human redemption will dawn. As an economic animal or a political animal, a man can never escape from the power of the cosmic laws of life. His fate is written in the books of the social scientists. But as a moral and spiritual animal, he erects a new creative power which meets and modifies and ultimately masters the cosmic law. In a creative act he says, "Let there be a Moral World within me,” and from the threshold of this new world even the social sciences of economics and eugenics and politics must be re-written. This is the "Missing World" with which the society of the future must reckon.

Not long ago an expert student of sociology remarked with conviction, "Socialism has contributed more than Christianity to the solution of the Industrial Problem." It was a statement revealing a characteristic failure to note the limitations of social science, and an equally characteristic failure to note the normal functions of ethical Religion. Christianity, as such, cannot perform the functions of Social Science. Social Science as such will wabble and fail so long as it assumes full responsibility for human salvation. The task of ethical religion in evoking and educating the real inner world of spiritual power, is the indispensable condition of saving the individual or the And every theory of society will wabble and come short of the solution of the human problem, until the "Missing World" of the Inner Spirit has been discovered and is given a place in our calculations.

race.

Social Leadership must get the vision of the Inner Powers and Inner Worth of men, if Civilization is to find stability and permanence. For men live not by bread alone, but by Visions of the Meanings of life and work, out of which come all of the heroisms and sanctities of life, all of the things which endure without end.

Current Thought

WHAT WAY LIES CHRISTIAN UNITY

In a timely article in the Hibbert Journal for January, Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody discusses the recent appeal of the Lambeth Conference for Christian unity on the basis of Episcopal reordination. He properly calls attention to the old device of attempting Christian unity by the formal means of external rite or confession instead of by that deeper unity of the spirit which alone has power to unite. In concluding he writes:

"This vast enterprise of spiritual unity has already become conspicuous and promising throughout the Protestant world, and the tragic experience of war has in an unprecedented degree encouraged a new and genuine fraternalism. If, therefore, any communion, with its own precious treasures of thought and life, deliberately chooses to stand aside from this great enterprise, and to claim for itself an exclusive authority of tradition and practice, then the march of Protestantism, though sadly obstructed, must proceed, with keen regret but with undiminished determination, on its own "Great Adventure of Good Will;" where those who walk in the spirit find themselves moving on converging lines toward the longedfor consummation, when, in God's time, the prayer of their common Master may at last be fulfilled."

MIRACLE AND CHRISTIANITY

That we must proceed from an inadequate belief in miracle as a break in the natural order to a profounder assumption of all life as proceeding from supernatural and divine sources is the claim of Miss Dougal in the same journal. To those who read there are sure to come deep thoughts and such as may compel a readjustment of fundamental ideas. She writes:

"The old pre-Christian faith in a God who at times breaks in and does all that He wills, has grown with the higher faith, as tares grow up with the wheat; but as tares and wheat grow together, the difference gradually becomes plain; the one will support life, the other will not If man, being evil, knows how

to give good gifts, how much more God! But how often does man know the agony of impotence to relieve or save! He stretches forth his hand but in vain. He would give his life for the objects of his love, yet they sink before his eyes in physical or moral degeneration. The whole course of human nature, the life of Jesus Christ— if this reveal God at all-reveal him as taking upon himself an analogous impotence, and waiting for the intelligent co-operation of men through whose understanding and zeal He can alone accomplish His will in the earth."

An added interest is given to the subject by the appearance in proximity to it of an article on the miracles of Sadhu Sundar Singh who has created such a profound impression upon American and European Christians since his conversion from a period of bitter opposition to Christianity.

LE REVUE DE STRASBOURG ON ITS FEET AGAIN

It is a matter of unusual interest that the Review published before the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia under the guidance of the Theological Faculty of the University of Strassburg is now revived. It is now to be known as the Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses, and volume one, number one, appears for January-February.

