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RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 
 
 ee 
 PETE eM cha BO TURES lag, 
 DELIVERED AT THE UNIVER- 
 SITY OF NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 WAY OF PRIN 
 <r ‘79> 
 APR 22 1924 
 
 
 
 
 BY PE 
 vo 
 CHART ESSA EE NY DINSMORE 
 
 PROFESSOR OF SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION 
 OF LITERATURE IN THE YALE 
 DIVINITY SCHOOL 
 
 
 
 CUAPEUS LITT pINah Cots Ciitesn AAS 
 THE ‘UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 OxrorD UNIVERSITY PREss 
 
 TOrZi4 
 
CopyricuTt, 1924, By 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS 
 
 PrinteD By THE SEEMAN PRINTERY 
 Duruam, N. C. 
 
DEDICATED 
 TO 
 DONATI DIS by MOUWUR MOU TIE 
 LOVER OF BOOKS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/religiouscertituOOdins 
 
THE McNAIR LECTURES 
 
 The John Calvin McNair Lectures were 
 founded through a bequest made by Rev. John 
 Calvin McNair of the class of 1849 which be- 
 came available to the University in 1906. The 
 extract from the will referring to the foundation 
 is as follows: 
 
 “As soon as the interest accruing thereon shall 
 by said Trustees be deemed sufficient they shall 
 employ some able scientific gentleman to deliver 
 before the students then in attendance at said 
 University, a course of lectures, the object of 
 which lectures shall be to show the mutual bear- 
 ing of science and theology upon each other, and 
 to prove the existence of attributes (as far as 
 may be) of God from nature. The lectures, 
 which must be prepared by a member of some 
 one of the evangelic denominations of christians, 
 must be published within twelve months after 
 delivery, either in pamphlet or book form.” 
 
HANTS 
 
 [ i 
 oye / b 
 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The lectures in this little volume were 
 delivered before the University of North 
 @arolinasinptiemspring oT lOZ2)9 Asi the 
 purpose of the lectureship is to help the 
 students in their religious thinking I had 
 them constantly in mind during the prep- 
 aration of these addresses. As the atten- 
 dence is voluntary, I was beset with the 
 dread of being so uninteresting as to lose 
 both their attention and their presence. 
 Therefore I aimed at simplicity, brevity 
 and popular statement. Refinements in 
 definition and subtle reasoning give little 
 satisfaction to empty seats. In revising 
 the addresses for publication I have re- 
 written a few pages in the interest of 
 Hari ma put motnenwiscmoavemnert. then 
 unchanged. 
 
 The reader may feel that in chapter 
 three I have been unduly solicitous re- 
 
il PREFACE 
 
 garding the word “knowledge,” but I be- 
 lieve this word and the confidence it 
 brings belong properly to religion. One 
 does not wish to commit his life to a Grand 
 Perhaps. If we have any intelligible pur- 
 pose for existing in this world, it is that 
 we may build up virtuous characters, that 
 we achieve the fullest possible develop- 
 ment of our personalities. But one can- 
 not erect a house or a character on fog, 
 neither can he live spiritually in a vacuum. 
 The foundations must be solid if the su- 
 perstructure is to be substantial and en- 
 during. If religion is to transform the 
 characters of men, she must deal in cer- 
 tainties as well as in noble faiths. It can- 
 not be that we have less assurance about 
 what concerns us most than about matters 
 of minor importance; that we can find 
 our way so readily in the physical world 
 to lose it when we pass the boundary 
 line into the spiritual. Our conceptions 
 doubtless change with increasing culture, 
 but in our deepest experiences we have 
 real knowledge of the Unchangeable. 
 
PREFACE ill 
 
 It has always seemed to me that a man 
 should be willing to face the actualities of 
 life; that he should be eager to know the 
 truth regardless of the effect on his theo- 
 ries. It is foolish to cherish a delusion 
 because it is pleasant. Therefore the 
 spirit of dogmatism, both in science and 
 religion, has been abhorrent to me. “No 
 one of us is infallible,’ said Benjamin 
 Jowett, “not even the youngest!’ And I 
 have felt that the religious man could 
 show his faith in God in no better way 
 than by welcoming the truth given in 
 every department of research. The Holy 
 Ghost is the spirit of truth, and in this 
 age, I am sure, our best scientific minds 
 are his anointed prophets and are mani- 
 festing his spirit and revealing his ways 
 more truly than many of our statesmen 
 or theologians. They are also restoring 
 to us the lost gift of wonder. 
 
 But too many scientific men claim the 
 word “knowledge” as their peculiar pos- 
 session and grant to the bewildered spirit 
 
IV PREFACE 
 of man only the satisfactions of conjec- 
 ture. In these pages I claim the word for 
 
 religion. 
 CHARLES ALLEN DINSMORE. 
 YALE UNIVERSITY. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 WEA Rat 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TEE OR OG U Bethe ie Si eR ea ORME ONO Fre OVEN a fo ping 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON MODERN 
 REDIGIOUSMAHOUGEC Lyra nen ee 1l 
 
 Conflict between science and religion has its 
 origin in the nature of man. Dogmatism both 
 in religion and science. Definition of science. 
 Her spirit, purpose and method. Limitations 
 of her knowledge. Has modified our conception 
 of the extention of the universe in time and 
 space; has revealed the infinitely great and the 
 infinitely little. Changed conception of man; 
 of the Bible. Why the Bible will never be out 
 of date. The scientific method has been intro- 
 duced into theology. Sydney Smith quoted. 
 Pasteur quoted. The religious man should be 
 open minded. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Tue NATURE AND TRUTH OF RELIGION . . 37 
 
 The religious impulse; its universality, its func- 
 tion in life; gives liberty, joy, peace, power as 
 an immediate possession. Is it an illusion? 
 The Power that makes for righteousness; 
 Moral virtues conform to the nature of things. 
 The universe on the side of the moral ideal. 
 Noblest minds not deluded. Personality of 
 God. Herbert Spencer quoted. The good su- 
 perior to the evil; the beautiful to the ugly. 
 Shakespeare quoted. Our sense of dependence 
 and our admiration for ideals. The Supreme 
 Power is one with the Supreme Worth. John 
 Tyndall quoted. 
 
v1 CONTENTS 
 WITA ERIE EEE 
 
 Wuat WE Know and WHat WE 
 BELIEVE do 
 
 Sir Leslie Stephen quoted. More than one path 
 to knowledge. The “knowing faculties” not the 
 exclusive possession of science. They belong 
 also to religion. Definition of knowledge. 
 To what degree science knows. We know 
 aesthetic and moral values and forces which are 
 spiritually discerned. Huxley quoted. Religion 
 begins in faith and attains knowledge through 
 experience. Testimony of Kant, Tyndall, 
 Emerson. Had no help come from the Unseen 
 religion would have died out. The lover, the 
 artist, the saint know as well as the scientist. 
 Religious knowledge not independent of charac- 
 ter and moods, yet is in some respects superior 
 to scientific knowledge. James quoted. A test 
 of the claims of Christ. Future existence a 
 ease Science has opened great spaces for this 
 ope. 
 
RE LG OG Sark Th UD By 
 UNG AONE GEO Ls ChE N Gy 
 

 
PROLOGUE 
 
 The honor of delivering this course of 
 lectures I sincerely appreciate, and I can 
 show my gratitude no more genuinely 
 than by adhering closely to the purpose of 
 the founder. The foundation was the gift 
 of Mr. John Calvin McNair, a graduate 
 of this University of the class of 1849. 
 His surname indicates that he sprang 
 from that sturdy Scotch-Irish stock whose 
 far-sighted patriotism and intense inter- 
 est in education gave North Carolina the 
 honor of establishing this the first univer- 
 sity created in this country by legislative 
 enactment. His Christian name, John 
 Calvin, attests the stern piety of his an- 
 cestors. One born of such blood and tra- 
 ditions would perforce be dedicated from 
 birth both to religion and the concerns of 
 the mind. Calvinism was an iron system 
 of far ranging and closely articulated 
 logic, centered around a majestic vision of 
 
2 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 a Sovereign Almighty Will, and wherever 
 that mighty creed cast its gloom and its 
 glory there sprang up strong men conse- 
 crated to truth and liberty. 
 
