Only in the most general terms can I trace the other origins of these present views.  I do not think modern religion owes much to what is called Deism or Theism.  The rather abstract and futile Deism of the eighteenth century, of “votre Etre supreme” who bored the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an infinite Being of no particular character whereas God is a finite being of a very especial character.  On the other hand men and women who have set themselves, with unavoidable theological preconceptions, it is true, to speculate upon the actual teachings and quality of Christ, have produced interpretations that have interwoven insensibly with thoughts more apparently new.  There is a curious modernity about very many of Christ’s recorded sayings.  Revived religion has also, no doubt, been the receiver of many religious bankruptcies, of Positivism for example, which failed through its bleak abstraction and an unspiritual texture.  Religion, thus restated, must, I think, presently incorporate great sections of thought that are still attached to formal Christianity.  The time is at hand when many of the organised Christian churches will be forced to define their positions, either in terms that will identify them with this renascence, or that will lead to the release of their more liberal adherents.  Its probable obligations to Eastern thought are less readily estimated by a European writer.

Modern religion has no revelation and no founder; it is the privilege and possession of no coterie of disciples or exponents; it is appearing simultaneously round and about the world exactly as a crystallising substance appears here and there in a super-saturated solution.  It is a process of truth, guided by the divinity in men.  It needs no other guidance, and no protection.  It needs nothing but freedom, free speech, and honest statement.  Out of the most mixed and impure solutions a growing crystal is infallibly able to select its substance.  The diamond arises bright, definite, and pure out of a dark matrix of structureless confusion.

This metaphor of crystallisation is perhaps the best symbol of the advent and growth of the new understanding.  It has no church, no authorities, no teachers, no orthodoxy.  It does not even thrust and struggle among the other things; simply it grows clear.  There will be no putting an end to it.  It arrives inevitably, and it will continue to separate itself out from confusing ideas.  It becomes, as it were the Koh-i-noor; it is a Mountain of Light, growing and increasing.  It is an all-pervading lucidity, a brightness and clearness.  It has no head to smite, no body you can destroy; it overleaps all barriers; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure.  It will compel all things to orient themselves to it.

It comes as the dawn comes, through whatever clouds and mists may be here or whatever smoke and curtains may be there.  It comes as the day comes to the ships that put to sea.