Mr. Bryan’s Opinion of Eliot’s Religion
It so happens that this new religion is the very religion that Dr. Eliot has practically monopolized for a lifetime. Its good features have been borrowed, without credit, from Christianity, and its immaterial features need no copyright to prevent their being appropriated. Dr. Eliot may be a great educator, but his prophecies are like other uninspired prophecies — half wish and half environment. It is no new thing to have people resent11the existence of a divine standard of conduct. Some regard it as humiliating to confess that a life can be superior to their own, or to admit that there are commandments binding upon the conscience. But the Christian religion has grown in influence in spite of Dr. Eliot, and it will continue to exist even when his death withdraws the stimulus furnished by his opposition. If the scholarly ex-president would only include the Bible in his model library and read it, he would find that it does not present a religion which deals “chiefly with sorrow and death,” but that it abounds in “joy and life.” He seems to have overlooked the fact that at the birth of the Founder of Christianity angels sang and proclaimed “Peace on earth and good-will toward men.” The old religion is good enough.