When Tennyson, in _Locksley Hall_, wrote the line declaring that "the individual withers and the world is more and more," he might have been inditing a prophecy summing up those modern tendencies which have engaged our attention in preceding chapters. And there are perhaps few more important questions before us to-day than this--whether Tennyson's prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to "wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more than suspicion.
Let us say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we are not referring--at least, not directly--to the struggle between Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the fear that under a socialist _régime_ there would be an end to individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of the competitive system is { 65} that it crushes and destroys individuality; but between the contentions of these rival schools of economics we are not attempting to adjudicate. Perhaps we cannot better indicate the scope of our subject than by quoting from two recent theological works, written from such widely differing points of view as Professor Peake's _Christianity: Its Nature and its Truth_, and Professor Bousset's _The Faith of a Modern Protestant_:--
"It is only in it"--_viz._, in Christianity--says the learned Primitive Methodist theologian, "that the individual has received his true place. In antiquity the worth of the individual was greatly under-estimated; he was unduly subordinated to the community. But the Christian religion, by insisting on the infinite value of each human soul, and by asserting the greatness of its destiny, supplied an immense incentive to the attainment by each of the highest within reach. The doctrine of the worth of man is, to all who accept it, a powerful stimulus in the struggle to a fuller and deeper life. An interest in mankind in the mass is compatible with heartless indifference to the lot of individuals" (p. 88).
"The Gospel," declares the Göttingen modernist, "announces a God who seeks and desires above all else the individual human soul. It unites, in a security and closeness hitherto unknown, belief in God with the importance of the individual human life. It { 66} is the religion of religious individualism raised to its highest point." (p. 36).