Excerpt from The Dawn of a New Era The Parliament of Religions, which sat in Chicago from September 11 to September 27, was a great surprise to the world. When the men who inaugurated it invited representatives of all the great religions of the earth to meet in conference, their plan was looked upon with misgiving, if not with ridicule. The feasibility and the advisability of their undertaking were doubted. The greatest and most powerful churches, it was said, would not be represented. The Vatican, for instance, regards the Roman Catholic Church as the only soul-saving power, with exclusive authority to loose or bind. To allow a comparison between it and other churches on a footing of equality, to appeal to reason, to provoke and favor such an appeal, or to submit to a decision after argument, would be tantamount to the recognition of reason, or logic, or science, as a higher and the highest test of truth. Like reasons, it was thought, would more or less influence other denominations, for almost all of them claim to be based upon a special divine revelation which is above argument, so as to render the mere doubt of it sin. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.