ABSTRACT
Crude beliefs and practices have lingered on as superstitions or have been maintained as traditionally sacred long after they had become unacceptable to later thought and feeling. Faith is deeper and more central in human nature and experience than the intellectual acceptance of any creed in which it can be formulated. It is right, then, that hope and with it joy should be a characteristic of religion. One of the surest marks of religion is its power to reveal the spiritual beauty in experience and transfigure the actual with the radiance of the spirit. Hope and joy have little in common with the passive endurance and resignation which have sometimes been upheld as the aim of religion. A religion of which fellowship is an essential principle will make for equality of social and economic opportunity and treatment, to take the place of competing interests between individuals and classes and nations.
