BOOK V PRESENT RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES The period we have surveyed began with the great cleavage of the Reformation, followed continually by further divisions. It appears as if we were now entering on an age of reunion. CHAPTER XXXIX INFLUENCES OF THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT The nineteenth century was pre-eminently the age of science. At first there was hostility to the scientific methods and results, but the Church is learning to accept them and make use of them in its own thinking. It has found them a powerful aid in the study of the Bible and the knowledge of God. Increasingly the scientific method is finding its place in religious thinking, and the religious temper is characterizing the scientific outlook. HE religious conditions and tendencies of our own time must be approached with the understanding gained by a knowledge of the history of the Church, and the future can be foreshadowed only in the light of that knowledge. We must look at something more than statistics and superficial characteristics. Nor can our attention be centered on any single nation. So closely have the various peoples become associated that religious tendencies everywhere are becoming all but identical. We must expect the influence of Christian idealism to be effective in social life. We shall see the workings of this reciprocal influence when in the next succeeding volume we examine in detail the development of science, philosophy, and sociology during the same period through which, in the present volume, we have traced the story of the Christian movement in the churches. Here, in closing that story with an estimate of the tendencies now apparent in religious life, we must consider the influence of modern thought upon the churches themselves. For it is only as we grasp the idea that any society tends to reach a level in all aspects of its life that we are able to appreciate the actual interplay of its varied interests. One of the most striking characteristics of recent days is the disappearance of the political institutions which the nineteenth century inherited from the Middle Ages. The positive side of |