Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/192

180 are exceptions to this which are becoming more frequent; personal esteem is often sincerely felt even where co-operation is refused, and co-operation is sometimes given in philanthropic schemes when refused in spiritual work. The free discussion of religion in the reviews and magazines and in private circles induces a still larger tolerance, so that even agnostics and positivists are not treated as outcasts by the most zealous of their Christian relations.

We must add to this the new state of things created by the modification of the tests imposed upon the clergy, and their abolition both in public life and at the universities. The clergy now profess only a general adherence to the formularies of worship, while in all other spheres tests are gone or doomed. This has tended to make religious profession more sincere, and to separate religion from injustice. It has also brought together those who would never have met. The presence even of one like Mr. Bradlaugh in Parliament is a preservative against conventionalism and hypocrisy when matters moral and religious are under debate. In the universities the fact that young men who are preparing for the ministry of various denominations, live together and share the same thoughts and associations, is pregnant with consequences to the future of church-life and of theology, as is also the freedom of speech and practice and the altered tone of religious instruction resulting from the presence of dissenters.

4. Theology can not separate itself from public life. The democratic and social uprising of our day must influence it. "While a system of privilege was dominant in the state, it was natural perhaps to think of the few who were called, and to pass over the rest. The idea of men having no claim upon God, and of his relation to them as being either that of a vigorous upholder of law, or of one who only in certain cases and on certain terms showed favor to transgressors, was congenial to all to whom the chief political factors were the monarch and the upper classes, and the maintenance of a law in the making of which the mass of the subjects had had no hand. But the modern conviction that all men have their rights, and that the government exists for their sake, has communicated itself to theology. We can not think of men simply as offenders who need pardon; rather the fact that they have been created seems to give them a claim on their Creator. The mission and self-sacrifice of Christ seem an answer to this claim, and a promise of a better condition in this world as well as in the world to come. Nor is this only for individuals. The democracy moves in masses; we can not be content with the blessing of individuals as separate from their fellows, but must strive for the building up of the masses in true relations and brotherly equality.

Such appear to be the main conditions under which our theological beliefs are destined in future to move. We have now to consider what the movements of theology can be under these conditions.

II.—When the preacher whose words were quoted at the beginning