The Religion of a Mature Mind

Abstract

A LARGE-SPIR1TED bookI by Professor George A. Coe, bearing the above striking title, first appeared in I 902, and has within eighteen months gone through four editions, an unusual record. This success, too, is well deserved. The book is beautiful in its fineness of literary excellence; there is a grandeur and impressiveness about its utterances; it is bold and even daring in its criticism; there is, no less markedly, a warrnth and delicacy of appreciation of the good in creeds, forms, and cereInonies both old and new; it is all this and lllore. But whatever impression one carries from the volume, one must at least feel that there is a magnanimity about it-a breadth of view, a depth of insight, an inspiration which makes it easily occupy an important place in the thought-life of the present. One wonders at times whether the motive which called it forth was religious, or theological, or scientific, or philosophical, or practical. It is certainly all these. It erbodies the large outlook of a man who has worked abreast of his time long enough to feel its ideals, its needs, and its vital problems intimately. So that many of the topics treated the scientific spirit in religion, the question of religious authority, the relation of morality and religion, the way of entra-nce into the spiritual life, the tests of religious experience, the immanence of God, prayer, the relation of Christ to modern life, and others while common enough in recent discussion, and topics that might easily be commonplace, are presented with unusual force and conviction. A work of this kind is especially opportune. If Christianity were a system and not an inner experience, if it were a final product instead of a great growing life which asserts itself from within and ad justs itself to every new situation as does every other growing thing, it would be threatened at the present tilne. The often expressed opinion that during the last decades, in the presence of new discoveries and shifting ideals, religion has had such a test as perhaps rarely before, can hardly