men who teach it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth inspires.  They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  Rather than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift to train them ourselves—­we amateurs, not knowing much about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against organized wrong.

It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race.  That we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our midst—­the schisms which waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies and petty vanities.  To lift men above such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great cause—­that is the work of “personal religion” in the true and vital sense of the words.

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction.  Read these lines from “The Desire of Nations,” by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at hand: 

  And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
  He will rebuild her beauty with a song. 
  To every heart he will its own dream be: 
  One moon has many phantoms in the sea. 
  Out of the North the norns will cry to men: 
  “Baldur the Beautiful has come again!”
  The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead: 
  “Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!”
  The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice: 
  “Osiris comes:  Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!”
  And social architects who build the State,
  Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
  Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum. 
  And glad quick cries will go from man to man: 
  “Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
  The King who loved the lilies, He has come!”

#The Knowable#

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies.  And even if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the facts.  The history of all philosophy might be summed up in this simile:  The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and cries for it; but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother’s breast and takes a drink of milk.