politics of idealism.

If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my
suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the
secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my
theory that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the
documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope
to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp
Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged
by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as
seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that
manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious
things.

Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes
of its author--a book which attempts to throw off all those long and
hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which
have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all
that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation of a
strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning to use.




INTRODUCTION


By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to
discover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the Church
in the affections of men.