But enough of the critical side. We have said that the coming religion will say yea to human life. Yet it will not affirm it in a blind and sentimental way. It will be realistic and striving. All great religions of the past have recognized the tragic aspects of human life, its brevity, its littlenesses, its fussy selfishness, its lack of vision, its suffering; but they have too often been led to despise humanity by seeing it on the illimitable background of celestial omnipotences and perfections. { 215} Religion as loyalty to human values will lose no whit of this tragic sense, and yet the palsying background of supernaturalism will disappear. Some measure of tragedy will remain; but its morbidity will have been separated out and courageously rejected. Social groups will fall to with a will to live largely and widely. They will seek a tingling welfare woven of the threefold values of truth, beauty and goodness. The saint will not be the groveling sinner, but the man of mellow wisdom. He will be immersed in the currents of life and yet master of himself. He will be at once the servant of concrete and compassable ideals and their possessor and enjoyer.
The shadow of the Great War will lighten to the coming generation soon after peace is declared. Then will come the time for the taking of stock and the revaluation of human endeavor. Man must ask himself more seriously than ever before what things are worth while, and thereupon bend his political and economic instrumentalities to their furtherance. And here the religion of human values must be the leader. Does democracy yet accord with such a religion? Or is it still too timid, negative, thin and uninstructed? America, for example, has a soul; but it is a soul which needs discipline, instruction, contemplation. The religion of human possibilities needs prophets who will grip men's souls with their description of a society in which righteousness, wisdom and beauty will reign together. It is hard to say what thought such a society calls up before us. Yet does it not mean that, more than now and increasingly, selfish luxury will be scorned, property subordinated to welfare, economic fear lessened to the utmost, knowledge unenviously exalted, and art called { 216} into service? Loyalty to such an ideal will surely constitute the heart of the humanist's religion.