God send us men whose aim will be
    Not to defend some outworn creed,

and some members of both entertain the suspicion that all creeds are outworn.

This dislike of dogma may cloak an unwarranted scepticism as to the possibility of reaching truth in religion, but it is symptomatic of the longing for larger sympathy and broader fellowship.  It is but the extreme expression of a temper which has reduced the angularity of those who are very far from surrendering or belittling definite beliefs and doctrines.  The denominationalist who used to have no hesitation in claiming a monopoly of the truth for his particular Church, now falters where he firmly stood.  We are more ready to recognize our limitations.  A growing number of thoughtful minds appreciate Lord Acton’s position when he wrote to Mary Gladstone:  ’I scarcely venture to make points against the religion of other people, from a curious experience that they have more to say than I know, and from a sense that it is safer to reserve censure for one’s own which one understands more intimately, having a share in responsibility and action.’  This more chastened mood opens the way to fresh understandings in the religious world.  Whence does this change in atmosphere originate?

In tracing out the causes of this new temper in religion, a first place may legitimately be assigned to the growth of the scientific spirit.  In considering science as a source of unity, it is a mistake to dwell exclusively on the creation of a body of common knowledge.  To know the same thing may do little to unite men.  To attack problems in the same way, and to share the same spirit of free inquiry, the same reverence for fact, the same resolute endeavour to surmount prejudice, issue in a far closer bond of union.  Science unites men even more closely by its spirit than by its achievement.  The application of scientific method to the literary and historical study of the Bible, as well as in the psychological analysis of religious experience, has called into being in every Church and every land, groups of people who approach the subject-matter of their faith from the same angle and under the guidance of the same mental discipline.  As a result of the critical movement a man finds his foes in his own and his friends in his neighbours’ ecclesiastical household.  The study of religion renews international contact and requires international co-operation as much as any other branch of science.  It is possible to detect differing characteristics in the scholarship of the leading nations, though it may be doubted whether these are fundamental differences.  The volume of critical work published in Germany is so considerable as to foster the illusion that it constitutes a self-sufficing world.  Thus it is possible for Dr. Schweitzer in his brilliant survey of research into the life of Jesus, to represent the whole inquiry as the work of German genius and as the endeavour of German liberalism to picture Jesus in