 As Mr. McNair graduated in 1849, he 
 was in the fulness of his intellectual vigor 
 in 1859 when Darwin published his epoch- 
 making book on the Origin of Species. 
 That volume kindled a fierce controversy 
 which was carried into every hamlet in 
 Christendom, and caused every thinking 
 man to examine the foundations of his 
 creed. <A vigorous, militant Orthodoxy 
 unhesitatingly joined issue with a science 
 so revolutionary. A graduate of this Uni- 
 versity, bearing such a name and having 
 in his blood a strain which carries with it 
 an inherent faith in a sovereign God, 
 could have been no indifferent spectator 
 of the earnest debate; the battle between 
 the tradition of his fathers and the new 
 affirmations must have been waged with ~ 
 intense energy in his own soul. I surmise 
 that during his mature years it was a very 
 vital problem with him how to be loyal to 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 3 
 
 the faith of his fathers, and yet be open- 
 minded to whatever truths science had to 
 teach. Doubtless he settled for himself 
 and to his own satisfaction the relation- 
 ship between the ancient creed and the 
 new spirit abroad in the world. And I 
 imagine that out of those years of intel- 
 lectual struggle grew the purpose of this 
 lectureship; namely, that the young men 
 of this institution might, for generations 
 to come, receive some help when they too 
 should meet the same essential problem. 
 For this debate between Science and Reli- 
 gion will go on to the end of time. It is 
 more than a struggle between two rival 
 systems of thought; it is the adjustment 
 of two distinct tempers of mind. The con- 
 flict goes even deeper. It has its origin 
 in the very nature of man himself. It is 
 a debate between the critical intellect and 
 that inner spirit which would fain be- 
 lieve and aspire and rest. It begins when 
 the boy in college feels the incompatability 
 between his new knowledge and his boy- 
 hood notions which he invariably con- 
 
4 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 fuses with the faith of the Church, and 
 it revives whenever the things which are 
 seen appear at variance with the things 
 which are unseen—whenever the critical 
 understanding questions the needs of the 
 heart and the intuitions of the spirit. 
 
 As stated by the founder, the purpose of 
 this lectureship is “to show the mutual 
 bearing of science and theology upon each 
 other and to prove the existence of attri- 
 butes (as far as may be) of God from 
 Nature.” To draw from the material uni- 
 verse proofs of the existence of God, or 
 indications of his nature, is a task quite 
 alien to my abilities. Every shoemaker 
 should stick to his last. Only one who has 
 spent a lifetime in scientific research is 
 capable of speaking with any semblance 
 of authority on such a subject. Only he 
 can have first hand knowledge of estab- 
 lished facts and of their legitimate impli- 
 cations. It requires prolonged and dili- 
 gent study in any department to form a 
 dependable judgment upon the value and 
 meaning of its data, Broadly speaking, 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 5 
 
 there are two fields of intellectual interest: 
 Man and his experiences, and Nature and 
 her processes. There is no more insidious 
 and dangerous temptation than for one 
 who has spent his life in one of these de- 
 partments of thought to venture into the 
 other department for the purpose of pass- 
 ing judgment upon its facts and conclu- 
 sions. It is a sad sight to see a physicist 
 come out of his laboratory, with the stand- 
 ards and habits which befit his work, and 
 go up onto that high tableland where the 
 spirit struggles with its mighty problems 
 of destiny, to pass pontifical judgments 
 which only reveal his own limitations. On 
 the other hand the scientist can suffer no 
 more exquisite torture than to hear a the- 
 ologian, who evidently knows nothing of 
 the care needed to establish even the sim- 
 plest fact, make sweeping generalizations. 
 
 Happily from any such exhibition of 
 ignorant presumption you will, I trust, be 
 spared. Upon one phase of the first state- 
 ment in the will—the mutual bearing of 
 science and religion—I am, perhaps, not 
 
6 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 entirely incompetent to speak. I have 
 therefore chosen for the theme of this 
 and the two succeeding lectures the theme, 
 Religious Certitude in an Age of Science. 
 Tonight I shall offer some reflections on 
 the Influence of Science on Modern Relig- 
 ious Thought. Tomorrow night the topic 
 will be, The Nature and Truth of Relig- 
 ion. The closing lecture will consider 
 What We Know and What We Believe. 
 
 Let me state at the outset that I shall 
 not attempt an intricate argument, clothed 
 in unfamiliar words, addressed to the 
 trained minds of experts, to establish 
 some theory of knowledge. The purpose 
 of this foundation, as I understand it, is 
 to persuade the students of the University 
 that they may be unfeignedly loyal to 
 truth in whatever department of research 
 it may be discovered, and at the same time 
 possess the strength and consolation of 
 religion. 
 
 I am too well aware that I shall satisfy 
 neither the dogmatists of science, nor of 
 religion. The dogmatist is seldom open to 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 7 
 
 argument. Dogmatism, as has been well 
 said, is puppyism grown old. The re- 
 ligious dogmatist is a familiar figure. 
 His iron creed will never open to receive 
 new truth, and the pain of a new idea is 
 intolerable. But religion has no mo- 
 nopoly of this spirit. The narrowest, the 
 most opinionated, the most supercilious 
 persons one finds in our seats of learning 
 are the little scientists, who have sunk so 
 deep into their constricted specialty that 
 they cannot see beyond its confines. They 
 burrow so long in their little mole-runs 
 that their eyes grow dim: they lose all 
 sense of the vastness of the universe; they 
 think the cackle of their laboratory is the 
 murmur of the world. They measure all 
 life with the instruments of their trade. 
 They mistake their generalizations for 
 the philosophy of the universe. A witty 
 writer has recently described those spe- 
 cialists whose minds have become so ossi- 
 fied that they miss the beauty and signifi- 
 cance of the world: 
 
8 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 ‘“‘A primrose by the river’s brim 
 Primula flava was to him, 
 And it was nothing more.” 
 
 From the closed mind and the intolerant 
 spirit may we be delivered. 
 
iPS INE EO EN GE OR SClENCHION 
 MODERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
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 THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON MODERN 
 RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 Let us first ask: What is science? In 
 the popular sense—the sense in which it 
 is used in Mr. McNair’s will—the term 
 science refers to the methods and the re- 
 sults of the Natural Sciences. It is that 
 body of knowledge made up of verified 
 and verifiable facts and their relation- 
 ships which pertain to Nature and her 
 processes, and to Man insofar as he is 
 immersed in the physical order. It is 
 “systematized knowledge of sense phe- 
 nomena.” 
 
 In a larger sense science is all verified 
 and organized knowledge. In this ampler 
 meaning it would include all the activities 
 of religion which report themselves in the 
 current of affairs. But we shall employ 
 the word throughout these lectures in the 
 narrower and popular significance. 
 
12 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 We are certainly living in a period that 
 is preéminently an Age of Science. It is 
 said that there have been more scientific 
 discoveries in the past hundred years than 
 in all preceding centuries. Yet the most 
 precious gift of science to the world has 
 not been her marvelous inventions, her 
 amazing discoveries; her supreme bestow- 
 ment has been the purpose, the spirit, and 
 the method she has introduced into our 
 thinking. 
 
