THE present state of religious thought in the Christian world illustrates Jesus' startling words, "Do you suppose that I am come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you that I came to bring dissension" (Weymouth's translation). Through his teaching the divine idea entered anew the arena of human consciousness, to stand unswervingly for righteousness, to rebuke unreservedly mortal sense and sin and thus to present the continuous occasion of "Christ crucified," exhibitions of the world's resistance to Truth. Not only have the pages of the past presented a well-nigh continuous story of religious strife, but to-day in many so-called Christian countries the religious question in some form is a leading political issue, and a large proportion of the people are maintaining an attitude of unfriendliness toward organized faith; while the discussion of the asserted "collapse of creeds," "the decadence of doctrines," "the passing of the belief in historic Christianity," etc., is so common as to be a feature of current religious periodicals as well as of the non-christian and critical.
These things would furnish ground for a rather pessimistic view of the general state of religion, were it not for the fact that in all this human turmoil there is disclosed a well-nigh universal respect for the Christ-ideal, a "deepening and widening of faith" in our Lord's essential teaching, even when contempt for creeds and professed Christians is bitter and outspoken. This is explained only upon the assumption that the people are beginning to discriminate between the gospel and its inadequate interpretation,—a fact to which Christian Science has made very great contributions, and which entirely changes the aspect of the situation. Those who are learning to distinguish between the Christ-ideal and its sadly imperfect expression in professed Christians, who have begun to recognize the contrast between the genuine and the counterfeit, the saving truth and its blundering exponents, and who condemn the latter,—these, and they are many, are in a wholesome state, and they are teachable withal, if appeal is but made to them in the demonstration of a faith which is freed from the lamentable accretions of human sense.
In the religious antagonisms of the past it has, generally speaking, been true that everything for which an opponent stood has been condemned with him, so that religious prejudice has come to be regarded as more unreasonble and more unjust than any other. To-day, however, those who are out of sympathy with prevailing religious belief and procedure are ready to concede the supreme value and authority of the Master's teaching, and in their demand that Christian profession shall give up its apologetics and exhibit a vital and effectual spiritual life, they are helping rather than harming the cause of true religion.
