various influences which led to the separation of Church and State in the American Constitution and various State constitutions, the agitation springing from Baptists was important.

Democracy has been maintained formally in Baptist organizations, yet it would be a mistake to hold that the Baptist movement has been without organized leadership and denominational control. The associations determine what churches are to become members, and although the denomination itself may be without overhead control, its great societies, possessed of large funds and organized for the purpose of Christian service of many sorts, have given opportunity for official action and influence which sometimes are not without resemblance to the episcopal system.

Furthermore, although Baptists of all sorts cling tenaciously to the independence of the local Church, there has been of late a tendency among them to form some sort of central body-a union or convention-which will have influence without authority. This is a new expression of democracy, for such bodies occupy a somewhat anomalous position. They possess not delegated powers like those of the Presbyterian General Assembly, but are composed of members of churches who meet as "messengers" or as members of the convention simply. The local convention, much more the World Alliance of Baptists, has no power to compel action of the churches, and so in the strict sense of the term cannot be called judicatory. Such gatherings, however, give opportunity for the discussion of general policies, and a decision made by them has great influence with most of the churches of their particular communion. In addition, as membership of these conventions is sometimes identical with that of the various societies, it is able to express its will in administrative policies.

While the Baptist movement deliberately breaks with Catholicism in ecclesiastical practices and in its refusal to adopt any creed or any really authoritative confession of faith, it has not broken with the theological positions of historical Christianity.

Theologically, Baptists as a whole maintain a uniformity

of evangelical attitude which is quite equal to that of churches possessing creeds. Doubtless the reason for this is that the movement inherited an already organized orthodoxy of a State Church or its immediate descendant. The great body of doctrine, including the biblical Canon which the original Protestant movement carried over from the contemporary Roman Catholicism, has been adopted by Baptists as a trustworthy embodiment of biblical teachings. The Westminster Confession has done for Baptists what the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England has done for Methodists. The difference between the orthodoxy of the Baptist and other Calvinist groups is practically limited to the former's insistence upon immersion as the mode of baptism and the limitation of baptism to those who can testify to their own personal religious experience, thus excluding infants.

Individual Baptist churches have adopted statements of faith, some of which are modifications of the Westminster Confession, and some are more original formulations. Such documents, however, are not creeds, strictly speaking, and in the case of the movement as a whole there is very great opposition to the adoption of anything more than a general statement of what is regarded as the teaching of the New Testament, but which cannot be used as a doctrinal test.

Such loosely organized bodies as constitute the Baptist movement are not capable of exercising any strict official supervision of the beliefs and preaching of their clergy. Ordination councils are held to pass upon prospective ministers, but this is custom rather than law. Probably in no other religious body are the extremes of theological beliefs more to be seen. Much of the progressive theological literature issues from the Baptist ranks. At times this has resulted in considerable tension, but the absence of any supreme court has prevented a heresy trial. The minister being responsible only to the particular local church of which he is a member, theological variations have been, so to speak, absorbed by the loosely organized denomination, or have led to such ecclesiastical boycott as induces the heretic to choose other church affiliations.

It is sometimes claimed that the churches of the Baptist type can trace their pedigree through persecuted minorities back to New Testament times. Whatever probability there is in this claim (and it has never been thoroughly established), it is at least true that in their origin and for more than a century the Baptists represented the religious interests of the less prosperous and humbler classes. Like all uneducated groups, they suffered from internal dissension and excessive independence. But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century the body became more interested in education. Despite the fact that the great majority of the group were probably illiterate and its ministers mostly uneducated, the Baptists began to found colleges and seminaries for the training of their ministers. Here again opposition developed from the less intelligent group, which extended even to the foreign missions with which the denominational awakening was closely associated. But the new interest grew. As wealth increased, colleges and universities became numerous, some of them now ranking as among the most important in the United States. Theological seminaries have been founded in all lands, some of them centers of theological influence which has extended far beyond denominational limits. Thus the movement as a whole has come to stand for education and a thoroughly trained ministry. In fact the remarkable development in numbers of the Baptists of all forms, including the Disciples, German Baptists, Mennonites, and smaller bodies in the United States, from approximately a hundred thousand in the beginning of the nineteenth century to something like ten millions at the present time, has been paralleled by the growth in the development of educational institutions, respect for scholarship, and interest in social reforms.

This development of religious democracy and the organization of churches drawn directly from the great mass of the people was not confined to the Baptists, for the Methodists and other religious groups that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries illustrate similar social forces. It is, however, noteworthy that the most rapidly developing bodies in Protestantism are those which never had political affiliations,

while being most closely associated with the so-called "plain people". Baptists were regarded by the churches of the eighteenth century as interlopers, fit subjects for legal procedure. They gained, therefore, no entangling alliances with locality, politics, or privilege. Their growth is a further illustration of the great law that when a really creative ideal becomes operative in society it finds its expression in religion. While the growth of Congregationalism was the outstanding religious expression of democracy in its earlier stages, the spread of the Baptist and Methodist movements (numbering together nearly nineteen million communicants in the United States alone) shows the appeal of democratic religion to the great mass of democrats.

The social significance of this development is great. What the Roman Catholic Church has done for the masses of lands where Protestantism has never got a strong foothold, the various groups of Baptists and Methodists have had a notable share in doing for the great masses with non-Lutheran Protestant antecedents. They have helped furnish religious and moral control for a changing social order. The Gospel has been trusted to save nations from atheism and revolution by the development of religious democracies.

CHAPTER XXX

DIVERGENT RELIGIOUS BODIES

There are certain types of mind, often among the finest, which cannot readily adapt themselves to any prevailing form of Christianity. Since the Reformation four very notable fellowships have come into being (the Society of Friends, the Unitarians, the Universalists, the Swedenborgians) which minister to those

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mystical or strongly intellectual temperaments.

HERE are two powerful tendencies always operating wherever life of any sort appears. There is first the tendency to conform to the ancestral type. The offspring is for the most part like the parent. Life seems to be a "repeatable" affair. Essential traits are inherited. The habits of the past are conserved and transmitted. But at the same time another tendency is just as certainly a fact, namely the tendency to vary and to "mutate". It is through this second characteristic of life that novelties and surprises appear. Unique forms and types emerge and the unpredictable happens. Henry Bergson has called this tendency of life its élan vital-its vital urge. One of these tendencies is as important as the other. With the first gone there would be nothing stable, dependable, or calculable. With the other wanting there would be no progress.

History as well as biology must note and mark two similar tendencies. All religious organizations tend to preserve and repeat the habits, customs, ideas, and practices of the past. Truth once formulated becomes a sacred possession, and orthodoxy is a precious inheritance to be safe-guarded. Ecclesiastical systems, established ritual, time-honored sacramental practices grow hallowed and become as necessary to the worshipper as the breath of his life. But religion, too, like everything else that lives shows a tendency to "mutate", to produce surprises and to manifest novelty and uniqueness. The spiritual rebel and