 Her purpose is definite. She aims at 
 nothing less than a mastery over nature 
 by the discovery of its laws. In this she 
 has met with such extraordinary success 
 that there has been born into the world an 
 inextinguishable hope that one by one the 
 old enemies of our race—pestilence, pov- 
 erty, superstition—will be overcome, and 
 that the conditions of existence will be 
 more tolerable. 
 
 She expects to achieve her dominion 
 over the forces of nature by a definite pro- 
 cedure; i.e., by discovering and verifying 
 facts and setting them in their proper re- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 13 
 
 lationships. Then the technical arts will 
 take the discovered facts and laws and 
 put them to the service of man. The pre- 
 cise methods of science differ according to 
 the field of investigation. But in every 
 department she uses those “methods which 
 are established in the confidence of men 
 whose occupation it is to investigate 
 truth.” 
 
 Yet the supreme contribution of science 
 has not been her results or her method, 
 but her spirit. I know of no finer state- 
 ment of this spirit than in Huxley’s mem- 
 orable letter to Kingsley: “Sit down be- 
 fore a fact as a little child, be prepared to 
 give up every preconceived notion, follow 
 humbly wherever and to whatever abysses 
 nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I 
 have only begun to learn content and 
 peace of mind since I resolved at all risks 
 to do this.” The predominant trait of 
 Huxley’s mind has been described as “a 
 passion for veracity.” Absolute open- 
 mindedness, the utter elimination in every 
 investigation of all motives save love of 
 
14 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 truth, the subordination of all personal 
 preferences and dislikes that might weigh 
 in the balance, this is the scientific spirit. 
 How similar it is to the religious spirit is 
 apparent. Both demand complete self- 
 surrender as indispensable to success; 
 both require the receptiveness of a little 
 child; both command their servitors to 
 subordinate all material advantage to the 
 higher interests; both enjoin utter mental 
 integrity ; together they seek to control the 
 world for the sake of humanity. 
 
 The rewards also are similar. Working 
 in this spirit of complete consecration to 
 truth, the genuinely scientific mind attains 
 a conviction of the order, the justice, the 
 vastness of the universe, which in mo- 
 ments of supreme discovery, changes into 
 an ecstacy that is akin to the mystic’s 
 vision of God. Witness Newton’s rap- 
 ture as he approached the end of his cal- 
 culations which were to demonstrate the 
 law of gravitation, or Darwin’s exaltation 
 of mind as he saw the verification of his 
 theory of development through natural 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 15 
 
 selection. A scientist, with a mind plod- 
 ding and dry-as-dust because no light of 
 the imagination streams through it, may 
 be a thorough going materialist, but if to 
 a clear understanding he adds wonder and 
 reverence, his spirit is truly religious, and 
 in his great moments he is not a stranger 
 to that experience which the church calls 
 the baptism of the Holy Ghost. For what 
 is the Holy Ghost but the spirit of all 
 truth? 
 
 Working according to methods estab- 
 lished in the confidence of competent men, 
 science obtains a body of verified facts 
 and laws which we call knowledge. But it 
 is knowledge with very definite limita- 
 tions. Science describes, she does not in- 
 terpret. She deals with phenomena and 
 processes, not with ultimate realities. “‘I 
 went into my garden,” says an Eastern 
 story, “to water the flowers, the drops be- 
 came a rill, the rill a brook, the brook a 
 river, and the river emptied into the sea.” 
 Science follows the drop through all its 
 courses to the ocean, but when it enters 
 
16 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 the Infinite and the Eternal she stops. 
 She knows nothing of entities, or efficient 
 causes, or of ultimate destinies. She does 
 not claim to interpret values and the mean- 
 ing of life. 
 
 Let us glance at the influence exercised 
 by science upon our religious thinking. 
 It has been exerted first through the 
 results she has established, and second, 
 through the spirit she has introduced. 
 
 Modern science began her revolutionary 
 influence upon religious thought when in 
 1543 Copernicus published his epoch-mak- 
 ing book. Before his day men believed 
 that they lived in a very complete and 
 snug little universe. The earth was the 
 centre, nine heavens revolved about it, 
 above the stars was heaven and in the cav- 
 erns of the earth was hell. Human his- 
 tory was confined to some six thousand 
 years, and a complete system of salvation 
 had been revealed from heaven by means 
 of which the elect would fill the vacancies 
 created by the fallen angels. Since the 
 days of Copernicus we have found that 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 17 
 
 we are living in a universe inconceivably 
 extended in space. Our thoughts are lost 
 in the immensities of distance and magni- 
 tude reported by the astronomers. 
 
 This extension in space has been 
 matched by an equally astonishing exten- 
 sion in time. The Creator has left a rec- 
 ord of his activities in the rocks and in the 
 stars which compels all informed minds to 
 relinquish the venerable chronology which 
 asserts that only six thousand years have 
 elapsed since creation. It is conjectured 
 that it was between forty and twenty-five 
 thousand years ago that a creature akin 
 to us appeared upon the planet. Before 
 the earth was fitted to be his habitation 
 untold ages rolled by. The estimates of 
 the age of the earth vary from one billion 
 six hundred million to Lord Kelvin’s 
 guess of four hundred thousand years. 
 As time is reckoned, man is a modern 
 upon the earth, for it is only some nine 
 thousand years ago that a crude civiliza- 
 tion appeared in Mesopotamia. This 
 amazing expansion in space and time of 
 
18 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 the little universe of our fathers com- 
 pletely shattered the contracted and closed 
 system of theology which so _ perfectly 
 conformed to it. The vastness of the ma- 
 terial universe has given us a glimpse of 
 the greatness of our God. We can no 
 longer think of him as an Emperor en- 
 throned above his universe. He is the 
 indwelling spirit—a Being present in 
 every point of his creation—transcendent 
 only in the sense that he stands outside of 
 our wills. 
 
 Neither can we well think of him as 
 the First Cause—for the law of continuity 
 denies the validity of the conception of a 
 beginning. God is first in the sense of 
 being Supreme; first in importance. It is 
 impossible to conceive of a condition when 
 there was God, but no universe. We 
 must think of the universe as always the 
 living garment of an eternal God—who is 
 the ground of all being, in whom all things 
 subsist. 
 
 But science has done something more 
 than carry our thought to the rim of the 
 outermost star; she has penetrated the in- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 19 
 
 finitely little, and discovered the Great 
 Artificer, toiling busily in the workship of 
 the living cell with a display of wisdom as 
 elaborate as he manifests in the largest 
 planet. He is in the infinitely small as 
 well as in the infinitely large—the ever- 
 present God. 
 
 “Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than 
 hands and feet.” 
 
 We Worship a Being: 
 
 “Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 
 All thinking beings, all objects of all thoughts, 
 And rolls through all things.” 
 
 Our view of humanity has also radically 
 changed. We are not, as our fathers 
 thought, a race debased, creatures fallen 
 from primitive excellence. Rather we are 
 growing beings—we are the result of an 
 ascent inconceivably long. But the sum- 
 mit has not yet been reached. We glimpse 
 a wonderful future before us. Around 
 us and within we are aware of an immense 
 treasure house of unreleased energies, and 
 
20 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 the marvelous achievements of the past 
 lead us to believe that, if we can learn to 
 control ourselves as thoroughly as we are 
 controlling nature, the time may come 
 when “beings who are now latent in our 
 thoughts and hidden in our loins shall 
 stand upon this earth, as one stands upon 
 a foot-stool, and shall laugh and reach out 
 their hands to the stars.”” The astounding 
 discoveries of science, I think, are the di- 
 rect cause of the inexpugnable conviction 
 that has recently taken possession of our 
 thinking, namely that man is a progressive 
 being. Nothing seems impossible. The 
 Great War has, probably, somewhat 
 rudely shaken this belief. Yet neither in 
 Jerusalem, nor in Athens, nor in the world 
 up to our own time, was there any such as- 
 surance of the latent possibility of man- 
 kind for advancement, or any such con- 
 viction of his ability to control the forces 
 of nature. 
 
