It seems,

for such idealism in America. as I have suggested in an earlier essay, to lack a definable spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, its dangers, raise constantly the question as to the status of religion in America.

I remember hearing Graham Wallas, who will not be suspected of bias in this matter, remark that England would not pass out of clouds and darkness until she had made for herself a new and felt interpretation of religion. America, founded by a curious partnership of the religious instinct and economic need and brought up on the moral and material profits of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in need of a fundamental spiritual readjustment. Every socialist and communist, every corporation president and ex-secretary, every professional intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one thing needful to save the world and America. do not know why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat.

I

The status of religion in America has been as peculiar as the status of politics. Our religious attitudes have been profoundly affected, and from early periods, by the separation of church and state. Struggle against a vested institution, dissent from traditional power, conciliation with sacred authority, have been burning points in the modern history of Europe. They have made great literature in England from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold and Swinburne. Our first battle against the tyrannical in tradition. wherever found was won in the Revolution; our second, in the defeat of the Federalist party in 1800.

In those contests we were freed, perhaps too early and too easily, from the menace of the church as a function of government. Since then we have been, and we still are, freer than the European to seek religion wherever it may be found. Our great religious literature is creative, not protestant. Woolman of the Quakers was a seeker: Emerson, in

greater measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for Americans, and, like Woolman, fanning their moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau were searchers for a new morality; Whitman and William James, in their fashion, searchers also.

Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a century later than Matthew Arnold. Fed from almost identical intellectual sources, he is the liberated mind seeking new allegiances; Arnold's, the rebel not yet free. And in general American religion, without reference to its quality, has had, like American politics, a status some generations ahead of the rest of the world. Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were prophets for Europe. The independent sects of America, none established, all respectable, and the free seekers after new truth, which sprang from them, seem to have prefigured a condition that is common in a world growing democratic.

In truth, we old Americans, who with all our faults still best represent America, gained freedom of conscience at the expense of shattering the ideal of a church universal. Religion for us came in general to be a personal matter because the church, separated from the state, lost the visible authority that made it easy or necessary to trust to an institution the responsibility for one's soul. We felt, as was to be expected, the need of new authority, new sanctions for our religion. And we were free, freer than others, to seek and to find a religion for democracy. What has been the result?

The results in bourgeois America, which goes to the theater, wears the commonly advertised collars, sends its children to college, and keeps out of the slums and the police court, are clearly visible and highly significant. Four classes, interlocking, but distinct enough for definition, may be readily described; and though they do not include the recent immigrant or the fire-new sophists of radicalism, the strongest brains, the most characteristic emotions, and the best character in America belong there with the mass of the mediocre undistinguished who are public opinion and the ultimate America.

There are, first, the militant advance

guards of our idealism, the ethical enthusiasts who carry on the moral fervor of our America. They range, like colors of the spectrum, from the rarer violet of the philosophical moralists, inheritors of the New England ethics or the Virginia ideology, through the solid blue of the organizers of great movements in social reform, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists and the anti-tobacco league. I do not mean to be flippant. The irony, if there is irony, is bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so various an army all certain that by stopping this and beginning that the world can be saved.

It is their certainty that makes them impressive the same certainty which drove our colonials toward republican government and our pioneers to the conquest of a wilderness. Sneers at their banner, "Progress," satisfy none but the reactionary. Progress where? Who knows. Progress for whom? It is hard to tell. But only the man who honestly believes in civilization for the benefit of the few can doubt the advance that has been made. I should have preferred the twelfth century to the twentieth if I could have lived in the right Benedictine monastery or been count in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Elizabethan age more than my own if I could have voyaged in the cabin-with Raleigh, been Shakspere's patron, or possessed a manor neither too near nor too far from London. I still think that life in a good English college, with a taste for letters and the proper port, is superior to any mental or physical luxury we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside from the point. Provençal poetry and perfect social intercourse, high adventure, the intellectual life in an appropriate physical setting, and even good port, may come again somewhere on the line along which our progress is marching. In the meantime, though the war has been a cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusiasms of the age have made the opportunities of the average man for most good things in life better, have made him, in the most accurate sense of the word, not nobler, but more civilized, and particularly in America, where the fire of opportunity was first set burning.

The moral enthusiasts whose religion

has been transformed into ethical idealism are safe from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, the tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have already reformed out of the brighter parts of the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty are to follow. We can well afford to risk their mistakes and their excesses, their blind trust in works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere energy of will to make the world better. But what lies behind this will? What keeps it from decaying? For these men are seldom religious in the sense that their reforming zeal springs from a deep spiritual need. A part of their energy is moral habit; a part is exactly identical with the energy that builds up a great industrial plant in order to satisfy a craving for action that meets approval in the world. If the certainty that the community must be bettered, can be bettered, should slacken, where would it find revival? In faith, hope, and charity? But can hope endure and charity be permanent without faith? And what is their faith?

