THE phrase belongs to Mr. H. G. Wells, and is applied by him to the pioneers of progress. He uses it to describe the men who think new thoughts, and find new ways, and bring their neighbors out of old conventions and monotonies into the sight of the new heavens and the new earth.

He begins with the paleolithic man who, first of all men, in the primeval forest, sharpened his spear to kill the mammoth. In The World Set Free1 he traces a shining succession of such adventurous spirits, always divinely always divinely discontented, always intent on solving some new equation in the everlasting problem of the earth and man. Even this problem did not satisfy their instinctive curiosity. They desired to get back to the causes of the world, and to learn the meaning of things. They would gain possession of the truth, and discover God. They were of the mind of the primitive hunter who hoped some time to snare the sun and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amid the distant hills.

"The world of every day,' says Mr. Wells, 'laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and illtreated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his

1 The World Set Free, by H. G. Wells. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that will some day catch the sun.'

Among the books which in the past twelve months have dealt with the subject of religion, so many have concerned themselves with these snarers of the sun, that we may perhaps be warranted in finding here a common note of interest and significance. To any one who asks, What, in the main, are the recent religious books about? we may reply, An unusual number of them are about the men who have tried to change the thought and life of the world, and about the changes which they have been able to effect.

The religious writers of the past year have not themselves put the sun to any unexpected peril. No volume which bears the date of 1914 will be placed by any historian of religion at the beginning of a new chapter. No new men have come among us, as, for example, Eucken and Bergson came a few years ago, bringing dynamic and revolutionary ideas. The next thing, however, to the rare task of changing men's minds, is to appreciate and praise those who have been the pioneers of change in the past, and to make the way ready for further changes in the future. And this the recent books have done with significant unanimity. Such a book as Mr. Puller's Continuity of the Church of England, which incidentally praises the Province of Canterbury for its endeavors to silence Bishop Colenso, serves 2 The Continuity of the Church of England, by F. W. Puller. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

chiefly to remind us that some rocks still remain from what was once a dam across the river of free thought. But Mr. Puller's book is made up of lectures which were delivered in Russia, where the calendar is still thirteen days behind our almanac.

It looked for a moment as if Dr. Stanton Coit might deserve a place among the pioneers. He rendered an excellent service a good while ago in connection with the beginnings of social settlements in this country. A remembrance of this constructive work, together with an appreciation of his unfailing altruistic enthusiasm, prepared the way for his book, The Soul of America.1 Dr. Coit proposed to found 'The Church of the Republic,' and announced his intention to spend the first four months of 1915 in the United States for the purpose of establishing a national religious society. It seemed like the beginning of a new religion. We were invited to merge all of our existing churches in the worship of America.

It is still possible to found a new religion in this country. Brigham Young did it. Within our own experience, before our own eyes, Mrs. Eddy has done it. But Brigham Young was the leader of a pilgrimage; he carried his disciples across a desert and settled them in a new land, by the Dead Sea of Utah. And Mrs. Eddy was a worker of miracles. It appears that a new religion must have a dramatic beginning. The Bab, to take another example of a modern founder, was put to death.

One would indeed imagine that a religion would be greatly commended to the general mind by being reasonable and respectable; but these were the qualities of organized Christianity in England in the eighteenth century, and they resulted in a phenomenal indifference. That was the time when Bishop 1 The Soul of America, by Stanton Coit. New York: The Macmillan Co.

Butler began his Analogy by taking for granted that religion was generally derided; and Montesquieu returned from a visit to London saying that he had thought that there was less religion in France than in any other country in the world, but that he found still less in England; and the suggestion was made in a letter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that the time had perhaps come to revise the creed and the commandments by taking the word 'not' out of the commandments and introducing it into the creed. Dr. Coit's new religion is eminently respectable and reasonable; but these are its fatal defects.

Moreover, the first four months of 1915 will be found to be the worst of all times in which to preach a gospel of nationalism. It will inevitably be confused with the doctrines of Treitschke and Bernhardi. This is no fault of Dr. Coit; he had no foreknowledge of the present frightful application, or misapplication, of his idea of a National God; but it is his misfortune. It prevents, or at least delays, the effective setting of his particular snare to catch the sun.