 The spirit of science working upon the 
 documents of our faith has given us a new 
 Bible, immeasurably more human, signifi- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 21 
 
 cant and real than that which the first set- 
 tlers brought to these shores. In no irrev- 
 erent spirit, but actuated by the most earn- 
 est desire to find out the truth, the most 
 competent men in historical research— 
 and they are earnestly Christian men— 
 tell us that the former theory of plenary 
 inspiration of the Scriptures is no longer 
 tenable. These scholars find that God has 
 not left himself without a witness among 
 any people, but to the Jews he gave a spe- 
 cial insight into the things of the spirit. 
 Their great men were not generals or phil- 
 osophers, but prophets. They interpreted 
 God through nature indeed, but preémi- 
 nently through the moral and spiritual 
 nature of man. They conceived of an 
 ethical Deity, a righteous and merciful 
 God, Lord of the whole earth, who was 
 using the nations in the interest of a re- 
 deemed humanity. The Bible is the rec- 
 ord of the growing insight, and the ac- 
 cumulated experiences with the Eternal, 
 of a uniquely endowed people. The 
 Koran gives the point of view of one man, 
 
22 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 occupying a moment only in the process of 
 history. The Analects of Confucius give 
 the moral judgments of a single genius, 
 at a definite period of time. The sacred 
 books of India and Persia contain much 
 noble philosophy and many penetrating 1n- 
 tuitions of rare value. But the Bible is 
 the only sacred book in the world that rep- 
 resents a righteous God working through 
 long periods of history for the moral re- 
 demption of mankind. It is a drama as 
 complete in its plot as Hamlet—but it is 
 the only drama which reveals God as the 
 chief actor in human history carrying for- 
 ward a supreme work of redemption. 
 “This people,’ said Matthew Arnold, 
 writing of the Jews, “have a secret. They 
 discerned the way the world was going, 
 and therefore they have prevailed.” The 
 secret they possessed was that the Ever- 
 lasting is righteous and that national well- 
 being and individual salvation depend 
 upon conformity to a Power that makes 
 for righteousness. The Bible is every 
 man’s book because it keeps close to hu- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 23 
 
 man life and tells of experiences of many 
 generations of men with God. 
 
 It has a human element, for it is a story 
 of man’s growing knowledge, his insight, 
 his aspirations, and his faith. It is a di- 
 vine book, because all human experiences 
 are judged in their relationship to God, 
 and God is declared to be acting in indi- 
 vidual hearts and in the processes of his- 
 tory for man’s well-being. 
 
 Our etathersiinterpreted ithe | Bible) /in 
 much the same manner which a lawyer 
 uses in interpreting the statutes of North 
 Carolina. It was all an exact statement 
 of fact and truth, and was to be so under- 
 stood. The King James version was 
 printed as prose, and it was not until a 
 hundred years later that it was discovered 
 that the psalms were poetry both in form 
 and spirit. It has also been ascertained 
 that the Hebrews, like all ancient people, 
 conceived and stated truths in forms of 
 the imagination. Therefore we have in 
 their literature fable, parable, legend, the 
 traditions which mothers told to their 
 
24 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 children at eventide, the proverbs of their 
 wise men, the songs of warriors, the alle- 
 gories, the idyls, the stories by which liter- 
 ary men enforced important truths. The 
 discovery that the Bible is a library of 
 many volumes, of many different types of 
 literature, has led scholars to interpret the 
 different books by their appropriate canon. 
 Consequently we know much more accu- 
 rately than did the men of a few gener- 
 ations ago precisely how God dealt with 
 this people. 
 
 The Bible will never be out of date for 
 four reasons. First, it is a record of the 
 way in which man grew into his concep- 
 tions of the true attitude toward God and 
 toward his fellow. Religion is the rela- 
 tionship of man with the Deity, and the 
 true relationship is that of sonship ex- 
 pressed in human service. This relation- 
 ship once discovered and stated, there can 
 be no further discovery in that line. 
 
 Secondly, there are certain ultimates in 
 religion which never can be superceded. 
 In music we have the eight notes. These 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 25 
 
 having been established, all musical ad- 
 vance is in new combinations of the basic 
 tones. In mathematics the multiplication 
 table will never be improved, neither will 
 tie point, or the: tine, or the circle; yihe 
 Seven colors will never become out of date, 
 but there will be many new arrangements 
 of them. These ultimates in music, mathe- 
 matics, painting, having once been found, 
 are of permanent, unchanging value. All 
 progress lies in using them with better 
 understanding and in fresh combinations. 
 So with religion. Faith, hope, and love 
 are ultimates. We may grow into pro- 
 founder conceptions of their meaning, we 
 shall learn to apply them more wisely, but 
 they are as truly ultimate factors in life 
 as the point and the circle in art. They 
 cannot be diminished or superceded; they 
 are the essence of religion. There is noth- 
 ing further in that direction. Having 
 learned his true relationship to God and 
 his fellow men, and the abiding and sover- 
 eion dispositions of the spirit which make 
 for salvation from the love of sin and the 
 
26 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 dominion of fear, has not man reached an 
 unchanging stratum in religion? To this 
 can anything be added? 
 
 Yes, there is one more possible disclos- 
 ure. Let faith, hope and love find a per- 
 fect expression in a human being who 
 lives his days as a true son of the Highest, 
 and a genuine brother to humanity; let the 
 ultimates of religion become flesh and 
 blood in some Son of God and Son of 
 Man, and something has come into history 
 which can never be ignored or out of date. 
 
 Thirdly, the Bible is a collection of the 
 original documents which describe the 
 process by which the religious ultimates 
 became permanent in the world. It shows 
 the expanding spirit of man gradually 
 throwing off the bondage of fear and su- 
 perstition, and with ever increasing won- 
 der laying hold of the increasing revela- 
 tion of truth. It contains the records 
 which witness to a perfect life, a life in- 
 carnating all the truths and forces of re- 
 ligion. Now the original documents of an 
 epochal movement never lose their value. 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE rp 
 
 Another reason may be mentioned why 
 the Bible will not be superceded. The 
 book is much more than a collection of his- 
 torical documents describing the process 
 by which the final truths of our faith came 
 into the world. It is literature, and parts 
 of it are literature of the very highest 
 order. Now great literature comes down 
 through the centuries in ageless youth be- 
 cause it radiates spiritual power. You will 
 recall De Quincey’s distinction between 
 the literature of knowledge and the liter- 
 ature of power. The distinction is inter- 
 esting, but in fact there is no literature 
 dealing simply with knowledge. No book 
 becomes literature until its truths stir the 
 emotions, the fountains of power. Books 
 containing information merely do not en- 
 dure, for having acquired the facts, we 
 throw the book away. Books live, not for 
 the knowledge they contain, but for the 
 moods they induce. The eternal volumes 
 are those which lift us into the timeless 
 world by the exalted moods they create in 
 us. To attain the mood we must read the 
 
28 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 book. Preéminently is this true of the 
 Bible. Its writers were men of spiritual 
 genius profoundly moved by the very 
 spirit of the truth of which they wrote; 
 they were aquiver with moral passion. 
 The word of God was on their lips and 
 his spirit was in their hearts. To attain 
 the gospel moods there is no better way 
 than to read the gospel books. Here we 
 find the power to become sons of God, the 
 strongest inducements to love our fellow 
 men and to hope for a glorious future. 
 The final truths of religion cannot be 
 stated with more beauty, simplicity and 
 spiritual power than they are stated in the 
 noblest passages of the Old and New 
 Testaments. Supreme truths, fashioned 
 in forms of perfect beauty, are not for- 
 gotten. They have that kind of fire in 
 them which the world will not let die. 
 
