America, on the other
hand, because of its material preoccupations, because of the dispersal
of its thinking classes over great areas, because of the cruder
understanding of its more heterogeneous population (which constantly
renders hard and explicit statement necessary), MEANS its creeds much
more literally and is at once more experimental and less compromising
and tolerant. It is there if anywhere that new brotherhoods and new
creeds will continue to appear. But even in America I think the trend of
things is away from separations and segregations and new starts, and
towards more comprehensive and graduated methods of development.
New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases
of social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people
are detached from old systems of direction and unsettled and distressed.
So, at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and
disturbed community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for
a long time it was confined to the drifting population of seaports and
great cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most
settled and most adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its most
adaptable forms.
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