bankrupt intellectually. [Applause.] It seeks still to face the world on the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, and it cannot do it. It has lost the intellectual leadership of the world. It had it once. It lost it, as all school-teachers lose their intellectual leadership by not keeping pace with the scholars. [Applause.] The tendency now is out-out of all these [the Christian churches] into here [the space on the chart representing non-church members], where there is no organization to speak of.

The "Next Step" is to be that. That is, the church is going to centre itself finally, and for its last battle, in its stronghold. The Protestant churches are going to obey the law of gravitation, and are going out. They will finally disintegrate and cease to be forces in the world. In my judgment the present century will see their end.

We are to-day in the presence of a world consciousness something that never existed before. Now, remember that our religion is the religion of the Mediterranean Basin; that that is all it is. Every religion claims to be "It"--all there is of It claims to be the only revelation of God ever made, claims to have the only God there ever was. The great mistake of the Jewish-Christian church was to assert that their God made the world, whereas the world made their God. [Applause.]

We are now in the presence of a world consciousness. The Japanese has stepped out to the front and made his bow. He has revealed himself as a man, and we can no longer treat him with our aforetime contempt. The Chinese are coming, and they are showing to us human attributes that make us ashamed in many respects. We are the barbarians. And therefore, when we, with our religion from the Mediterranean Basin, send our missionary to the East and he carries his theology with him and proposes it, he comes in contact with subtle minds that were meditating upon the great problems of the universe before ever the Western races were born, and they can go above him and under him and all around him in a minute. [Applause.] To expect them to take ready-made his theology is indeed to expect a miracle.

I am glad to see that my dear friend Bishop Williams, of Michigan, in the current American, says it cannot be done, and he proposes that they shall unload that the church. shall throw off everything that is not essential. That is, throw off the bishops, they are not essential; throw off the doctrines, they are not essential. Throw off everything then what have you got? Then of course the church is gone, in its old conception.

The world consciousness demands a new and greater conception of man's relation to the universe, and therefore we can say without any doubt that the Christian scheme as it was articulated and crystallized from the first to the fourth century has lived its life and is to-day passing away. Men will never go back to the thinking of the fourth century. They never will have that view of the world again. They never will believe again as they believed in the fourth century; and the effort made by my Presbyterian brothers at Atlantic City to keep their standards is a vain effort. Their standards cannot be kept. They do not dare preach them. And when the standards are gone, the church's life goes with them.

And what is to follow? What is to follow is this: Religion is going to be like knowledge, self-poised. [Applause.] No man rules in the realm of intellect any more, not even a Darwin or a Newton. We dare question him, and if he cannot prove his thesis to our reason we refuse to accept it. That great deliverance of the mind of man was made in the fourteenth century, never to be overthrown. Never will men go

back to intellectual slavery. Truth is based only on truth. And so of religion. Religion will not require buttresses any more. Religion is man's reaction against the universe; and each man will react, and in his own life will express his own reaction. The church idea is bound to go why? Because the church idea stamps the human race, as a race, as a failure -and the human race is saying, "Taint so." That is, the doctrine of evolution is taking the place of the doctrine of creation with its correlative. Man did not begin where Bull said he did. If you want to read one of the most interesting of books, my friends, read Bishop Bull's treatise on "Man

before the Fall." You will wish you had been born then. But man was not so. He did not have all those perfect faculties and every virtue, and then get rid of them simply because his wife asked him to. That is not so, you know. So that the whole system based upon that idea is gone-and that idea underlies all the thinking of the Christian world.

In the time to come there will be innumerable associations for the expression of the religious life. Its emotions will be told by the great poets and sung by the great singers. Wagner and Goethe and Schiller and Wordsworth and Emerson are all forerunners of the prophetic days to come. The religious life will find its fullest expression as it is beginning to find it to-day, not in its emotions as emotions, but in its emotions transformed into conduct.

With the disintegration of the churches is coming the integration of the social life of man. To-day, while the churches are failing, the peoples are coming, and we are beginning to see to-day for the first time the possibility of a universal peace between the various peoples and nations of the earth. [Applause.] We are beginning to-day to try to solve the problem that has vexed mankind since mankind began to emerge from the savage state the problem of the economic relation of man to man. [Applause.] In that solution we are exercising the highest spiritual gifts. We are going to solve it by the great principle of human love and brotherhood; and the great prophet of Nazareth will point—as the politicians do "with pride" to the great nineteen centuries during which the thought has been growing in the minds of men and is now coming to fruition, that “a man's a man for a' that," and that every man has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; has a right to share in the prosperity of the community to which he belongs; and that the oppression of the weak by the strong belongs not to the human but to the savage period.

In the working out of these great problems the religion of the future is to have its life-the greatest that has yet come to it in the history of religion in the world. [Applause.]

PRESIDENT WENDTE. - Ladies and Gentlemen: Immanuel Kant once said of his beloved philosophy that she was destined to be forever the handmaid of religion; - not servilely to bear her train, but to precede and carry a torch before her, to shed light upon her path. I know not whether the next speaker who is to address you will accept this dictum of the great German thinker; but with one thing he will agreethat it implies movement, the "Next Step," for both religion and philosophy. I take pleasure in presenting Dr. Merle St. Croix Wright, of New York, who will speak to us on the subject, "The Next Step in Philosophy." [Applause.]

ADDRESS BY REV. MERLE ST. C. WRIGHT, D.D., OF NEW YORK

THE NEXT STEP IN PHILOSOPHY

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I shall exhibit to you this morning, if possible, the contemporaneous rather than the chronological view of the universe as we know it to-day. Instead of a longitudinal section I wish to give you a transverse section, and from that alignment to take the "Next Step" as it seems indicated to me in the history of philosophy and in the position and disposition of our own souls.

Philosophy may seem to be a harder thing than history, but, after all, it is simpler, it is less complex; its alternatives are fewer if profounder, though the reasoning which leads. to them is also profound, and implies and requires trouble on the part of those who pursue it. It is my conviction, however, that philosophy can and should be made pleasing; that it may and must remain human. And this is not a conviction of fatigue or of despair; it is a conviction of common sense, of practical efficiency, and of, let us say, mental clearness and courage.

Why need philosophy be harsh and crabbed? It may, it should, be musical as is Apollo's lute.

"An even walk in life's uneven way

Is not a boon that's given to all who pray.
none."
envy

If this I had, I'd

- Patmore.

Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,

Flowering grass and scented weeds."

In other words, I believe philosophy is the home-making of the soul. If science is the systematization of the common sense of mankind, a simple carrying to its culmination of the efficiency of ordinary thinking, then it seems to me that philosophy is the impressing upon existence of the pattern of human personality, and the recovery of the conviction that existence in itself responds and corresponds to that personality, that they are in essence identical, in co-operation and communion one.

This is so simple that any one can retain it. It is too simple for the profound to conceive and to receive. Yet I believe we are driven to it by the perennial conflicts of our studies, by that exhaustion of error which ultimately leads to the acceptance of plain truths, and by the urgency of other disciplines which chasten and purify if they apparently restrict

the practice in which at last we all express our lives. My philosophy, then, starts with the soul and ends with the soul. I endeavor to vindicate the soul in thinking and. in living in the face of a world of which, in the first place, we need predicate nothing except its contemporaneous existence with ourselves. According as we fare in thought and act, so do we receive and recall our impressions of approval or of condemnation, and so do we affirm and construct our ultimate theories; for they rest, I am convinced, less upon mind than upon life, less upon any theory than upon practice, less upon speculation than upon ethics, less upon logic