good practical nurses, good Bible students, good public speakers. But what were they learning or developing of spiritual power?

Our men have not that power because they do not lead the life necessary to develop it. And because here is the crux of the matter -they are possessed by a different ideal. The declared ideal of the Western religious man is not "to realize God," but "to win men to Christ" or to "the true faith." Their constantly reiterated ambition is not to have the mind and spirit of Christ in themselves, but to get somebody else to have it. They take it for granted that they have it-which is a dangerous assumption.

Christ had power in himself. He did not talk about the power of some one else who lived two thousand years ago, or urge people to follow a way that had obviously not succeeded in transforming him. There is no force in second-hand religion.

Christ had more life and power. He was a God-man, the Incarnation of a higher state. Is Christ therefore, as the Christian church claims, the final answer to life? Is he Absolute Truth, Life, God?

He is not, to me. Much as I love Christ, and deeply as I reverence him, fired by his beauty and gallantry as I am, every time I read his story with no doctrinal admixtures I still do not find him the ultimate answer. Because I do not see how the ultimate answer-the Power creating and sustaining this universe -can be a person; or how, in this world where life and knowledge are still evolving, we can claim to have had a final and absolute revelation of either goodness or truth.

Christians say that Christ is all truth. But my experience does not bear this out, for he does not include the truth I most want to know. Christ gives great principles of living, but no explanation of life. He gives laws of moral conduct, but does not explain those laws in the light of any general scheme-cosmic or universal. Here is human life: live it in such and such a way, he says, and you will realize Heaven, and have reward instead of punishment.

But why is human life? And what is human life? Where has it come from-whither is it bound? What relation has it to other than human life, to the infinite stream of forms and energy?

Christ tells me nothing about this, and this is what I want to know. The Christian religion, without this explanation and rational background, is to most men a "beautiful story" and collection of moral preceptsvery fine, but over-idealistic, and remote from the demands of practical life in this age. Morals detached from science will never win the mass of modern men.

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This is the great weakness of the Christian system: its lack of a scientific cosmology. Its second great weakness is its spiritual and cultural narrowness, an attitude not natural to the best men and women of to-day and that makes for a meager instead of rich social and intellectual lifecertainly less life within the church than without it. A religion that holds that all truth is confined to one form and that all people shall accept that one form or they have not the truth, naturally develops an exclusive and proud spirit and a

limited rather than a broad and comprehensive culture.

I have never been affiliated with any Oriental religion, but I deeply revere the Lord Buddha and the Lord Krishna, and the Chinese sages. I have their gospels, as well as the Christian, beside me on my table each is equally well-worn. Each gives me something that the other does not, a different emphasis, light on a different point. My life would be vastly poorer if I had to part with any one of them. When I have said just that, and no more, to Christian ministers, and to the broadest and supposedly most brotherly of them, I have been amazed to see the complete change in their attitude toward me, the freezing disapproval and withdrawal, as from one who was an enemy. I have sat in the company of some of the representative Christian ministers of the world and have heard the "Christian" principles of love and unity discussed and I have seen every atom of love and unity vanish from that company in thirty seconds when love and reverence for the Lord of any other religion were mentioned.

They cannot bear to have any other Lord mentioned on an equality with their Lord-so one of them told me, frankly: some good in the others, yes, but not to be mentioned as equal with Christ. This is an inevitable result of a one-person religion. The Christian idea of unity is that men shall be united within the Christian faith. The Christian idea of love, is that all men shall love their Master.

Christ said, "God is a Spiritworship him [yourself] in spirit and in truth."

Christians say, "God is Jesus Christ. Get other men-all the men in the world-to worship him."

Christians have taken as their First Great Commandment, “Go ye into all the world," and make converts-win men-to the Christian faith. "The world must be spiritualized, and the non-Christian won to Christ," says Stanley Jones.

But the first people who must be won to Christ, are Christians.

Most people's chief reason for differing from the Christian religion, is that it is so different from the religion of Christ. The religion of Christ was not an aggressive, but a responsive religion. Christ had not to go out and argue and advertise, and browbeat men to come unto him. Christ had something greater life and power. Men responded to that life and power, and ran unto him. And in every case he asked, “what wilt thou that I do unto thee?" And according to each man's individual need as he stated it, Christ responded.

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Nevertheless, an aggressive religion has great uses. The world is what it is to-day because of the contacts made with once dangerous and far-away races by the missionaries, who were the only people brave enough to make them. And there are people who need, and want, an aggressive religion, people sunk in the apathy of ancient civilizations and and worn-out social systems, people who want to be persuaded, fired, dynamited out of their inertia, by the enthusiasm and intensity of others. There are other people to whom such aggressiveness has no appeal whatever, to whom the

intensely personal expression and exclusiveness is as foreign as inclusiveness is to the first type.

When I read that "Christianity is rapidly gaining ground in India," or when my friend in California writes me that "Hindu teachings are being enthusiastically received, and the Christian Church is steadily losing, in America"-that does not prove to me that the Christian religion is "better" than the Hindu, or that the Hindu is "better" than the Christian. It simply proves that people in one part of the world need waking up and stimulating, by an intensely active, clear, and very definite religious conception. And that certain other people are beginning to hunger for reflective, reasoned and more philosophical religion.

It is a matter of individual temperament and individual need.

The aim of religion should be, not to make all men think alike, but to give to each man according to his spiritual necessity: not to make all men bow to one form, but to desire that each may find for himself that special form that will open up the highest possible revelation of life to him—and to know that those for whom our own best-loved form is the right one, will be naturally attracted to it.

