Modern Religious Cults and Movements

ly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and Barrack Room Ballads-too far away for th

lization was sure of its forces, sure of its formul?, sure of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's hand against particularly luminous

ow for a decade and a half-no Protestant sect of any importance had been established. The older denominations had achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy and though these controversies were

re asked to meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they have issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient orders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It will be the task of the historians of the future who wil

hrough an immense labour of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last century were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousand years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked to wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin, then, with a state of mind

ntinues the whole of our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and that the inherited eleme

ties Common t

hither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices out of the depths. A very great development of intelligence was demanded before such questions really took definite shape, but they are implicit in even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we outgrow them throug

self in an almost unbelievable variety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been some aspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover, of those who worship to come into a real relation with what is worshipped. It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to back up so general a statement with the facts which prove it, but the

ion is the effective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifesting itself in the Universe." This is only a formula but it lends itself to vital interpretations and is a be

enough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were permitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These permissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may trace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an always emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental relationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first felt itse

nding of God or new answers to the three great questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. They accept, for the most part, the generally

the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical standards and guiding and strengthening the will in its endeavour after goodness, it would have done us an immense service. But one may well wonder whether if religion did no more than this it would have maintained itself as it has and renew through the changing generations its compelling appeal. More strong than any

is God and may stand in very conscious need of divine salvation. The adjustment sought by Confucius was very different from that which drew the mind of Plato or led Augustine to the City of God. Often quite different motives may inspire the reasonings which incidentally bring men to like conclusions.... The life adjustment of the early Greek philosophers had t

erance," p

New Testament roots itself in this soil. The literature of confession is rich in classic illustrations of all this, told as only St. Augustine more than a thousand years ago or Tolstoy yesterday can tell it. No need to quote the

ed through the sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only the sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We have great need to be delivered not only from

ical but practical. We break with God more often than for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faith with us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found their opportunity in the evident deficiency of t

nd a need including all this and something beside for spiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departure for the religious reactions of the last generation naturally included all this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectually curious were more concerned with science and political economies than the nature or genesis of rel

ed Around the Conception of a Tra

f God give colour and character to the outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thought of God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to the measure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of the universe. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mystical quality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. Th

see as we go on how the newer religious movements take also their colour and character from a new emphasis upon the nature of G

ongs to the East, had never anything in common with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets and lawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects of Pantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament is

over what Judaism refused-Jesus Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealth of His teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made most of what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of their race. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and the greatest of

less his own experience was the deeper directing force in all this. Theologies always, to begin with, are

ion naturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out his system strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he had probably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ's lips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inherit

; the Cross as the Instrument of Man's Redemption

world Christianity offers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost estate Christianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the re?ntry of God into a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way of thinking, He has never been ent

ntented themselves with affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their keen dialectic

ly, we find these old forms and phrases unexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the Western Church had been more strongly influenced by the philosophical i

coming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we see something vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of new spiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, the growth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us the passages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirth meant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing recasting of both the inner and outer lif

ter as they passed through the alembic of his own experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity with God. They do not hesitate to designa

ory of Christian

ant. All men are lost and foredoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only in that Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith and obedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varying theological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as if here were something whose m

e given new hope to the hopeless and a power not their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very message of God the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us how there is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and the strong put their strength at the service of the weak;

liverance in Obedience to the

he individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly interprets St. Paul. Faith-a big enough word, standing for both intellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love and goodness and justice of God revealed in the C

their unburdening and its absolutions for their assurance, its sacraments for their strengthening and its penances for their discipline and restoration. It took from them in spiritual regions and maybe in other regions too, the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives and asked of the faithful only that they believe and obey. The Church, as

authority. If anything should shake the Catholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of her sacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulated as this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change. To continue our figure, one great wing of the medieval structure fell away in the Protestant Reformation and what was left, though extensive and solid enough, is still like its great cathedrals-

