ing made it advisable to return to the larger Ford hall of the morning Convention, whereupon brief addresses followed, on "The Forward Look," by the veteran Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord, by Rev. Paul Revere Frothingham, and more specifically by the following speakers as announced: Professor Edwin D. Starbuck, "In Philosophy"; Professor George C. Cox, "In Ethics"; Rev. Samuel M. Crothers, D.D., "In Literature"; Rev. D. Roy Freeman, "In Social Movements"; Professor Emily G. Balch, " In Woman's Uplift"; Mrs. A. W. Hunton, "In Race Progress"; Rev. Frederick Lynch, "In International Relations"; and Hon. Joseph Walker, “In Politics."

All the addresses of the day appear in this printed volume of Proceedings and papers. Perhaps none was more warmly received than that of Mrs. A. W. Hunton, a colored lady speaker, who pleaded with moving eloquence for her race.

OPENING ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT,
REV. CHARLES W. WENDTE, D.D.

THE PRESENT REBIRTH OF RELIGION

Members of the Free Religious Association and Friends: Once more our Association welcomes you to its annual feast of reason and flow of soul. For nearly fifty years it has borne courageous and faithful testimony in the American community to the universality, power, and permanence of the religious sentiment, interpreted by the light of reason, the spirit of freedom, and the law of progress.

The first and brilliant company of witnesses and prophets who made the annual meetings of our Society so attractive and notable has well-nigh passed away. But a new generation of

free and ardent minds has arisen to continue their unfinished task. These may, or may not, possess the gifts and eloquence which distinguished the founders of our movement, but they are equally seekers after religious reality, and equally devoted to sincerity, freedom, and progress as the way to its attainment. Moreover, they give to the religious sentiment that practical, fraternal application to social ethics and social service in which the radical thinkers of a former day were less interested, but which is now seen to be an all-important element of an harmonious and vital religion.

Again, while in the pioneer days of the Free Religious movement of America the methods of negative and destructive criticism, a brave denunciation of established and pernicious error, and a general antagonism to existing conditions in Church and in State, were demanded by the exigencies of the religious situation, in our day the necessity for this hostile attitude toward the creeds and churches of the land has largely ceased. The ancient creeds are crumbling away rapidly before the onset of modern science and knowledge; the churches are more and more exchanging their selfish and theological aims for humanitarian and social activities. Intelligent and earnest

minds in our day are less and less interested in theological polemics, and more and more interested in the study and applications of science, in philosophical thinking, and in the reconstruction of the social and political order. There may be as great a demand for courage and self-sacrifice in promoting these ideals as was required in the avowal of unpopular theological opinions a generation ago.

The call of the hour, therefore, upon our Association is for affirmative testimony in the spirit of religious freedom and progress, for constructive endeavors, philosophical, ethical, social, religious. It is demanded of us to show a reconciling spirit, an inclusive sympathy that extends its fellowship not only to Jew and Gentile in the great family of world-religions; not only to agnostics and unbelievers; but with equal hospitality to Christians, of whatever type of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, as common seekers with us after truth, righteousness, and service.

It is this purpose which has suggested the topic or topics on which you are to be addressed to-day by speakers of widely different religious antecedents and affiliations, but all alike possessed by the desire to conserve what is best, and to attain to what is highest in religion and in morality, to free these supreme interests of the soul from superstition, error, and intolerance, and so to arrive at a worship of the true, the beautiful and the good embodied in character and life.

With this purpose the Free Religious Association deeply sympathizes. Whatever denials it has been compelled to make in its public utterances were always in the interest of a deeper spiritual affirmation. Its very title indicates that it believes in religion; believes in it as the master passion of man's spirit, the inner and ineradicable testimony to the dignity, grandeur, and eternity of the human soul. Intellectual conceptions may be transformed, outward forms may change through the ages, but religion itself will never pass away. will grow ever brighter, stronger, and more influential for good, as mankind develops its higher and spiritual faculties and becomes less and less subject to merely material interests and to the sway of the senses and the passions.

It

We live, to be sure, in an age in which this supremacy and permanence of religion are seriously questioned. Religion, we are told, has had its day. Its sun is setting. We are witnessing its decline and death. By virtue of its wide extension, its appeal to the prevailing ignorance, superstition, and selfish fears of men, and the momentum it has gathered through the ages, religion will continue for a long time to exist and cumber the ground; but this can at most only delay its inevitable doom. The modern man is devoted to other and more profitable pursuits, economic, scientific, æsthetic, social, and humanitarian. He has less and less use for theological speculations and fancies, for so-called religious yearnings and hopes, for church attendance and worship.

There is much, it must be admitted, in the mental attitude and pursuits of many of our cotemporaries to lead to such a conclusion. Absorbed in materialistic occupations, devoted to the study of external Nature, or the reorganization of the existing social order, it is not surprising that men of this type should be disinclined to take into consideration the higher con cerns of the soul in its relations with the Infinite and the Eternal. They may not actually deny the validity of religious ideas and practices, but these exercise little or no influence on their thinking and conduct. Of the uplift, the strength, the vision, the enlargement of sympathy which flow from religious convictions they know little or nothing.

And yet, when all allowance is made that should be made for this wide-spread unbelief and disaffection, are we justified in concluding that it reflects the general attitude of man toward religion in our day, or expresses more than a passing mood of the soul, a transient phase of human culture?

The philosopher Hegel tells us that the key to human history is progress attained through antagonism and alternation. All life is a growth, a process of development, and nothing grows without resistance, without the opposition of contrary elements. Human civilization is not a uniform movement in one direction, it is the product of a series of reactions; and through this perpetual conflict of opposing forces humanity attains to a greater mastery over Nature, loftier conceptions of

truth, and nobler embodiments of virtue. As a ship wrestles with wind and wave, and by alternating courses pursues its path across the ocean, so human progress is won through struggles and conflicts, arrest and defeat, advance and victory, the alternating experiences of the soul in its search for truth and perfectness.

The history of religion also discloses the same processes and passes through similar phases. Its development has been the outcome of a long series of conflicts between antagonistic principles, of reactions from opposing doctrines and forms. By virtue of this alternating swing of the pendulum between opposite extremes of opinion, religious progress has been made possible, and the human mind has attained to higher and ever higher conceptions of religious reality. This process of development through resistance and reaction makes religion subject to the law of periodicity. It waxes and wanes like the moon. It has its ebb and flow like the ocean. There are ages when an intense individualism predominates in religion; there are others, like the present, when social ideals and human affections are the mainspring of its activities. In one age the reason, cold, critical, negative, is uppermost, and the destruction or transformation of existing beliefs and institutions is the distinguishing characteristic. In another age the imagination and the sentiments are in control. The human soul obeys its spiritual intuitions, a revival of the religious life takes place, and constructive endeavors mark the recoil of the soul from the unbelief and indifference of a former generation. We distinguish these phases in man's spiritual history as the ages of doubt and the ages of faith. As Goethe tells us, the deep, underlying issue in all human history is this inevitable conflict between faith and unfaith, but he reminds us also that the great, the creative and splendid ages, have been the ages of faith.

For half a century or more Christendom has been passing through an era of doubt and negation in the domain of the religious. So far as this was a reaction from the dogmatism, superstition, and spiritual tyranny of former systems of belief, it was justifiable and necessary. But it did not end there.