In spite of the interest of recent religious writers in the pioneers of progress there is not among their books any very notable biography. There is nothing which adequately corresponds with Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Life of Newman, or with the Autobiography of George Tyrrell, or even with such accounts of past leaders as the Life of Luther by Professor McGiffert, or that by Professor Preserved Smith. The only men whose names appear in the titles of the more important religious books of the past year are Dante and John Woolman. But Bishop Boyd Carpenter's Spiritual Message of Dante2 is a study of the poem rather than of the man; and Mr.

2 The Spiritual Message of Dante, by W. Boyd Carpenter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Teignmouth Shore's John Woolman, His Life and Our Times 1 is not so much a biography as a 'study in applied Christianity.'

It is pleasant to find Dante and John Woolman thus brought together, Catholic and Quaker, from Italy and from New Jersey. They would have understood each other, after they had reckoned up the five centuries which separated them. They were both snarers of the sun, and they had essentially the same method. The message of Dante, as Bishop Carpenter reads it, was that the supreme victory is gained by love. 'Love is stronger than death, and, if our faith be right, it is mightier than sin.' The life of John Woolman was an endeavor to carry this message into immediate effect, especially in its application to negro slavery. He found, like Dante, that it gave him peace and satisfaction in the midst of trouble. It is difficult to imagine John Woolman guided by Virgil, and still more difficult to imagine him seeing the divine light reflected in the eyes of Beatrice, but in his own way, out of his narrower experience, he entered into the same paradise of spiritual felicity.

Instead of composing biography, and devoting large books to great men, a number of recent writers have followed the order of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The pioneers are marched by in procession. The historians are informed and friendly persons who point them out as they pass, and tell us briefly who they are and what they did. Thus we have Hulme's Renaissance and Reformation,2 Vedder's Reformation in Germany, Jourdan's

3

1 John Woolman, His Life and Our Times, by W. Teignmouth Shore. London: Macmillan & Co. 2 The Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution and the Catholic Reformation in Continental Europe, by Edward Maslin Hulme. New York: The Century Co.

The Reformation in Germany, by Henry C. Vedder. New York: The Macmillan Co.

Catholic Reform in the Early XVI Century, and Jones's Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries; and then, omitting a hundred years, Storr's Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Harris's A Century's Change in Religion,' and Weinel and Widgery's Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After.8

These sixteenth and seventeenth-century men were chiefly concerned about the failure of the church. They were engaged in the everlasting contention between the prophets and the priests. In this contention the priests represent the church. They administer the institution, conducting the services, continuing the traditions, keeping the old order, defending the ancient orthodoxy, maintaining and advancing the organi zation. The prophets are progressives. They are the captains of the opposition. They declare that the church has lost its moral leadership, and cares only for ritual, not for righteousness. They come into plain sight in the person of Amos, who stands on the steps of the king's chapel and denounces the existing situation until the priest Amaziah drives him away. They speak with the great voice of Isaiah, who declares that the Lord is weary of ceremonies and sacrifices, that incense is an abomination to Him, that He hates the whole calendar of holy days, and that in his

The Movement towards Catholic Reform in the Early XVI Century, by George V. Jourdan. London: John Murray.

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by Rufus M. Jones. London: Macmillan & Co.

• The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century, by Vernon F. Storr. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

7 A Century's Change in Religion, by George Harris. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

8 Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, by Heinrich Weinel and Alban G. Widgery. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

sight solemn meetings and even prayers are only so much additional insult and iniquity. 'Wash you,' he says, 'make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well.'

Or they declare that the church has lost its intellectual leadership. The world of thought moves on, but the church stands still. There is new truth to which the ecclesiastical authorities will not give so much as a hearing, being willfully blind to it, hostile to it. It is the intention of the church officials to keep the religious mind where it was, in the first century, or the third, or the fifteenth, in agreement with Athanasius, or Augustine, or Aquinas, or anybody else whose name begins with the first letter of the alphabet. Against examination, even against discussion, they oppose the barrier of authority. Knowledge increases, old philosophies become obsolete, new sciences widen out the horizon of the world, new needs, new aspirations, new ideas possess the minds of men, and the church, unwilling to accept them, and unable to encounter them in argument, deals with the discoverers and pioneers as it dealt in Jerusalem with Stephen-stones them or burns them.

