Universalism and futurism, combining in the perception of a universe which is in process of global growth (evolution). In themselves, these two characteristics constitute by their appearance a great psychological event, since they amount to the acquisition by our experience of two new dimensions. But they do more: by their nature, they define a religion, since the ‘religious’ appears, by definition, as soon as the world is seen in its totality and in its consummation in the future (‘faith’).
The true struggle we are witnessing is not between believers and nonbelievers, but between two sorts of believers. Two ideals, two conceptions of the Divine, are confronting one another.
Christians, as a result of a change that is inherent in the human mass of which they form a part, can no longer worship precisely as they used to do (before the appearance of Space and Time). That explains the unspoken dissatisfaction of so many of the faithful with a Christianity that tells them to beware of views and hopes that they cannot help sharing. It is the source, too, of their anxieties about a faith that believes itself to be threatened by all the refocusing and enlargement of outlook on the universe that man is now effecting. Many Christians are beginning to feel that the image of God they are being offered is not worthy of the universe we know.
The modern ‘religion of the earth’ is simply an unconscious impulse towards heaven—so that the energies that seem to present such a threat to the Church are on the contrary a new contribution, with the power to bring new life to the ancient Christian stock. Not to condemn, but to baptise and assimilate. It is clear that the nascent world (which is the only one that matters) would be converted practically at one stroke, if it were recognised that the divinity it worships is precisely the Christian God comprehended at a deeper level. Is this conjunction of the two divine stars possible? I believe it is.
I believe that the world will never be converted to Christianity’s hopes of heaven, unless first Christianity is converted (that so it may divinise them) to the hopes of the earth.