al
tendencies known by the admittedly vague names of democracy and
socialism. Solidarity, collectivism, the common life--these are the
watchwords of some of the most widely influential movements of our
time.

And these watchwords have, for many of us, not only a political, but a
religious meaning. I need not remind you of the popular influence of
such dramas as "The Servant in the House," or of the numbers of
clergymen to whom the preaching of religion has come to mean, in the
main, the preaching of beneficent social reforms. If teachers who thus
view religion as, on the whole, a movement toward the increase of
social welfare are asked what their counsel is to the individual
regarding the salvation of his soul, they will reply: "If you want to
be saved, come out of yourself." Some of them would add: "Forget
yourself." But whether they use this latter extremely ambiguous and
doubtful form of advice, they very generally agree that to seek to
save your own soul by any merely or mainly inward and non-social
process is to secure perdition. "It is love that saves," they are fond
of {57} telling us. And in this doctrine, as interpreted in the light
of our modern social movements, many see the entire essence of
Christianity adapted to our present situation.

Nor is the tendency here in question limited to the practical counsels
of which I have just reminded you. There are those students of the
psychology and the philosophy of religion who are disposed to conceive
that the whole essence of the religion of all times, the entire
meaning of religious beliefs and practices, can be exhaustively and
accurately described in the purely human and social terms which these
practical counsels attempt to embody. A recent writer on the
psychology of religion defines religion as man's consciousness of his
highest social values, and maintains that all religious beliefs are
attempts to express this consciousness in whatever terms a given stage
of civilisation makes natural and possible.

One can easily suggest to any student of general history some of the
facts which such a writer has in mind. Have not the gods often been
conceived as tribal deities, and so simply as representatives of the
welfare and of the will of the community over against the waywardness
and the capriciousness of the individual? Was not the transition from
polytheism to the various forms of pantheism and of monotheism
determined by the social processes that formed kingdo