endeavour is made to retain a more intellectual attitude, and it again found expression in the volume by Boutroux, written as late as 1908, which deals with the religious problem in our period. [37] It was followed after his death in 1901 by the volume _Les Religions d’Authorité et la Religion de l’Esprit_, 1904. [38] This is the late Eugene Ménégoz, Professor of Theology in Paris, not Ferdinand Ménégoz, his nephew, who is also a Professor of Theology now at Strasbourg. Quoting Boehme in the interesting conclusion to this book on _Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy_ (1908) Boutroux sums up in the words of the old German mystic his attitude to the diversity of religious opinions. “Consider the birds in our forests, they praise God each in his own way, in diverse tones and fashions. Think you God is vexed by this diversity and desires to silence discordant voices? All the forms of being are dear to the infinite Being himself!”[39] [39] It is interesting to compare with the above the sentiments expressed in Matthew Arnold’s poem, entitled Progress: “Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye For ever doth accompany mankind, Hath look’d on no religion scornfully That men did ever find. This survey of the general attitude adopted towards religion and the problems which it presents only serves to emphasise more clearly those tendencies which we have already denoted in previous chapters. As the discussion of progress was radically altered by the admission of the principle of freedom, and the discussion of ethics passes bevond rigid formulae to a freer conception of morality, so here in religion the insistence upon freedom and that recognition of personality which accompanies it, colours the whole religious outlook. Renan, Renouvier and Guyau, the three thinkers who have most fully discussed religion in our period, join in proclaiming the importance of the personal factor in religious belief, and in valiant opposition to that Church which is the declared enemy of freedom, they urge that in freedom of thought lies the course of all religious development in the future, for only thus can be expressed the noblest and highest aspirations of man’s spirit. CONCLUSION The foregoing pages have been devoted to a history of ideas rather than to the maintenance of any special thesis or particular argument. Consequently it does not remain for us to draw any definitely logical conclusions from the preceding chapters. The opportunity may be justly taken, however, of summing up the general features of the development.