lvation with Conversion the Test for the Indiv

Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentally the authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carried over the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we have generally recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine as Augustine was in direct line with St. Paul, and Luther's fundamental doctrine-justification by faith-was not so much a rewriting of ancient creeds as a new way of validating their meaning

ame experience with his own Judaism.) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. He was typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" and he found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts in simp

o be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine. The validating experience has come generally to be known as conversion, and conversion has played a great part in evangelical Protestantism ever since the Reformation. It has become, indeed, the one way in which religion has been made real to most members of evangelical churches. So sweeping a statement must

ic as an enrichment of the spiritual life th

. "In the case of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the

William James,

and women apart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to great travail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritual deliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal, their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type of personality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience be cast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to every one through the same travail of soul in which it was

ts Authority in an In

eal power, we have had, particularly since Jonathan Edwards in America and the Wesleys in England, a recurrent insistence upon it as the orthodox type of religious experience. Partly through inheritance and partly in answer to its own genius Protestantism has built up a system of theology tending to reproduce the sequence of conviction of sin, aspiration, repentance, and conversion by doctrinal pressure from the outside. The foundations of it

has made much of sin in the abstract and sometimes far too little of concrete sin; it has made more of human depravity than social justice; it has failed

authority of the Church by the authority of the Book, and in order to secure for this authority an ultimate and unquestioned power it affirmed as the beginning and the end of its use of the Scriptures their infalli

religion over the life of its followers and the reality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up on just such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions; second, conversion secured through the processes of Pr

and spiritual victories and new understandings of God and a wealth of love and goodness which are a part of the imperishable treasures of humanity for three centuries. This faith and experience have voiced themselves in moving hymns, built themselves into rare and continuing f

nd Weakness of

d history as well. The inherited theologies really went out of their way to give the incidental the same value as the essential. There was no place in them for growth, correction, further revelation. This statement may be challenged, it certainly needs to be qualified, for when the time

he Biblical theory of the Creation and subsequent human history. If anything should challenge the scientific or historical accuracy of the book of Genesis, the doctrine of original sin would have either to be discarded or recast. If the doctrine of original sin were discarded or recast, the accepted interpretations of the Atonement went with it. With these changed or weakened the evangelical

antism the Outcome

an nurture; they sought what is secured for the emotionally twice-born through guided growth and a larger dependence upon normal spiritual conditions, though they were at least one with their brethren in believing that tho

ss a mystic saving power. Just why all this should be so they are perhaps not able to explain to the satisfaction of any one save those who, for one reason or another, believe it already. But those who cannot understand sacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there be here danger of a mechanical formulism, the

tive members of the representative evangelical churches all had a religious experience; some of them had been converted after much waiting at the anxious seat, or long kneeling at the altar rail; others of them had been brought through Christian teaching to the confession of their faith, but all of them were thereby reborn. They were the product of a theology which taught them their lost estate, offered them for their acceptance a mediatorial and atoning Christ, assure

er the Keystone of Evangelical Protesta

of great regions of human thought. It was, to begin with, unexpectedly weak in itself. Evangelical Protestantism, as has been noted, throws upon the members of Protestant churches a larger burden of individual responsibility than does the Catholic

too much troubled by doubt, if he possesses a considerable capacity for religious understanding, if his Bible is still for him the authoritative word of God, if his church meets his normal religious needs with a reasonable degree of adequacy, if he is resolute in purpose and if he has no excessively trying experiences in the face of which his faith breaks down, and if th

the religious life thus secured to them the true secret of interior peace and their true source of power, is itself a testimony to the massive reality of the whole system. And yet the keystone of the great struct

ble, or if his own inner experiences should somehow fail in their sense of

ructure has been met and conquered by flying buttresses. In other words, sustaining forces of accredited beliefs about science, history and human nature have been a necessary part of the entire system and the temple of fai

Catholic and Protesta

4,000 years old and practically uninfluenced by modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in its acceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its main line of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. It made more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in the Crucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic in its emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. For the Protestant it locked up unexpectedly up

n it. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is to consider the forces which for the last two generations have been c