Problem of Christianity,—is as accurate and scholarly as it is friendly. I am not conscious of having taken in my recent work a position inconsistent in its genuine meaning with the positions which you recognize. Therefore, precisely in so far, I have and can have only thanks for your interpretation and for your aid.
“But the two central ideas upon which my Problem of Christianity turns, the idea of the community, and the idea of what the historical theology of the Christian church early learned to call ‘the holy spirit’ are ideas which are as living, and growing, as they are ancient. They grew when the prophets of Israel began to formulate their doctrine of Jerusalem, which, in the beginning was a city, of somewhat questionable architecture and morals, in the hill districts of Judea; but which, in the end, became the heavenly realm of which the mystic author of the well-known mediaeval hymn wrote, and which the world is still trying to understand. These two ideas, the Community, and the Spirit, have been growing ever since. They are growing today. They certainly have assumed, in my own mind, a new vitality, and a very much deeper significance than, for me, they ever had before I wrote my Problem of Christianity. That book records the experience and the reflections which have been working in my mind daily more and more ever since I wrote it. These reflections constitute for me, not something inconsistent with my former position, but a distinct addition to my former position, a new attainment,—I believe a new growth. I do not believe that you change in a way involving inconsistency when you reinterpret former ideas.
“To borrow a figure from a remote field, I do not believe that Lincoln acted in a manner essentially inconsistent with his earlier political ideas when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and freed the slaves. To be sure, before he wrote that Proclamation, he had seen a new light. My poor little book on The Problem of Christianity is certainly no Emancipation Proclamation, and is certainly no document of any considerable importance. But it certainly is the product of what for me is a new light, of a new experience, of ideas which are as new to me as the original form of my idealism was new to me when I first defined it.
