It is undeniable that the various churches will long play a beneficent role in the social economy, but the question may well be asked whether this role would not be more significant and sanely creative if the hampering traditions and beliefs of the past were shaken off. For these traditions are the shelter of interpretations and social habits which are ill-adapted to the needs of the present. They slow down the energy of institutions and cloud their vision. They lead the sincerest of people to use tools which have lost edge. For instance, is not civic and moral education far more effective than melodramatic revivals which stir people's emotions and leave them without chart and compass before the problems of their every-day life? The church must {209} learn prevention; it must go to school to the social and mental sciences. Only so will it conquer that dilettantism which accompanies the absence of methodical intelligence. But the churches have the right to respond that they are not the only sinners in this regard. Institutions of all kinds display the same tendency to retardation, to conservatism, to waste of energy, the beliefs and habits of the past clinging heavily about them as impedimenta. It is seldom that a new life wells up quickly enough within them to break this inertia. Perhaps all that the younger generation has the right to ask is a spirit of tolerance and even respect for all loyalties which attach themselves to things of good repute, and a more catholic admission of all human values into the class of spiritual things. The scientist is working for things of the spirit, and so is the artist, and so is the social reformer, and so is the educator, and so is the day-laborer who does his work for the sake of some dear one. The sea of faith of which Matthew Arnold sang is indeed at its ebb; but a new sea of faith is welling up in the human soul, faith in humanity, in this life here and now, a faith in common things and common people, a faith in noble things and their gifted creators, a faith founded in sympathy and in mental integrity and rooted in the actualities of life. It is a faith grounded on the high will to assimilate and carry further the spiritual values which the human race has slowly achieved in its travail of the centuries. Not to relinquish but to surpass, not to deny but to transform: thus will the new day be won. Let the spiritual forces which have grown up around religion, industry, science, philosophy, {210} citizenship and art fall to with a will, to bring some fuller measure of the long-dreamed-of Kingdom upon this earth, which has been and forever will be man's sole home. {211} CHAPTER XVI THE HUMANIST'S RELIGION