It must be confessed that many a candidate for the Christian ministry nowadays enters upon his course of professional study with misgiving. He is quite clear as to his own purpose, to serve God in his day and generation most directly and effectively by showing Him forth in word and deed. But he has a vague feeling that the curriculum of the theological seminary has nothing very definite to contribute to the preparation for this lifework. A glance at the announcement shows him that it concerns itself largely with the distant past—the writings of the Old and New Testaments, the vicissitudes and controversies of the Church, the theological problems set by dead religious thinkers. While he is eager to rush into the thick of the fray, he is bidden to stay and devote some of his most precious years to a laborious survey of ancient ground. Would it not be better to leave tradition and the traditional disciplines on one side, and give his time and attention at once to the consideration of the present needs of society and of the men and women who compose it? to learn what there is to do, and how to do it?

In the October number of this Review for 1912 there appeared, as many readers will doubtless remember, a striking article by Professor Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, under the caption “Christless Christianity.” This is his rather clever designation for the religion of those who hold that belief in the historicity of Jesus, however valuable to the Christian, is nevertheless not absolutely indispensable to Christian faith. The article shows a wide acquaintance with the recent literature of the subject, is written in a spirited and forcible manner, and altogether makes an appreciable contribution, as it seems to me, to the clearing up of this interesting question.

As making for this devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, however, what we have chiefly to thank Professor Warfield for is the way in which, having chosen his presuppositions, he carries them through to their logical conclusion, and states the result with all the candor that could be desired. He plays the game; he is never “off side.” And when he intimates that, in his judgment, the exponents of this “Christless Christianity”—among whom the present writer finds himself included—are not Christians at all, there is no just ground for complaint; it is all in the game. It is a case where, in strict logic, everything depends upon how Christianity is defined.

With eager expectations and with wistful yearning men have always turned to the poets as to watchmen of the night. The great poets see beyond the sunset and the stars, and read the writing of the wind upon the darkness. They are our prophets. God has whispered his secrets to them. And what they hear in the silence of the eternal, they proclaim in the streets of men. The poets are the pioneers of the spirit. They wander in desolate places; they are voices crying in the wilderness; and by the rivers of Babylon they see visions. The poets, at their best, have been leaders in religion.

So for these reasons many people ask today, Who are the new poets, and what message do they bring?

When Darwin first turned the search-light of his genius upon the world of Nature, and under its illumination men were compelled to replace their static views of organic creation by a dynamic representation that made the history of life a connected and, in great part, progressive process from the beginning, attention was mainly concentrated on the fitness of the organism to its environment. The fact of such fitness had long been obvious in differing degrees, but the problem of its causation as a factor in survival was then for the first time philosophically treated in the doctrine of Natural Selection. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that through all the earlier discussions that ranged round these topics the point of view was more or less one-sided. The fitness of the organism to its environment was stressed and stressed again; the question of the fitness of the environment to the organism was seldom raised, or even realized. In some cases, along with views advancedly transmutational, a conception of the environment was maintained that was almost static. The organism, isolated from its environment, was ransacked for its history in the laboratory or made the subject of experiment in order to elucidate its behavior. The conception of the organism and its environment as vitally and reciprocally connected, as a single system undergoing change, had not yet been reached.

The religious question of an earlier day was, “Are you saved, my brother?” Matters have changed since then. Religion at this moment is but slightly a matter for individual concern or query, while it is very decidedly of serious importance to social thinkers and sociological conferences. As matter of fact, a consideration of the “state of religion” in our present day is no longer a mere courtesy to constituted religion but is a necessary logical preliminary to sociological reconstruction as such. For consider the significance of religion from the social idealist's point of view. One may calculate to the nicest exactitude every needed remedy for our glaring maladjustments, yet that result all by itself will be of no worth until the crucial question is answered whether, after all this information and wisdom has been gained, people of the average sort are going to pay any attention to it, let alone act accordingly. It is or should be plain that in social betterment as in life in general, though men by the grace of science know all mysteries and all knowledge, yet if they have not love, all social panaceas are condemned to be but effervescent dreams and much-whipped syllabub. The perception of values is nothing, except there be a fundamental and innate recognition of values as absolutely and beyond argument binding. The many imposing models of desirable social machinery being prepared by skilled draughtsmen within and without our universities and social settlements and the like, can never be made to go, despite all their glistening cogs and cams and innumerable clever devices, without a certain minimum of that spontaneous energy which we call religion. You may prove never so clearly how wages might be raised and taxes be more equalized and how at last, far off, poverty may be abolished. For those in the saddle there is easy reply, “Why give up our advantage? Why not ‘let us alone’? What are our servants and tribute-givers to us? Why are we our brothers' keepers?” To such blustering self-regarding inertia as this, there could be no answer save the appeal to deep realities, which because they are cannot by any “why” be shouldered aside.