 The second method by which science 
 has influenced religious thought is 
 through the introduction of the scientific 
 spirit and the scientific method into the- 
 ology. Let us bear in mind that theology 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 29 
 
 is ever to be distinguished from religion, 
 as botany is distinct from flowers. The- 
 ology is our theory of religion, as botany 
 is the science of flowers. 
 
 The theologies of the past have been 
 discarded one by one, not through lack of 
 logical articulation, but because these 
 mighty structures were reared upon shaky 
 premises. Discredit the major premise 
 and the superstructure collapses. Grown 
 wise by the experience of the past, and 
 thoroughly. imbued with the scientific 
 spirit, our leading thinkers in the religious 
 world do not assume some broad general- 
 ization, such as the Fall of Man, or the 
 sovereign decrees of the Almighty, upon 
 which to build imposing systems of 
 thought. On the contrary, they are keep- 
 ing very close to facts of human experi- 
 ence; they deal almost exclusively with the 
 near end of truth. And while undoubt- 
 edly their interpretations of the facts and 
 truths may change with advancing knowl- 
 edge, the foundations are secure. Their 
 appeal is not to dogma, but to life. 
 
30 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 Let me say, in conclusion, that the Age 
 of Science has also been an age of un- 
 precedented religious activities. When 
 science made her tremendous affirmation 
 that there had been no break in the cre- 
 ative process from the nebula up to man, 
 there were not lacking religious leaders 
 who hailed this ampler interpretation of 
 the orderly ways of the Creator with en- 
 thusiasm. “This law of growth,” said one 
 of the most distinguished preachers in 
 America, “is what Paul and I have been 
 looking for for some time.” Christian 
 scholars at once applied this theory of 
 development to the documents and to the 
 institutions of their faith, with the re- 
 sult that never since primitive Christianity 
 have there been so many spiritually 
 minded people free from the trammels of 
 dogmatism, and so possessed of the essen- 
 tial spirit of all true religion. The new 
 freedom, the new sense of reality, the 
 broader outlook gave immense impulse to 
 religious activities. Never has the Church 
 been nearer the heart of the faith, never 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE nna & 
 
 has it worked more wisely or more exten- 
 sively for the establishment of the King- 
 dom of God upon the earth. 
 
 The witty divine, Sidney Smith, walk- 
 ing one day through the streets of Lon- 
 don, heard two women quarreling. Each 
 was in her own house, and the houses were 
 on opposite sides of the street. ‘““Those 
 two women will never agree,’ remarked 
 the wit, “for they occupy different premi- 
 ses.” In former days when religion dwelt 
 in a gloomy tenement of uncharitable dog- 
 matism, and science lived in a new and 
 somewhat shaky house across the way, 
 they did shout invectives at each other. 
 But that time is passing. There are com- 
 mon premises upon which they can live to- 
 gether in peace, with science on the ground 
 floor and religion in the upper story—sci- 
 ence keeping the premises in good order 
 and religion supplying the motive and the 
 home atmosphere. 
 
 The common house is the spirit of man. 
 Man is the reconciliation of science and 
 religion. Science shows him the laws of 
 
32 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 the world in which he lives and which he 
 must obey. But above this order of time 
 and sense there is another world of values 
 and spiritual forces which he knows as 
 truly as he knows the temporal order. 
 Here he finds an interpretation of the 
 meaning of the life, a refuge in times of 
 distress, lofty motives which hold him true 
 to his ideals, and power pouring into his 
 being from the reservoirs of the Unseen. 
 
 All scientific minds of the first rank are 
 religious in their purpose of utter loyalty 
 to the truth, and in their emotion of won- 
 der, reverence and humility, and many of 
 them have possessed to the full the con- 
 solation and the strength which a spiritual 
 vision of man and the universe gives. 
 
 It is a long and brilliant roll from New- 
 ton, who wrote an appendix to his Prin- 
 cipia expressing his faith in God, whose 
 works he had profoundly studied, to Pas- 
 teur who wrote: 
 
 “There are two men in each of us; the 
 scientist, he who desires to rise to the 
 knowledge of nature through observation, 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 33 
 
 experiment and reasoning; and the man 
 of feeling, of belief; the man who mourns 
 his dead children and who cannot prove 
 that he will see them again, but who be- 
 lieves that he will, and lives in that hope— 
 The two domains are distinct and woe to 
 him who tries to let them trespass on each 
 other.”’ 
 
 There is only one attitude for a relig- 
 ious man to take in this age of science. 
 Let him not stand with closed mind and 
 closed fist in front of the venerable theo- 
 ries and systems of the fathers, deter- 
 mined to defend them to the last breath. 
 Rather let him remember that the Holy 
 Spirit is the spirit of truth, and that he 
 works wondrously in every age. His 
 glory shines not only from the pages of 
 the Old and the New Testament, but also 
 from the Oldest Testament written by the 
 finger of frost and fire in the rocks, and 
 from the Newest Testament as he dis- 
 closes his nature and purposes through 
 the minds of saints and seers who have 
 lived since the canon of the Scriptures 
 
34 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 closed. If we believe in the Holy Ghost, 
 we must believe that more of his light 
 will ever break from every Testament. 
 All light comes from one source and har- 
 monizes with itself; let us receive it with 
 eladness. 
 
 No one believes more profoundly than 
 I doin the faith once delivered to the saints. 
 It has been handed down from generation 
 to generation by a glorious succession of 
 redeemed men and women. The essentials 
 of that faith can be realized in experience 
 and cannot be overthrown. But these un- 
 changing truths are interpreted in every 
 age according to the language and point 
 of view of that period. ‘Therefore the 
 forms of religious philosophy are con- 
 stantly being modified, yet the substance 
 changes not. 
 
 “Our little systems have their day 
 They have their day and cease to be.” 
 
 Science will greatly modify our theories 
 and speculations, she can never disturb 
 the deeper interests of the soul. Man is 
 
INS ANT AGE OR SCIENCE 35 
 
 incurably religious. He isa little creature 
 living in a universe terrible in its vastness 
 and in its power. He asks great questions. 
 He cannot be persuaded that they will re- 
 main unanswered. He will never believe 
 that he has light to find his way amid the 
 things that are temporal, only to lose it 
 amid the things eternal. Confidently he 
 will ever hold that the light within him, 
 and in the spiritual geniuses of history, is 
 the true light, given for safe guidance. 
 
 The tragedy of history has been that the 
 church has so often mistaken the tempo- 
 rary form of her faith for the eternal sub- 
 stance. She has neglected her gospel of 
 love in her fierce zeal for dogma. 
 
 Let us also never forget that priests and 
 theologians and laymen cannot pass judg- 
 ment on the seasoned conclusions of 
 science. Only those are competent to 
 form opinions upon the facts and laws of 
 any department of learning who have 
 made the verification of its truth their 
 occupation. The rest of us must accept 
 the testimony of the competent. 
 
36 - RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 But no changes in our astronomy will 
 put out the stars, and no advance in scien- 
 tific knowledge will ever extinguish the 
 lights of the spirit by which man has 
 always and must ever live. 
 
 “As for knowledge” says Euripides,” I 
 bear her no grudge. I take joy in the pur- 
 suit of her. But the other things are 
 great and shining.” 
 
