individualism which has sought soul-salvation. In the midst of
unworthiness and helplessness there springs up the consciousness of
reconciliation. Man, with all his imperfections, becomes aware that he
is the object of the loving purpose of God. Still this redemption of a
man is something which is to be worked out, in the individual life and
on the stage of universal history. The first step beyond the individual
life is that of the Church. It is from within this community of
believers that men, in the rule, receive the impulse to the good. The
community is, in its idea, a society in which the conquest of evil is
already being achieved, where the individual is spared much bitter
conflict and loneliness. Nevertheless, so long as this unity of the life
of man with God is realised in the Church alone there remains a false
and harmful opposition between the Church and the world. Religion is
faced by a hostile power to which its principles have no application.
The world is denounced as unholy. With this stigma cast upon it, it may
be unholy. Yet the retribution falls also upon the Church, in that it
becomes artificial, clerical, pharisaical. The end is never that what
have been called the standards of the Church shall prevail. The end is
that the Church shall be the shrine and centre of an influence by virtue
of which the standard of truth and goodness which naturally belongs to
any relation of life shall prevail. The distinction between religion and
secular life must be abandoned. Nothing is less sacred than a Church set
on its own aggrandisement. The relations of family and of the State, of
business and social life, are to be restored to the divineness which
belongs to them, or rather, the divineness which is inalienable from
them is to be recognised. In the laws and customs of a true State,
Christianity first penetrates with its principles the real world. One
sees how large a portion of these thoughts have been taken up into the
programme of modern social movements. They are the basis of what men
call a social theology. A book like Fremantle's _World as the Subject of