands
and feet to be idle, or has even stepped unheeding over the prostrate
forms of men and children broken in the mart. To remove theology from
Christianity is to make the kingdom of this world.

The content of Christianity cannot be separated from its origin. To do
so is to open the door to private interpretations of all sorts and to
facilitate duplicity and self-deception. Christianity is an historical
fact, and has meant various pretty definite things. If we have
outgrown certain of these things and re-interpreted others in a
fundamental way, we are not making for clearness of thought by trying
to read our own outlook into the past. Continuity of a spiritual kind
there has been, but there is also newness of a basic import. The
knowledge and atmosphere which confront it to-day are vastly different
from the theosophy in which it was born and nourished.

{60}

I think we all feel that Christianity stood for an ethical stimulus of
a very fruitful sort whose effect can hardly be overestimated. Yet, if
we wish to gain a proper perspective, w