THE NATURE AND TRUTH OF 
 RELIGION 
 
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 THE NATURE AND TRUTH OF RELIGION 
 
 In front of the Art Museum in Boston 
 is a bronze statute of extreme beauty and 
 suggestiveness. It is the figure of an 
 Indian seated upon his pony, stretching 
 out hands in prayer and adoration to the 
 Great Spirit.. Three orders of being are 
 represented by the sculptor. There is the 
 solid earth, inanimate, insensate. Upon it 
 stands the pony, belonging to a higher 
 order of existence. Made of the dust of 
 the ground, in him is life. He can adjust 
 himself to a physical environment. Yet 
 the beauty of the sun-set means nothing to 
 him, nor the delicate tint of the flowers. 
 The Indian is formed both of the dust of 
 the earth, and of living cells like the ani- 
 mal. But a spark disturbs his clod. In 
 his breast there is the push of an impulse 
 to which the pony is an utter stranger. 
 
40 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 He has yearnings and aspirations which 
 reach above himself. He is aware of a 
 relationship with the Universe. He con- 
 ceives of a Great Spirit not unlike himself 
 —stronger, wiser, eternal—to whom his 
 heart goes out in emotions of awe, rever- 
 ence, adoration. In the dark breast of 
 this primitive man there is a sense—im- 
 perfect, indeed, but real—of a whole order 
 of values and forces, which is as lifted 
 above the animal upon which he is astride 
 as the animal is elevated in the scale of 
 being above the earth. 
 
 Modern science knows the chemical ele- 
 ments of the ground. She tells wonderful 
 stories of the evolution of the horse, fol- 
 lowing his ancestors back through three 
 millions of years. She can even describe 
 the molecular movements in the brain of 
 the Indian. But here science must pause. 
 She has never been able to bridge the 
 chasm between the molecules of the brain 
 and a state of consciousness. The psy- 
 chologist has penetrated very deeply into 
 the nature of man, but there are some 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 41 
 
 facts of that Indian’s consciousness which 
 he cannot explain, and it does not seem 
 probable that he ever will explain. 
 
 The impulse which leads the savage to 
 pray and to worship a Spirit akin to him- 
 self is part of the furniture of human 
 nature. It has maintained itself in every 
 age and in every race,, *You may find,” 
 says Plutarch, “communities without 
 walls; without letters; without kings; 
 without money; with no need of coinage; 
 without acquaintance with theatres or 
 eymnasia; but a community without holy 
 rite, without a God, that uses not prayer; 
 without sacrifice to win good or to avert 
 evil—no man ever saw or will see.” Re- 
 ligion begins in this response of man to 
 what he conceives to be a supernatural 
 Power or Powers, the response leads to 
 an attitude, and the attitude results in ex- 
 periences which involve the whole man— 
 his thoughts, his emotions, his activities. 
 
 This religious impulse may be very fee- 
 ble in some men, for we differ in our en- 
 dowments. Some are blind to color and 
 
42 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 others are deaf to music, and yet the re- 
 ligious response is seldom lacking in any 
 human bosom. The Great Mystery sur- 
 rounds us all and all have some sense of it. 
 
 Now every impulse of our nature, be- 
 cause it has survived in so long and so 
 rough a journey, must serve some useful 
 function in life. We may have within us 
 some scrapped appendages, or organs 
 which were once of use and have now been 
 discarded and are carried as useless bag- 
 gage, but an impulse as vital, as universal, 
 as apparently indestructable as the relig- 
 ious impulse must serve some important 
 purpose in the furtherance of life. What 
 are the chief functions of religion? What 
 purpose does the religious impulse and its 
 satisfaction serve in enabling man to sur- 
 vive and progress? 
 
 Gilbert Murray, in his charming essay 
 entitled Religio Grammatici, declares that 
 the chief purpose of religion is to give 
 liberty. ‘Man is imprisoned in the ex- 
 ternal present: and what we call a man’s 
 religion is, to a great extent, the thing 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 43 
 
 which offers him a secret and permanent 
 means of escape from that prison, a break- 
 ing of the prison walls which leaves him 
 standing, of course still in the present, but 
 in a present so enlarged and enfranchised 
 that it becomes not a prison, but a free 
 world.” Religion is the power by which 
 men have overcome the world. From the 
 primitive man who employed his religion 
 to escape from fear, or bad luck, up to 
 Jesus who said that the purpose of his 
 mission was to give life and life more 
 abundantly, and through all the centuries 
 succeeding, religion has given men release 
 from their prison, from the body of this 
 death. 
 
 More than this, with liberty have come 
 peace, joy, and a consciousness of power. 
 Note the significance of this. Liberty, 
 peace, joy, power, these are the permanent 
 and loftiest aspirations of men. Liberty 
 has been the banner under which the 
 suffering ages have fought. It is the ideal 
 toward which they have toiled. The com- 
 ing of peace on the earth seems a far- 
 
Ad RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 away dream. To get power and joy men 
 search earth and heaven. Yet the men 
 who have that quality which we recognize 
 as religious have as an immediate posses- 
 sion those values which are the aspiration 
 of the race and the noblest goal of history. 
 
 The religious mind has this instant 
 possession because it conceives itself inter- 
 sphered in Something higher than itself 
 upon which it can repose with confidence, 
 and from which comes spiritual vitality. 
 This Something, greater in power and 
 higher in worth, out of which we came 
 and which controls our destiny, faith calls 
 God. From this sense of God issue man’s 
 interpretations of the meaning of life and 
 all his theologies; by it are kindled those 
 emotions which take form in love and 
 worship; it frames the most powerful 
 motives in the conduct of life. 
 
 Take from the religious man his firm 
 conviction in the existence of a great and 
 good God who sustains him in this mortal 
 combat, and you take all glory and worth 
 from life, and choke the chief springs of 
 power. 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 45 
 
 A few rare spirits could still confront a 
 godless universe with pagan courage, 
 striving to build up a moral civilization in 
 the great and terrible wilderness of exis- 
 tence, but the vast majority of men would 
 say “Why fight with these beasts of Ephe- 
 sus, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for 
 tomorrow we die.” 
 
 Is it all an illusion? The question goes 
 to the very roots of our being. Has man 
 projected his own image and his passion- 
 ate desire upon the black and unreplying 
 void above him, or is there, as our faith 
 affirms, a Reality surpassing our noblest 
 thoughts? 
 
 You and I would be untrue to our col- 
 lege training and to the best spirit of our 
 age, if we did not desire above all things 
 else to know the truth. Certainly we do 
 not wish to live in a fool’s paradise, even 
 if it is comfortable. 
 
 “Play no tricks with thy soul, O Man 
 Let facts be facts and life the thing it can.” 
 
 In testing the reality of religion it is 
 well to bear in mind that the question is 
 
46 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 not one regarding the being of a Reality 
 which faith calls God. It needs no argu- 
 ment to prove that there is a vast Some- 
 thing, out of which we came, which influ- 
 ences every action of our lives, and to 
 which at last we shall return. We are as 
 sure of this Other as we are of our own 
 existence. Our consciousness of self 
 makes us aware of an Other than our- 
 selves. The vital question is not, “Is there 
 a God,” but “What kind of a God is there? 
 What is the nature of this Something out 
 of which we have emerged? Is it friendly 
 to us? Does it know anything about us? 
 Does it care for us individually?” The 
 religious consciousness has universally 
 assumed that this Other is not entirely 
 unlike us, and faith at its best affirms that 
 God is righteous, that his purposes, slowly 
 unfolding through the ages, are good, and 
 those who trust in him shall not be 
 ashamed. 
 
 Is this a true insight? Does the evi- 
 dence support the conviction? 
 
 We must remember that each depart- 
 ment of research has its own proper 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 47 
 
 method of verification. What is of worth 
 in music and poetry is established by other 
 means than those employed in a biological 
 laboratory, so we must not attempt to test 
 the validity of a declaration of faith as we 
 would a proposition in chemistry. There 
 is only one way to establish fundamental 
 truths either in ethics or religion, and that 
 is by an appeal to life. If God is found at 
 all, he will be found in human experience; 
 in an experience involving the whole of a 
 man and the whole of humanity. The acid 
 test of life, and life under all conditions,— 
 than this there can be nothing more 
 searching. 
 
