osophical works were purchased by the members of the middle class by the hundreds of thousands. For instance, the sale of Chamberlain’s “Foundations of 19th Century Civilization” has reached 150,000 copies. Vaihinger’s “Philosophy of the As If” 50,000, Spengler’s “Decline of Western Civilization” 70,000 and Keyserling’s “A Philosopher’s Log” 50,000.
Count Keyserling is a member of a noble German family of the Russian Baltic provinces dispossessed by the Revolution. The social and moral chaos of his generation drove him to despair, so he undertook a trip around the world as a student of creeds and philosophies. “He tried to feel and think like a Buddhist in Ceylon, a Brahman in India, a Confucianist in China, a Japanese in Japan and an American in the United States.” The record of his spiritual metamorphoses was first published in 1918 as “A Philosopher’s Log.” His conclusions might be summarized as follows: “All facts—and all creeds—are but different expressions of one spiritual meaning; they are the only means by which we can gain cognizance of the real world of spiritual facts; deeper understanding of their meaning will lead to greater power and perfection; and there is no human progress but this improvement of our understanding.”
This philosophical acknowledgment of the universal origin of spiritual life is quite recent, but even as early as 1905, Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall, the President of the Union Theological Seminary, observed the growing repugnance on the part of ministers and laymen, to old forms of denominational subscription. In circles of culture there is coming a truer sense of proportion touching the legitimate functions of the church, he declared. Undeveloped conceptions of unity and movements of life and love are in the air, moving freely as on the wings of eagles and unconsciously ignoring formal lines of division beneath. Meantime, the advancing philosophy ot religion, the enriching discoveries of history and archaeology, the pressure of social problems, the new cosmopolitanism, and above all the constructive results of Biblical criticism are bringing together many of the best minds and of the most consecrated souls upon a platform of Christian belief and effort incompatible with aggressive sectarianism, and independent of denominational subdivision. The tenor of this sentiment is not revolutionary but evolutionary; not destructive but constructive. This crystallizing of unorganized sentiment into a reinterpretation of the church on non-sectarian lines must be through the centralizing power of the Eternal Truth lifted up and drawing all men unto itself, with the vitalizing power of the Eternal Spirit giving liberty unto every man.
After prophesying the gradual breaking down of the artificial barriers of sectarianism and denominationalism, thereby giving religious life a freer development in a wider field, Dr. Hall described his hopes entertained towards the people of the East. “When one stands in the heart of the venerable East; feels the atmosphere charged with religious impulse; reads on the faces of the people marks of the unsatisfied soul; considers the monumental expressions of the religious idea in grand and enduring architectural forms, then the suggestion, that all this means nothing—that it bears no witness to the Divine in man seeking and finding a partial and inadequate self-fulfillment—that it is but to be stamped out and exterminated before Christianity can rise upon its ruins—becomes an unthinkable suggestion. I look with reverence upon the hopes and yearnings of non-Christian faiths, believing them to contain