significant in religion is merely an expression of man’s social consciousness and experience, his sense of participation in a common life.  “Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation of creative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for a source of religious inspiration.”  Professor Overstreet, in “The Democratic Conception of God,” Hibbert Journal, volume XI, page 409, says:  “It is this large figure, not simply of human but of cosmic society which is to yield our God of the future.  There is no place in the future for an eternally perfect being and no need—­society, democratic from end to end, can brook no such radical class distinction as that between a supreme being, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and the mass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imperfect struggle.”

[Footnote 10:  Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, p. 322.]

There is certainly a striking immediacy in such language.  We leave for later treatment the question as to the historical validity of such an attitude.  It certainly ignores some of the most distinguished and fruitful concepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what are to the majority of men real and precious factors in the religious experience.  It would appear to be another instance, among the many, of the fallacy of identifying the part with the whole.  But the effect of such pervasive thought currents, the more subtle and unfightable because indirect and disguised in popular appearance and influence, upon the ethical and spiritual temper of religious leaders, the very audacity of whose tasks puts them on the defensive, is vast and incalculable.  At the worst, it drives man into a mechanicalized universe, with a resulting materialism of thought and life; at the best, it makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate objectives, just practical “results” as his guide and goal.  Morality as, in Antigone’s noble phrase, “the unwritten law of heaven” sinks down and disappears.  There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato’s One behind the Many; no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or for Christian theodicy.  That which has been the typical contribution of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive vision of life and the world and time sub specie aeternitatis is here abandoned.  Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the music of the spheres.  We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age.  Here is a prime reason for it.  The spiritual solidarity of mankind under the humanistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolving and breaking down.  Humanism is ingenious and reasonable and clever but it is too limited; it doesn’t answer enough questions.