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 348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

supply material for revision of our ideas and for broadening our conceptions of social utility. The knowledge gained by rude races and that derived by the keenest science are inter- changed, and the culture of the world tends to become one. When the fashion of our chief cities sets apart a week for devo- tion to the chrysanthemum, we need look no farther for proof that the aesthetic life of alien civilizations coalesces and har- monizes. The Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 was merely a symptom of a condition that is as old as human inter- course. Religion is not a local nor a racial but a human want, and the want will not be satisfied until it has reached a uni- versal expression. Every movement of man to satisfy the reli- gious yearning has been a vicarious sacrifice for all humanity, in expressing its want and in experimenting with means for achieving its desire. The transfusion of religious conceptions has been going on since the first human consciousness of awe and fear. We need not argue that one religion is the product of another, but, assuming the independent origin of several families of religions, there has been progressive modification of religion by religion, parallel with the progress of inter- course between peoples. The Buddhist and the Jew, the Mussulman and the Christian, each has a different actual reli- gion today from that which would have been his religion if the other faiths had not contributed to the content of his conscious- ness.

In other words, the world has gone on realizing what was partially but fundamentally expressed by St. Paul in his famous sociological lectures to the Roman and Corinthian Christians (Rom. 12:4 and I Cor., chap. 12). He may not have intended to carry his proposition, "We are members one of another," beyond its application to membership in Christian communities. At all events, the truth turns out to be as broad as the most liberal interpretation of his language suggests. As intercourse and means of communication and exchange of goods and thoughts have become developed, world-wide community has become more intimate and obvious. The peculiar consequence of this fact today is that there are no local questions ; every social