Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/232

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214 Later Theology plan and one purpose from the least atom to the highest intelligence. From the testimony of Hindu thought, Christians will more appreci- ate the superiority of the spiritual and invisible over the material and the seen, of the eternal over the evanescent. At the close of the Parliament, two lectureships were es- tablished to conserve the temper and purpose of that re- markable assemblage. One of these is named the Barrows lectureship, and upon its incumbent is laid the duty of deliver- ing a series of lectures, interpretative of the Christian spirit, in the intellectual centres of the East. Charles Cuthbert Hall, the President of Union Theological Seminary, was twice the Bar- rows lecturer. As the result of this last strenuous and congenial service he laid down his devoted life. Between those two periods of Oriental travel he delivered the Cole lectures before VanderbUt University, on the The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion (1905). Their chief impression concerns the folly of further sectarianism in the Protestant communion, but upon the matter immediately occupying us the lecturer declares in words thoroughly and inclusively t3rpical of our period : When one stands in the heart of the venerable East; feels the atmosphere charged with religious impulse; reads on the faces of the people marks of the unsatisfied soul; considers the monumental expression of the religious idea in grand and enduring architectural forms, then the suggestion that all this means nothing — that it is to be stamped out and exterminated before Christianity can rise upon its ruins, — becomes an unthinkable suggestion. I look with reverence upon the hopes and yearnings of non-Christian faiths, believing them to contain flickering and broken lights of God, which shall be purged and purified and consummated through the absolute self-revelation of the Father in Christ Incarnate." As a result then of these three great world-movements of thought — the science of Biblical criticism, the theory of evolu- tion, and the emergence of comparative religion — Christian theology has renounced its lofty isolation and become a depart- ment of human knowledge. But though finding religion at the heart of common human life, instead of in a holy sphere apart from it, modern theologians have not found it empty of signifi- cance. They have discovered the world to be not, as Plato