And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before. Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. He cannot enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own faith. But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control has been indifferentism--that American indifferentism which has been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy optimism that accompanies it. Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of everyday Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the average American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the crux of the problem. Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of one’s America. The human product of too much selling and buying has never been attractive; our half-education and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long dormant and decaying?