The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-08-13
EXCLUSIVE VIEWS OF THE
 RELIGION OF THE FUTURE
Rev. R. H. Benson Says We Are on Verge of One of the Greatest RevivaIs the
 World Has Ever Seen

In the current number of '"The At lantic Monthly the Rev Robert Hugh Benson writes of catholicism and the Future" The article of which the following is an excerpt has special in the fact thatthe contributor is the con- vert son of the Protestant Archbishop Benson of Canterbury.
 There are two sharply defined views as to the significance of what is called modern religious thought The first that of the thinkers in ouest1on-ls that it marks the beginning of an epoch, that it has immense promises for the future. that it is about to transform, little by little, all religious opinion, and especially such opinions as are called orthodox The second view is that it marks the end of an epoch, that it is of the nature of a melancholy procress at least discredit- ed, that 1t is about to be re-absorbed in the organism from which it takes its origin, or lost in the sands of time. Let us examine these two points of view.
 The modern thinkers take their rise. practically. from the religious uDheaval of the sixteenth century. At that per iod of Chrisendom the establishment of the principle of Nationalism in re- ligion struck the first blow against the idea of a final revelation Ruaran- teed by an infallible authority: for the subscription, as a court of appear. Of a written Book for living voice could only be a transitional step towards the acceptance by each individual in whose hands the Book is placed. of himself as interpreter of it. Congregat1on1Sm followed Nationalism. an Individual1sm Cor pure Protestantism) Congrational- ism; and since both the Nation and hot hn Nof authority, littleby little there came in- to existence the view that true re- ligion' was that system of belief which each individual thought out for him. self; and, since these individuals were not found to agree together. Truth finally became more and more sub- jective; until there was established the most enthusiastically modern form of thought-namely the Truth was not absolute at all, and that what was true and imperative for me was not true nor imperative for another. Further. the original acceptance of the Bible as containing Divine Revelation became itself modified by internal criticism. until the discoveries of external science. until at the present day we find mod ern religion practically to consist in an attitude of mind. more or less Christian in sentiment. though often indignantly claiming the name: in an system dHu d OC1iO1 HI pAo6A CoS toward an undefined and only gradu- ally realizable goal. rather than in an acceptance of a series of historical events and of dOgmaS. built upon them.
 On the other side stands that body of opinion represented by. the Catholic Church, whose tenets are as they have always been-involving. and indeed founded upon, the idea that theology is not, as are the other sciences. mere ly progressive and inductive. but is rather the working out, under Divine guarantees, of body of truth revealed by God two thousand years ago.
 We find then atthe present day two mutually exclusive views of the future of religion. To the modern thinker it appears certain that the process be- gun almost instinctively in the six teenth century, justified as it seems to be by the advance of science and criticism, will continue indefinitely. to the final destruction of the other view. To the Catholic it appears equally cer- tain that the crumbling of all Syste- matic, and theimpossibility of discover ing any final court in Professionalism to which the individual will bow. is the death sentence of every attempt to find religious Truth outside that in fallible authority to whose charge. he believes, truth has been committed. The view of the writer of this paper is emphatically the second of these two.
 That the modern system has ac- great things and made inn portant contributions to thought, is of coI1rsa obvfOuS Much of the useful