This sentence hardly overstates the case.  It is the challenge of the age to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs, and which religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not conspicuously done, nor even on a great scale attempted.  It is the challenge to religion to undertake a work of surpassing grandeur—­nothing less than the actualisation of the whole ideal of the life of man.  Religious men respond with the quickened and conscientious conviction, not indeed that they have laid too great an emphasis upon the spiritual, but that under a dualistic conception of God and man and world, they have never sufficiently realised that the spiritual is to be realised in the material, the ideal in and not apart from the actual, the eternal in and not after the temporal.  Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have come deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention shows marked tendency to extremes.  A religion in the body must become a religion of the body.  A Christianity of the social state runs risk of being apprehended as merely one more means for compassing outward and material ends.  Religion does stand for the inner life and the transcendent world, only not an inner life through the neglect of the outer, or a transcendent world in some far-off star or after an aeon or two.  There might be meaning in the argument that, exactly because so many other forces in our age do make for the realisation of the outer life and present world with an effectiveness and success which no previous age has ever dreamed, there is the more reason, and not the less, why religion should still be religion.  Exactly this is the contention of Eueken in one of the most significant contributions of recent years to the philosophy of religion, his Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1901, transl.  Jones, 1911.  The very source and cause of the sure recovery of religion in our age will be the experience of the futility, the bankruptcy, of a civilisation without faith.  No nobler argument has been heard in our time for the spiritual meaning of religion, with the fullest recognition of all its other meanings.

The modern emphasis on the social aspects of religion may be said to have been first clearly expressed in Seeley’s Ecce Homo, 1867.  The pith of the book is in this phrase:  ’To reorganise society and to bind the members of it together by the closest ties was the business of Jesus’ life.’  Allusion has been made to Fremantle’s The World as the Subject of Redemption, 1885.  Worthy of note is also Fairbairn’s Religion in History and Modern Life, 1894; pre-eminently so is Bosanquet’s The Civilisation of Christendom, 1893.  Westcott’s Incarnation and Common Life, 1893, contains utterances of weight.  Peabody, in his book, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, 1905, has given, on the whole, the best resume of the discussion.  He conveys incidentally