It is not easy to define my attitude toward the Old Masters, I mean the Old Masters in religion, the incomparably great religious teachers of the past, who tower above us like giants. My attitude is one of profoundest reverence—toward the Hebrew prophets and Jesus especially. The Hebrew religion first sounded the distinctively spiritual note. Zoroaster had emphasized the struggle of the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness, but the conception of light in his system remained to a considerable extent materialistic. Buddha emphasized Enlightenment in the sense of escape from Illusion, and in conjunction with it sympathy for all who remain under the spell of illusion. Confucius endeavored to walk, and taught his followers to walk, with equipoise in the Middle Path; he emphasized what he thought to be the cosmic principle of balance or equilibrium. Plato, taking his stand on the highest terrestrial platform, caught, or believed himself to have caught, sight of transcendental beauty as the ultimate principle in things. But the prophets of Israel assigned to the ethical principle the highest rank in man’s life and in the world at large. The best thing in man, they declared, is his moral personality; and the best thing in the world, the supreme and controlling principle, is the moral power that pervades it. The predominance of the ethical principle in religion dates from the prophets of Israel. The religious development of the human race took a new turn in their sublime predications, and I for one am certainly conscious of having drawn my first draught of moral inspiration from their writings.[6] But nevertheless I found myself compelled to separate from the religion of Israel. Now why was it necessary for me to take this step? Why not continue along the path first blazed by the Hebrew prophets—smoothing it perhaps and widening it? Why not separate the dross from the gold, the error from the truth, explicating what is implicit in that truth, and adapting it to the needs and conditions of the modern age? The answer is that the truth contained in the Hebrew, and as I shall presently show, in the Christian religion, is not capable of such adaptation. It claims finality. I have mentioned that there is an element of permanent value in both the Hebrew and the Christian religion, and that it should be restated and fitted into a larger synthesis. But this is impossible unless the Hebrew or Christian setting be broken, unless the element to be preserved is taken out of its context, and treated freshly and with perfect freedom. A religion like the two I am concerned with is a determinate thing. It is a closed circle of thoughts and beliefs. It is capable of a certain degree of change but not of indefinite change. The limits of change are determined by its leading conceptions—the monotheistic idea in the one case, and the centrality of the figure of Christ in the other. Abandon these, and the boundaries by which the religion is circumscribed are passed.