The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, I suppose, as that which supported the Stoics or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth century. They believe in the perfectability of man and the pragmatic value of right-doing. This, for a strong man, may be enough; but it is not a religion. It is questionable whether it would stand adversity. It was not shaken in the war, but it is shaking now. If the enthusiasm of the reformers should be spent or exhausted, they would have little to fall back upon. Their idealism has already shown signs of hysteria, spots of sentimentalism, evidences of a basis in habit and impulse as much as in deep spiritual conviction.

It has become almost a commonplace to say that the spiritual seekers, the second of our observable classes, more numerous, I believe, in America than elsewhere in the white world since the seventeenth century,-are products of reaction against the dry moral will that seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet their importance has not always been grasped. Commercial America has not only been the home of the greatest of modern philanthropies, but also the source of the only powerful religious

sect created in the nineteenth century, as well as one of the few new strains in idealistic philosophy. They are not happy in our commercialism or content with ethical reform, those more sensitive spirits whose numbers and weight in bourgeois America are evident whenever an emotional crisis arrives. And the freedom from ecclesiastical restraint which was won for them by their ancestors has left them free to construct new religions.

But as it was the earnestness of the moral enthusiasts that seemed more valuable than any reason they had for goodness, so it is the spiritual craving of American seekers that is more impressive than anything they have found. I do not undervalue the hopeful idealism of Emerson or the strong protest of the Christian Scientists against surrender to petty worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may generalize in so vast a matter, the seekers of spirituality have been singularly out of harmony with the needs of a democracy. They have found religions that solace the optimistic. temperament when it has been duly intellectualized, they have found medicine for the ills of prosperous people; but the breadth and often the depth of appeal that must characterize a religion for all men they have missed or failed to seek. The Friends, later called Quakers, began with the will that all the world should become Friends; it was only in later stages that they regarded themselves as a peculiar people with whom only those fitted by temperament should join. But it is with such an exclusiveness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate religion now begin. One can prophesy in advance who will or will not be Christian Scientists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spiritual adventure exhausts itself in emotional vagaries, or rises into regions of pure mysticism where, no matter how noble or how satisfying it may be for individual persons, it can never establish the religion for a democracy.

The third group is again a result of that early freeing of America from ecclesiastical control; but its members are those whom such unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, if I may call them by that name without offense

intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose modern craving for the sanctions of religion leads them back into dependence upon the old rites, the old theologies, the old authority, which many, indeed, never have left. They, in our history, are the Federalists of religion.

And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before. Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. cannot enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own faith.

He

But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control has been indifferentism-that American indifferentism which has been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy optimism that accompanies it.

Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of bourgeois Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the average

American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the crux of the problem.

Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of one's America. The human product of too much selling and buying has never been attractive; our halfeducation and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long dormant and decaying?

If only we knew by what ingenious statistics these men might be classified, prophecy would not be difficult. If only we knew how many have become mere traffickers in bodily comfort, sensualists in fact, whatever they may be in name. If only we knew how many in their hearts were dumb seekers for some spiritual satisfactions that would raise the heart in adversity, lift the mind above the necessity for safety, pleasure, success, so that all might be pursued, all enjoyed, without flatness and disillusion.

But no answer is ready; for there has been no test of the latent religion of America.

It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism the suppressed religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places. It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is proverbially restless in America.

Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how much religion is latent in our democracy has not come yet; nor have our moral enthusiasms, our spiritual adventures, our reachings for traditions, been in our day really tested for the spirit behind them. There is reason to believe that the time is approaching. In a normal evolution of the bourgeois society that has made America, some clear revelation must have come of the religious spirit that as a race and a nation we are developing. Doubtless we would slowly have found our way to an expression more true to our nature than any of the partial modes so far allowed us. But there will be no normal, or at least no slow, evolution of the religious emotions of the old Americans. A factor from without, a sudden emergency, calls for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual assets. All, in every class, who are responsible for the American inheritance of ideals and morale and character are challenged, but specially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the conflict between spirit and matter can stay neutral no longer.

Bourgeois America, which means most of America, is, as every one sees, on the verge of a revolution like the politicalsocial revolution of 1800. For a century we have pursued economics, and now economics is pursuing us. A new class is coming to the front, and yet that, perhaps, is of minor importance in America, where money and a little education extinguish distinctions between classes in two decades. What is coming with more significance is a new social system, wherein a new control of industry and a more equitable distribution of the products thereof is to be substituted for competitive individualism. Many are skeptical of the proposed practices by which this revolution is to be accomplished; few now doubt that its theory is correct and will some day be demonstrated.

But there has never been a revolution of any kind in world history that did not bring with it a revolution of all that tradition had established and custom made familiar. And this revolution, peaceful or otherwise, that is upon us differs from earlier examples in that its economic nature is clearly distinguished