Leopold Monod contributes the first article, "Truth and Freedom," which was the sermon delivered by him upon the reopening of the University. Of special significance is the tolerant and appreciative consideration of the Religious philosophy of Ernest Troeltsch by Professor Vermeil. Other articles by Causse, Lobstein, and Reuss give studies of the Jewish philosophers, Some Aspects of the Idea of the Church, and Reminiscences of the old Strassbourg Review from the unpublished memoirs of Edouard Reuss. The magazine promises to perform a valuable service for the University and for French Protestantism, and possesses an international interest.

AMERICAN REACTIONS TO BERGSONISM

Mr. W. Riley in the Revue Philosophique for January-February gives a careful and interesting summary of the various reactions to the Bergsonian philosophy on the part of such American philosophers as James, Pitkin, Perry, Lovejoy, Hocking and Santayana.

The points of similarity between James and Bergson are set forth. These are not so much due to the fact that both men were profoundly influenced by the same teacher, Renouvier, as from the necessary advance away from Renouvier's position. That is to say, their mutual sympathy lies not so much in what is behind as in what both felt necessary to reach toward. The article is interesting as affording a fairly wide account of the various reactions the work of Bergson has created in America.

PERSONALISTIC STRAWS IN THE PHILOSOPHIC WIND

If it may be held true that straws show which way the wind is blowing in the world of thought, the annual president's address before the eastern section of the American Philosophical Association, by Dr. Ralph Barton Perry, is of special interest to every Personalist. It appears in the March number of the Philosophical Review. Under the title, The Appeal to Reason, he discusses the demand which modern thought is making for a revaluation or reconsideration of human nature as something apart from or in addition to the physical basis of life. "It would appear, then, that the great philosophical enterprise of the immediate future is the naturalistic study of the more complex levels of human life. This does not imply the leveling of human nature, or the mere extension of existing physical laws; but the study of man as a part of nature, interchangeable and interactive with his environment. That such a study of man should lead to new conceptions and new laws not included in the existing encyclopaedia of science, is inevitable.”

Now Dr. Perry tells us "biologists, and even chemists are discussing teleology with open and receptive minds" and "the general problem of human nature centers in the problem of control."

There is a tendency to throw the onus of misunderstanding upon the shoulders of the idealists through whom it seems reason was "by definition withdrawn and perched on a mountain-top," on which account "the scientist who moves about on the plane below naturally fails to find it." But if Dr. Perry's own contention is true the scientist, pretending to the full and final solution of all problems on the materialistic plane, could not in the very nature of the case consider the higher data. Not only so, but it can hardly be considered in the best sense scientific for the scientist to have allowed himself, because of the misconstruction of the idealist, to be placed in the attitude of opposition to the reality of human values.

We welcome the address, which will be read with great interest, as indicating a direction which we are quite sure the thinking of the future will take, a future which we believe will think more kindly of personalism.

THE IDEALISTIC TENDENCIES OF NEO-REALISM

It frequently happens of late in reading the neo-realists that one has to pinch himself hard to realize that he is not dreaming and that he is not in the camp of idealism. An article entitled The Ethical and Aesthetic Implications of Realism by W. P. Montague and H. H. Pankhurst in Mind for April is a significant example. "The realist of the present day assimilates to the common-sense existential realism of modern philosophy the profound subsistential realism of Plato." He would emancipate from their supposed dependence upon cognition not only the forms of earth and heaven but the totality of laws and forms-all qualities and all relations. "The sculptor, the architect, the painter, the musician, when they seek to embody in material form the as yet non-existent objects of their imagination, are inspired to their efforts by the belief in the more than imaginary beauty of those objects. If they supposed for a moment that the worth of what they were to create was merely subjective, and dependent upon or derived from their own attitudes of approval, their motive for creation would cease to be aesthetic and become merely hedonic and selfish." Thus he arrives at "the realist faith that universal truths are independent of the particular subject-matter in which they are exemplified" which "by no means conflicts with the realization that we attain to a conceptual knowledge of the universal through a perceptual knowledge of the particular." This is where the pinch comes. We have to trace the pedigree of modern realism back to its materialistic sources in order to distinguish it from Absolute idealism which it decries. We give up.