What we ask of God is equally subject to change. True enough, the old questions--Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselves to be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensity wherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightly distrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, the more insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less, there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time is manifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is than a happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifies experience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with God as an end in itself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of God in happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction govern this whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his own salvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants were chiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of the physical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselves and the possibilities of personality.
Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself in the universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on the other, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what is most distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of the combination of these two variants. What an age asks of the God whom it knows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movements do not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of our time, of course; a great deal of that same creative religious consciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxies of the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actual adventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have not been thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken away from the older organizations and taken their own line, using such material as seems proper for their purpose.
They are not wholly independent of the past; some of them have taken the immemorial speculations of the East for their point of departure though introducing therein a good many of the permissions or conclusions of modern science and something of the spirit of Christianity itself. Those taking their departure from Christianity have claimed rather to reinterpret and modernize it than to supplant it by their own creations. Yet when all this is recognized these cults and movements are particularly the creation of our own time. So accepted, they reveal strongly the persistence of religion. All these conjectures and confidences and reachings through the shadows are just a testimony that few are content to go on without some form of religion or other.