There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.

It is natural to try to understand one's own time and to seek to analyse the forces that move it.

As to judging our own time, and thereby gaining some basis for a judgment of future possibilities, we are doubtless not only too close to it to appraise it but too much formed by it and enclosed within it to do so.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.