Free Religion, as thus understood, seems to me opposed to the law of evolution, and incompatible with it. Evolution educes the present from the past by a continuous process. Free Religion cuts itself loose from the past, and makes every man the founder of his own religion. According to the law of evolution, confirmed by history, every advance in religion is the development from something going before. Jewish monotheism grew out of polytheism; Christianity and Mohammedanism out of Judaism; Buddhism out of Brahmanism; Protestant Christianity out of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus himself said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." The higher religions are not made; they grow. Of each it may be said, as of the poet: "Nascitur, non fit." Therefore, if there is to arrive something higher than our existing Christianity, it must not be a system which forsakes the Christian belief, but something developed from it. According to the principle of evolution, every growing and productive religion obeys the laws of heredity and of variation. It has an inherited common life, and a tendency to modification by individual activity. Omit or depress either factor, and the religion loses its power of growth. Without a common life, the principle of development is arrested. He who leaves the great current which comes from the past loses headway. This current, in the Christian communion, is the inherited spirit of Jesus. It is his life, continued in his Church; his central convictions of love to God and to man; of fatherhood and brotherhood; of the power of truth to conquer error, of good to overcome evil; of a Kingdom of Heaven to come to us here. It is the faith of Jesus in things unseen; his hope of the triumph of right over wrong; his love going down to the lowliest child of God. These vital convictions in the soul of Jesus are communicated by contact from generation to generation. They are propagated, as he suggested, like leaven hidden in the dough. By a different figure, Plato, in his dialogue of Ion, shows that inspiration is transmitted like the magnetic influence, which causes iron rings to adhere and hang together in a chain. Thoughts and opinions are communicated by argument, reasoning, speech, and writing; but faith and inspiration by the influence of life on life. The life of Jesus is thus continued in his Church, and those who stand outside of it lose much of this transmitted and sympathetic influence. Common life in a religious body furnishes the motive force which carries it forward, while individual freedom gives the power of improvement. The two principles of heredity and variation must be united in order to combine union and freedom, and to secure progress. Where freedom of thought ceases, religion becomes rigid. It is incapable of development. Such, for instance, is the condition of Buddhism, which, at first full of intellectual activity, has now hardened into a monkish ritual.