 The following considerations have to 
 my mind convincing weight. Man has 
 been a long time in this world, thousands, 
 tens of thousands of years. He is part 
 of the universe. He is woven out of 
 the living tissue of this system of things, 
 and partakes of its character. His body 
 is fashioned in the mould of nature, and 
 his life depends upon his obedience to the 
 forces of the physical order playing 
 
48 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 through him and about him. The ener- 
 gies of the Universe have likewise built 
 up his moral being and made him sensitive 
 toa moral law. He is as vividly aware of 
 the moral order as of the physical and 
 upon equally valid evidence. Of its au- 
 thority his conscience is a witness. By 
 obeying it man achieves those ethical vir- 
 tues which time has proved to be the basis 
 of civilization and prosperity. You can- 
 not find in literature a mind of the first 
 class which is lacking in an instinct for 
 the moral law—its existence, its sanctity, 
 its commanding authority. This is the 
 greatness of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It 
 was the power of Moses and the prophets. 
 By obedience to these ordinances which 
 have their witness in every man and are 
 the frame-work of our social organization, 
 certain virtues have been evolved. The 
 mills of the ages have ground but they 
 have not destroyed them, thus indicating 
 their conformity to the nature of things. 
 These virtues make saints and heroes— 
 the finest products of our humanity. This 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 49 
 
 Power out of which we came has laid 
 down the lines along which we must 
 advance if we would have physical well- 
 being: it has laid the tracks along which 
 we must move to attain the virtues which 
 we most prize: it has also put into our 
 being an ideal of the perfect—a vision of 
 something better further on. These ideals 
 of moral worth did not spring out of the 
 dust of the earth, they did not originate 
 in experience, they transcend it. 
 
 “In man’s self arise 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendor ever on before.” 
 
 Working within us is the push of the 
 Power not ourselves to participate in these 
 ideals of supreme value. Our science is 
 constantly changing, but there never fails 
 a succession of poets and prophets calling 
 upon humanity to catch the vision splendid 
 and to move upward to the heights of 
 virtue. 
 
 More than this, when a man seeks to 
 cooperate with this Power that is work- 
 
50 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 ing for righteousness, he finds that the 
 latent energies of his nature are released. 
 At the close of the war a Governor of one 
 of our states, addressing the returned sol- 
 diers, used these memorable words, “We 
 welded our selves to our duty as by fire, 
 and there stole into our minds a supernal 
 illumination, and into our hearts a mys- 
 terious strength.” This experience is ever 
 reproduced in all who weld themselves as 
 by fire to duty, to truth, to beauty, to 
 righteousness. The illumination and the 
 mysterious strength never fail. “I con- 
 sidered myself,” said John Milton when 
 he threw himself into the struggle for 
 English liberty, “‘a member incorporate of 
 that truth whereof I was persuaded.” 
 When one makes such a complete dedica- 
 tion of himself to truth his brain grows 
 clear, his will strong, and something of the 
 splendor of truth descends upon him. 
 
 The long experience of man goes to 
 show that what we call the moral virtues 
 —righteousness and goodness in all their 
 forms—have survival value. They con- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE TNL 
 
 form to the Nature of Things. When 
 man battles for them he is not struggling 
 in a vacuum, he is sustained. He finds 
 “the Friend behind phenomena” cooper- 
 ating with him. 
 
 Because of this long experience his 
 mind has been so fashioned that he can- 
 not believe that the Supreme Power is 
 lacking in those qualities which are of 
 supreme worth. Shall not he who formed 
 the conscience do right? Men make sacri- 
 fices for righteousness and truth in per- 
 fect confidence that they will prevail. Men 
 assume, instinctively, that the universe is 
 on the side of the moral virtues. They 
 will not act on the contrary assumption. 
 Because this faith lasts amid all changes 
 and discouragements and produces great 
 and shining characters and is fertile in 
 honorable activities, it must be essentially 
 true. Falsehood is not a_ permanent 
 builder. 
 
 This intuitive assumption is a clear and 
 steady conviction of the elect minds of the 
 race. The men who have served most 
 
we RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 faithfully and with the greatest personal 
 devotion the cause of beauty, truth, good- 
 ness are the most certain that these values 
 are wrought into the very constitution of 
 the world and reflect the nature of the 
 Eternal. Men cannot permanently think 
 to the contrary, or act on any other sup- 
 position. The moral virtues are indis- 
 pensable to the preservation of the race. 
 Humanity can no more survive and pro- 
 egress without them than it can dispense 
 with air and water. 
 
 If the Universe is not on the side of the 
 moral ideal, then the finest and noblest 
 minds in humanity have been the most de- 
 luded. Socrates was wrong when he said 
 that “no evil can befall a good man either 
 in this world or the world to come.” The 
 martyrs of every noble cause have need- 
 lessly cast away their lives. Jesus was the 
 most foolish and deceived of all when he 
 died on Calvary to reconcile men to a 
 fatherly God. 
 
 We are certainly put to intellectual con- 
 fusion, if philosophers and seers, who by 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 53 
 
 universal consent are regarded as the 
 noblest exponents of our humanity, were 
 but blind leaders; if the ideals which have 
 been the inspiration and strength of the 
 world do not contain that which is of per- 
 manent worth. We lesser men look up to 
 the sovereign spirits of the race for light 
 and power, and these elect and radiant 
 ones who stand on the very summit of 
 human excellence we find are all looking 
 up—not into the void, but to a divine ex- 
 cellence from whence cometh their help. 
 A conviction which lasts amid all changes 
 and discouragements, produces the great- 
 est characters, and is prolific in noblest 
 activities, must be fashioned of truth. 
 Falsehood, illusion, build neither charac- 
 ter nor civilization. As the Power that 
 worketh in us sustains us in our effort 
 after truth, righteousness and goodness 
 may we not hold the faith that it is true 
 and righteous and friendly to our divinest 
 aspirations ? 
 
 Thus far we have spoken of God as 
 Power. In this form he manifests him- 
 
54 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 self in the physical world, but we are justi- 
 fied in thinking of him through the loftiest 
 symbol we know, which is spirit. The 
 Creator is not less than the noblest of his 
 works. A fountain cannot rise higher 
 than its source. Of the universe as we 
 know it man is the ripest product, and 
 what is highest in man is the best revela- 
 tion we have of what is highest in the 
 universe. When therefore we think of 
 God through the terms of the human spirit 
 we have taken the loftiest symbol we 
 know. We have used our clearest, largest 
 lens to look upon the Everlasting. He 
 may be inconceivably more than our high- 
 est thought; he cannot be less. The term 
 “spirit” is no more anthropomorphic than 
 “power.” And our right to use it stands 
 the test of experimentation. When we 
 try out our daring venture of faith we 
 find that the rational structure of the 
 world is not alien to our minds. In our 
 discoveries we are but thinking God’s 
 thoughts after him. We can interpret na- 
 ture because the intelligence there at work 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 5 
 
 is akin to our own. When we affirm with 
 Jesus that “God is a Spirit”? we have em- 
 ployed the most comprehensive symbol we 
 possess. | The Eternal/as like this’) not’.a 
 being inferior. As Herbert Spencer has 
 so well said: “The choice is not between a 
 personal God and Something lower, but 
 between a personal God and Something 
 higher.” 
 
