er of religious
gravity has altered tremendously from what it was in the Victorian Age.
We are on the brink of a new period, the period of a realistic, and yet
spiritual, social democracy.

"But," I will be asked, "do you advocate a religion of humanity? That
is an old effort weighed in the balance and found wanting." Comte's
reform was, in a way, premature. Society had not developed enough to
give his effort a concrete basis. But, more than this, his mistake was
that he did not see that the elements of religion, as well as its
perspective, must be altered. Humanity is not an object to be
worshiped. The very attitude and implications of worship must be
relinquished. In their place must be put the spiritually founded
virtue of loyalty to those efforts and values which elevate human
beings and give a quality of nobility and significance to our human
life here and now.

The positive note of the present work can now be given in a few words:
_Religion is loyalty to the values of life_. The idea of the spiritual
must be broadened and humanized to include all those purposes,
experiences and activities which express man's nature. The spiritual
must be seen to be the fine flower of living, which requires no other
sanctions than its own inherent worth and appeal. We must outgrow the
false notion that religion is inseparable from supernatural objects,
and that the spiritual is something alien to man which must be forced
upon him from the outside. _The spiritual is man at his best, man
loving, daring, creating, {8} fighting loyally and courageously for
causes dear to him_. Religion must be concrete instead of formal, and
catholic in its count of values. Wherever there is loyal endeavor, the
presence of the spiritual must freely be acknowledged. It would seem
to follow that religion will have objects only in the sense of purposes
to fulfill. It will no longer have need of a special view of the world.

The religion of the past has had much to say about salvation.
Salvation was only too often something which happened to a man from
outside. It was something capricious and uncontrollable like sudden
fortune. Let us see what the religion of the present with its more
realistic conception of life has to say about salvation. I have
written in the book as follows: "Only that soul is saved which is worth
saving, and the being worth saving is its salvation. Salvation is no
magical hocus-pocus external to the reach and tim