We are living in a time of religious ferment. What shall we do? Attempt to keep the new wine in the old bottles? That can only end in destroying the bottles and spilling the wine. Attempt to stop the fermentation? Impossible! And if possible, the only result would be to spoil the wine. No! Put the new wine into new bottles, that both may be preserved. Spiritual experience is always new. It must therefore find a new expression in each age. This book is an attempt to restate the eternal yet ever new truths of the religious life in the terms of modern philosophic thought.

The teachers in the modern church may be divided into three parties: one is endeavoring to defend the faith of the fathers and the forms in which that faith was expressed; one repudiates both the faith and the forms; one holds fast to the faith, but endeavors to restate it in forms more rational and more consistent with modern habits of thought. To confound the second and third of these parties, because they agree in discarding ancient formularies, is a natural but a very radical blunder. The New Theology does not tend toward unfaith; it is, on the contrary, an endeavor to maintain faith by expressing it in terms which are more intelligible and credible.