accordance with its own half-unconscious bias.  Yet even so the cloven-hoof of international interdependence makes its appearance, for he has to devote one unsympathetic chapter to Renan, even if he contrives to ignore Seeley’s Ecce Homo.  But the debt of English scholarship to Germany is undeniable, and must not be repudiated in war-time.  Nor is the debt entirely on one side.  It is worth recalling that Adolph Harnack, perhaps the greatest living German scholar in the realm of New Testament criticism and Church History, derived no little inspiration from the work of Edwin Hatch.  At any rate the acceptance of the critical method associates scholars in all lands, produces International Congresses for the study of Religions, and fosters personal friendships which even war will not destroy.

Beyond the internationalism of scholarship, we must remember the reaction of criticism on popular religious thought.  Slowly but surely the judgements of believers, lay and clerical, are being permeated with some sense of historical perspective.  The mere attempt to recognize the literary character of the various books of the Bible has effected a liberation.  The variation of the different parts of the Bible in literary quality, in evidential value for history and in spiritual significance, are at last being freely recognized outside the study and the lecture-room.  Men are ceasing to regard the Bible as a series of legal enactments or common-law precedents of equal authority.  This is leading to a revision of inherited traditions, that were based on a view of the Bible which is no longer tenable.  In general this development favours a more modest assertion of one’s own beliefs and a more charitable consideration of other people’s.  When we continue to differ, we differ with a more sympathetic understanding of those from whom we differ.

It is impossible to trace here in any detail the influence of the critical movement on traditional beliefs or even on the conception of authority in religion.  It may, however, be worth while to point out that the psychological study of religion has tended to broaden sympathy by promoting the frank recognition of the varieties of religious experience.  More allowance is made for temperament, and there is less anxiety to force all spiritual life into the same mould or scheme.  The sacramentalist and the non-sacramentalist, the mystic and the intellectualist, the man of feeling and the man of action, those who experience sudden changes and those who are the subjects of more gradual growth—­each receives his due, and neither need despise the other.  There are dangers associated with our constant reference to temperament.  It is really a condemnation of a Church to say that its position appeals to a particular temperament, while it is often no real kindness to an individual to be excused from attempting to enter into a particular phase of religious life on the ground that he is temperamentally disqualified.  But it is clearly a gain to challenge an over-rigid standardization of religious life.  It is pathetic to hear people protest that they have no religious experience, when they are simply blinded by too narrow an interpretation of the term.  In so far as the psychology of religion throws into relief the manifold appeal of religious ideas to different minds, it helps to create a new sense of unity in difference.