For many of us to-day the Christian religion is not a natural form; but we cannot forget what we owe to the Christian Church, its great gifts to the life of the race, to us each individually. We owe to it, every one of us now alive in this Western world, whatever principles, ideals,

standards of morals and conduct, we possess. We owe to it our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers-all our sturdy forebears reaching back into the past. The doctrines so unreal to some of us, were very real to them. Their stanch and gallant characters that have made us what we are, if we are anything, were built upon faith in those doctrines, devotion to that beloved and historic church, and the sure sense of its support and consolation. Generation by generation, honestly and earnestly striving man by man, these “old-fashioned,” “orthodox" people and ideas we now laugh at, gradually, painfully and with infinite patience, built up everything in life that we now value. Can their age-long endeavor on our behalf be dismissed with a satirical jeer at the old folks' "obsolete superstition"?

Orthodox Christianity is our religious background, our spiritual heritage from our forefathers—a very precious thing. Whether it will remain as our religion of the future, depends I think on whether the Christian Church has the courage to lose its life in order to find it: to sink its desire to dominate the world, into a desire to serve the world—as the world itself may find it serviceable. To take its place as one among a circle of sister-faiths, make its offering-generously and enthusiastically but leave each individual free to choose his own best, from out all the truth and fineness that the gathered storehouse of the race has to offer.

I

N THE autumn of 1926 the consort of Rumania's king visited the United States. From Atlantic to Pacific she was fêted wherever she went, and an extraordinary amount of newspaper space was devoted to her doings and to the receptions accorded her. Virtually nothing was said about her country at the time. It was enough for the American people that she was a queen. Her unusual personality made it possible for her to captivate a people already well disposed toward her from what they had read of her and by her before the visit. She capitalized to the fullest extent the curiosity of our democracy concerning royalty.

The eagerness to do honor to royalty per se was so great that where Queen Marie came from did not matter any more than why she came. Few of the thousands that clamored to greet her or stood in crowds, frequently in the rain, simply to see her, cared about her country. Few who read everything they could lay their hands on concerning the visiting queen knew anything at all of the now vast and varied kingdom that stretches from the Black Sea westward across the Carpathians to what were formerly the richest plains of Hungary. And yet the

Queen of Rumania was not as interesting and she was far from being as important as the people over whom her husband reigned. In the United States it was not realized that there was more romance in the land itself than in its queen.

We began to have a faint glimmering, however, of Rumania's politics and problems in the last days of the royal visit. Queen Marie is supposed to have cut short her American itinerary because of alarming cable reports from Bucharest of her husband's physical condition. King Ferdinand was reported to be dying. Queen Marie hastened back to Europe, but lingered in Paris before returning to her country. Then followed from the Balkan Kingdom a mass of contradictory rumors which were invariably played up in the American newspapers. Events in Rumania had become "front-page stuff" because of the interest aroused through the Queen's visit.

When King Ferdinand's death seemed imminent, the editor of THE CENTURY asked me to write on the real position of the royal family in Rumania and to forecast the probable results of the King's death. But Ferdinand did not die! He lingered on for many months, and when he finally disappeared from the

scene the attention of all the world was centered upon the succession to the Rumanian throne. The most absurd rumors were given credence, and it seemed impossible for American correspondents in Europe to separate romance from reality in dealing with the Rumanian situation. No accurate picture could therefore be given to the American people of what was happening in Rumania.

The fault was largely due to the Government's censorship policy, which defeated its own purpose. The Government did not want false news to get out; it was anxious to avoid the growing up of an impression abroad that internal conditions in Rumania were not what they should be. As a result the world was fed on half-truths or stories wholly imaginary, emanating from Budapest and Vienna. Passed on by Paris correspondents to American newspapers, with embellishments, much of this so-called news has been up to the present writing grotesquely untrue. More than a year has passed since Queen Marie hurried back to her husband's bedside. None of the things confidently predicted in the press have come to pass. There has been far more romance than romance than reality!

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Nine years ago we wrote in THE CENTURY of the future of the Hapsburg dominions. The Treaties of St. Germain and Trianon had just been signed, and most students of European affairs felt that a great mistake had been made at Paris. So long had we been accustomed to the status quo on the Danube that we were ready to accept as God's truth the

bon mot of the diplomat who said that if the Austrian Empire did not exist it would have to be invented. After half a half a century century of uninterrupted growth in power and prosperity the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was cut to pieces by the framers of the treaties. Shorn of the provinces inhabited by subject peoples and of many regions in which the former ruling races were indisputably in the majority, Austria and Hungary were reduced by the fortunes of war to little states, cut off from access to the sea and hemmed in by new economic as well as political frontiers. Out of the ruins of a mighty empire that had been centuries in the making arose the Succession States.

None of the new countries presented a structural problem similar to that of any other, and only one of them was wholly the result of the treaties that had sealed the fate of the Hapsburg dominions. Czechoslovakia was an artificial creation of statesmen, who put together under Czech rule widely different elements and regions of what had formerly been Austria and Hungary. Poland was in large part the resurrection of a kingdom that had disappeared in the latter half of the eighteenth century and to its composition Russia and Germany, as well as Austria, were compelled to contribute. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (commonly known by the less awkward appellation Jugoslavia) was formed by the union of the South Slav portions of the Dual Monarchy with Serbia and Montenegro. Greater Rumania was achieved by incorporating Bukovina, taken from Austria; Transylvania and part of the Banat of Temesvár,