"As a result, then, of life's very recent passing through a new critical point in the course of its development, no older religious form or formulation can any longer (either factually or logically) satisfy to the full our need and capacity for worship - satisfy, I mean, what has now become permanently their specifically human quality. So true is this, that a 'religion of the future' (definable as a 'religion of evolution') cannot fail to appear before long: a new mysticism, the germ of which (as happens when anything is born) must be recognizable in our environment, here and now.

At the Equator, 25 October (Christ the King) 1953. Published in Cahier IV of the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1968).