The 'Failure of the Church,' which was dealt with in a vigorous article in a recent number of the Atlantic Monthly, is an ancient and perennial subject. There are sixteen books about it in the Old Testament - beginning with Isaiah and ending with Malachi. The chief defect of the article was in the fallacy of finality. The church is always failing

and succeeding. The conservatives, in every department of life, are always open to the attack of the progressives, and are always eventually defeated. The better way of living and the better way of thinking prevail. Nevertheless, in the contention, the conservatives compel the progressives

to prove their point; they successfully resist the individual eccentricities and the revolutionary enthusiasms of their adversaries; they defend society against anarchy. In the course of time, maintaining what is abidingly good in the old, they take over what is good in the new. They keep the ancient order, into which, very slowly and cautiously, they bring the modern spirit.

The old text, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against it,' is open to a modernist interpretation; for the word 'gate' means counsel, as the place where in the oriental city the elders and sages met, and the word 'hell' is translated, not from gehenna, the place of evil, but from hades, the place of departed spirits. Against the progress of the church the ancient ideas of departed philosophers and fathers shall not prevail! But neither shall the new ideas, even of the youngest critics, prevail against it.

This is the confidence in the staying power of the church to which one is brought by the recent accounts of the old revolutions.

The situation in the time of the Renaissance seemed to imply the final failure of the church. Professor Hulme has described it in a book whose distinction of literary style is matched by the accuracy of its scholarship. The University of Idaho is to be congratulated upon its possession of a teacher who so happily combines minuteness of observation with wideness of vision. He has made a long list of obscure names fascinatingly interesting. The procession passes, and the interpreter not only tells us what it was all about, and what the various regiments did, but what part in the great war was played by several hundred individual heroes, each of whom, for the moment, stands out vital and dramatic. The writer is detached from the old partisan prejudices. He describes Luther and Loyola

with equal sympathy and discrimination. No other single volume gives so fair an account of the whole period of the Rennaisance, the Protestant Revolution, and the Catholic Reformation. At the height of the Renaissance, the church, as Professor Hulme describes it, seemed wholly out of accord, not only with the age, but with all good ages. Its leadership in the papacy was divided among rival popes, and discredited by a prevailing paganism. It was concerned, not with morals, but with money. It was opposed to most of the contemporary revivals; sympathetic, in a pagan way, with the revival of literature and of art, but against the revival of the nation, and the revival of the individual, and the revival of science, and the revival of conscience. It had no faith in Roger Bacon's great word, 'The truth is ever growing, by God's grace.' It was occupied with logic, taking isolated sentences of Augustine or Aristotle or of the Bible, and deducing conclusions from them by the process of syllogism, at a time when men were beginning to move out from the beaten track and the enclosed circle of logic into the actual world, under the guidance of research. The church was so committed on the one side to a pagan secularism over against the new conscience, and on the other side to an obscurantist logic over against the new learning, that its continuance seemed impossible.

Mr. Jourdan shows how the forces of reform took shape in humanism. He deals with the effort to influence the church from within. His principal heroes are those ever-companionable persons who appear in Seebohm's Oxford Reformers, a delightful and informing book which has recently been reprinted in 'Everyman's Library.' Of Colet and Erasmus and More no right-minded reader will grow weary. These friends would save the church by better instruction. Colet lectures in Ox

ford on the Epistles of St. Paul, and munificently founds a school in London. Erasmus edits the Greek Testament, and points out errors in the Vulgate. They are of the spirit of Lorenzo Valla, their Italian contemporary, who founded the science of historical criticism by proving the 'Donation of Constantine' to be a forgery, and denying the tradition that the Apostles' Creed was written by the twelve apostles. Erasmus and More would save the church by the grace of humor: Erasmus by the Praise of Folly, More by the Utopia; a work which others were undertaking, not quite so pleasantly, in the Letters of Obscure Men and the Ship of Fools.

The humanists failing to change contemporary religion from within, Luther and his companions went outside. They were of the same mind with the Atlantic essayist on the 'Failure of the Church,' who has resigned his official ministry that he may preach more freely on the corners of the streets. It is true that in so doing they abandoned an ancient form of organization only to erect another organization of their own devising. The idea needs the organization as the soul needs the body. They did, however, introduce into religion a change somewhat like that which was effected by the apostles. The apostles found that they could get along without the Jewish Church. It seemed incredible, and the Bible seemed to be against it; but they tried it, and succeeded. The reformers found that they could get along without the Catholic Church. They discovered to their satisfaction that the Christian religion is not bound up with any particular method of administration. This had been suspected before, and a good many holy heretics and saintly schismatics had tried to prove it, but not very successfully. Luther proved it. The papacy itself had been an innovation on the