The achieving of the present and future salvation of people demands not the successful performance of some mystical process of indoctrination. It calls for the actual application of religious principles in everyday thinking and action. It has not achieved its end until testimony to its power and blessing is borne by all social life and by every social institution. It is nothing until it has come to be expressed in terms of life. Without surrendering any of its hope in the promise of a world to come, the religion of the future will lay a larger emphasis upon the life of the world in which we dwell. More and more men are realizing that the only hope we can have of gaining any other world depends upon our treatment of this one. The path to heaven lies directly through the earth. Two attitudes toward this world can never fit in with a thoughtful and reasonable faith. One is the attitude that this is a world of selfish opportunity and sensuous pleasure, and that the highest object of life is the satisfaction of the flesh. The other is the attitude that this is only a vale of tears to be endured, despised, and neglected until such time as we can get out of it into a happier realm. This is a life of opportunity, to be lived out with full appreciation and emphasis upon the sweetness and the worth-whileness of each day and hour. Real religion will strive to make it more and not less beautiful. The new religion will be one of optimism. It will understand that nothing is so easy as cynicism and nothing so cheap as the continual discounting of other people. It will find its strength not in emphasizing the badness of people, but in believing in them. After all these years, it will come to realize that Jesus saved by believing in sinners. Whoever follows in his footsteps will certainly have to learn to do the same. The human heart shrivels under accusation. It blossoms under the radiant influence of someone’s confidence. The new religion—an evolved form of the old—will count the roses and forget the thorns, and it will strive to emphasize the divinity in every man. The new religion will be the old reduced to its simplest and most workable terms. God will be upon its throne. Jesus will stand as his perfect expression in the flesh. The cross will overshadow all. It will be a religion of service, for there is much to do. It will be a religion of sacrifice, for this is a needy world. Reasonably interpreted, the Bible will be its message. Its aim will be to bring out the divinity implanted in all things, and its test will be its product. Christianity and Americanism (1920)