This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ... n jjHAT this system of opinion has lost control of the religious mind of the present generation will be universally admitted. There are many teachers of religion with no theology, many with a new, and still more with a crude theology, but nowhere do we find men of modern training and respectable intellect holding the New England theology. Our question then is, How came this system of belief, dominant in our churches for more than one hundred and fifty years, suddenly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to lose its hold upon thinking minds? What causes brought about its sudden and final collapse? In any fair account of this collapse, while the chief blame must lie with the system itself, some blame will be seen to attach to the state of the public mind. There has arisen within the Christian Church considerable indifference to speculative thinking. Practical interests have been engrossing, as they should be, but the dependence of living, practical interests upon fundamental ideas, and upon clearness on fundamental subjects, has not been seen. The mill-round of the mind has been substituted for the sun-path. An indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail trade, has largely taken possession of the teachers of religion. The eternal spaces in which, like the planet, the world of practical interest lives and moves and has its being, have fallen from the public mind. Hence questions of the origin of sin and its permission in a universe over which God is sovereign, serious thinking upon moral government, the nature of virtue, the character of disinterested love, the decree of the Most High and the eternal economy of his being have not appealed to this generation. To the discredit of the generation be it said. and master a difficult...