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Some of the men whose personalities I attempt to analyse in this volume are known to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think, represent schools of thought in which America is as greatly interested as the people of Europe.

Therefore I may presume to hope that this present volume will find in the United States as many readers as The Mirrors of Downing Street and The Glass of Fashion.

But, in truth, I hope for much more than this.

Perhaps I may be allowed to say that I think America can make a contribution to the matter discussed in these pages which will outrival in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the contribution she has already made to world politics by the inspiration of the Washington Conference.

For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action. Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and Æschylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.

Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus, I feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and the politics of idealism.

If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my theory that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious things.

Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes of its author—a book which attempts to throw off all those long and hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation of a strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning to use.