The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more accessible, and a less exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the _Idea of a Free Church_. In this work the principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional Christianity, and then positively to the new conception of religion he would substitute for all this--the development of personality in accordance with the claims of family and of national life. A fair-minded criticism of this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and parcel of the programme of liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the form of the many more or less philosophical presentations of the same in modern German theology, or in the form of the free, moral and social efforts of the voluntary religion of America and England. In America many of the younger thinkers in theology and philosophy are already writing in a more or less popular manner upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to harmonize “traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion. One of these writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative volume,[39] tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the “supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical” in experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.” And it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in which the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy and psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked over by recent investigators like Stanley Hall,[40] Starbuck,[41] and others, and, above all, by James in his striking volume _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.[42] The fact, of course--and I shall immediately refer to it--that Pragmatism has been hailed in France as a salutary doctrine, not merely by Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics and Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give us some pause in the matter of its application in the sphere of theoretical and practical religion. It is useful, it would seem, sometimes to “liberate” the spirit of man, and useful, too, at other times to connect the strivings of the individual with the more or less organized experiences of past ages.