 But it may be objected, the argument 
 that God is righteous and good because 
 these are forces in the world is a two 
 edged sword. Evil and ugliness are also 
 here, and most patent forces are they. 
 True. But the universe is not indifferent. 
 Two streams, it has been said, flow forth 
 from the Everlasting. One is good and 
 the other is evil, and we should be hope- 
 lessly puzzled as to the nature of the 
 source of all things, did not a third stream 
 go with them—the conviction that the 
 good is superior to the evil. We are so 
 constituted that we believe that the good 
 is better both in value and power. We 
 find that evil is self destroying, the good 
 
56 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 is self perpetuating. “The evil that men 
 do in their lives,” said Mark Antony, 
 “lives after them. The good is oft in- 
 terred with their bones.” It may seem so 
 for a day, or a generation, but it is not 
 true ultimately. The evil that made Rome 
 a cesspool has been absorbed in the earth. 
 The poetry, the oratory, the justice, the 
 heroism of Rome are still a beneficent 
 force. The evils which destroyed Athens 
 have gone glimmering into oblivion; the 
 beauty of her temples, the wisdom of her 
 philosophers, the insight of her poets, are 
 part of the wealth of today. “Only the 
 virtues of the just smell sweet and blossom 
 in their dust.” 
 
 Here is a very interesting and sug- 
 gestive fact of our human nature. Wher- 
 ever sin abounds grace does much more 
 abound. Let an evil be done and immedi- 
 ately reserves of righteous energy are 
 released to meet and defeat the intruder 
 and thus the world moves upward. 
 
 This brings us to what to my one mind 
 is most persuasive evidence that the Power 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 57 
 
 which works in history is good. Samson 
 put it dimly in his famous riddle. “Out 
 of the eater came forth meat, and out of 
 the strong came forth sweetness.” This 
 world of ours is so constituted that good 
 does come out of evil; weakness turns into 
 strength, darkness is transmuted into 
 light. Every sad experience of life is the 
 raw material out of which the wise and 
 valiant spirit of man can fashion wisdom, 
 eoodness, and moral heroism. “There 1s 
 some soul of goodness in things evil,” said 
 Shakespeare, “would men observingly dis- 
 til it out.” This insight of our greatest 
 poet is true, and it is true because there is 
 the soul of goodness at the heart of our 
 universe. The valor of the moral will of 
 man in its struggle for perfection finds 
 latent in the grimmest facts, and stream- 
 ing through the most unpropitious circum- 
 stances, a cooperating spiritual energy by 
 which ugliness is turned into beauty and 
 evil becomes the instrument of good. 
 
 Let me put in a paragraph what I have 
 said so imperfectly in this lecture. As 
 
58 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 true men and students we joyfully accept 
 all the results that science can establish. 
 But science works within very definite 
 limits. She describes processes, but she 
 does not interpret meanings. She prop- 
 erly knows nothing of the ultimate things. 
 But man has moral and emotional claims 
 which his scientific intellect cannot satisfy. 
 He must have unity for his thought and 
 faith. He must build a house to shelter 
 his spirit from the terror of the Great 
 Mystery surrounding him. It often seems 
 pitifully small and inadequate compared 
 with the Vastness, yet he would found it 
 upon a Rock. 
 
 Confronting this great and strange uni- 
 verse he has two distinct and profound 
 emotions. One is that of dependence upon 
 the Power whence he came, which shapes 
 his destiny and which he knows in daily 
 and most intimate experience. The other 
 emotion is that of admiration for some 
 thing higher than himself—for ideals of 
 worth. The questions he wishes answered 
 are these: “Is the Supreme Power one 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 59 
 
 with the Supreme Worth? Has it any 
 moral character and purpose whatever? 
 Are our most shining ideals merely ema- 
 nations of our brains, or are they of inter- 
 est to the Power not ourselves’? We 
 have tried to show that this Power flows 
 through us and through the world creat- 
 ing these ideals of goodness, truth, beauty, 
 testing their validity, proving their worth, 
 and sustaining us in our struggle to 
 achieve them. The Supreme Power and 
 the Supreme Worth are alike expressions 
 of the Reality out of which we came, 
 which shapes our natures and our destiny, 
 which does not leave us without reinforce- 
 ment in our battle for the ideal, and which 
 our faith calls God—righteous because he 
 formed both the moral law and the con- 
 science that responds to it, good because 
 he planted the dream of the perfect in our 
 minds and helps us in our mortal battle, 
 our Father because his thoughts are not 
 entirely alien to our thoughts. Him we 
 reverence because we find liberty, joy, 
 peace and security in the secret of his 
 presence. 
 
60 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 Let me close by using the eloquent 
 words of one of the most famous scientists 
 of the last century, John Tyndall. After 
 affirming, in his memorable Belfast Ad- 
 dress, that man has certain “unquenchable 
 claims of his moral and emotional nature 
 which the understanding can never sat- 
 isfy,” he continues: ““The world embraces 
 not only a Newton, but a Shakespeare— 
 not only a Boyle, but a Raphael—not only 
 a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only a Dar- 
 win, but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, 
 but in all, is human nature whole. They 
 are not opposed, but supplementary—not 
 mutually exclusive, but reconcilable. And 
 if, unsatisfied with them all, the human 
 mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for 
 his distant home, will still turn to the 
 Mystery from which it has emerged, seek- 
 ing so to fashion it as to give unity to 
 thought and faith; so long as this is done, 
 not only without intolerance or bigotry of 
 any kind, but with the enlightened recog- 
 nition that ultimate fixity of conception is 
 here unattainable, and that each succeed- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 61 
 
 ing age must be held free to fashion the 
 mystery in accordance with its own needs 
 —then, casting aside all the restrictions of 
 Materialism, I would affirm this to be a 
 field for the noblest exercise of what, in 
 contrast with the knowing faculties, may 
 be called the creative faculties of man. 
 Here, however, I touch a theme too great 
 for me to handle, but which will assuredly 
 be handled by the loftiest minds, when you 
 and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall 
 have melted into the infinite azure of the 
 Dastes 
 
 These are memorable words. The low- 
 liest as well as the loftiest minds turn 
 towards the Mystery for an explanation 
 of the problems of life and for refuge 
 from its storms, and not only minds of 
 every country, but minds of every age. 
 Four thousand years ago these words 
 were written on a Babylonian tablet; 
 “Trembling one pursued by evil, dash 
 thyself against the bosom of thy God.” 
 Some fifteen hundred years later this cry 
 came out of the midst of Judah; “As the 
 
62 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 hart panteth after the water brooks, so 
 panteth my soul after thee, O God!” Out 
 of the storms of the Latin civilization 
 Augustine exclaimed: “We came forth 
 from thee, O God, and our hearts are rest- 
 less until they rest in thee.” This relig- 
 ious impulse is universal; it is part of the 
 nature of man. Would it have continued 
 vital during all these milleniums of ex- 
 perience, if it had found no valid satisfac- 
 tion? An appetite indicates that some- 
 thing exists to satisfy it. In a world 
 where there is no water there would be 
 no creature that thirsteth. Men would not 
 hunger and thirst for God had they never 
 experienced more than an illusion of satis- 
 faction. Had nothing ever come from 
 “the realms of help” through all the ages, 
 the craving would have died out. 
 
 In associating his mind with the 
 Eternal, man finds that which meets the 
 needs of his moral and emotional nature; 
 his experience is that the Everlasting 
 Reality is concerned with those spiritual 
 values which make our human nature 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 63 
 
 complete and glorious. Only in God does 
 he find life’s greatest questions answered. 
 
 But is Mr. Tyndall correct in claiming 
 for science the knowing faculties and in 
 intimating that the creative faculties, used 
 in our loftiest moments, give us some- 
 thing precious, indeed, but not fairly en- 
 titled to be called knowledge? Does science 
 have knowledge and religion only faith? 
 
 This distinction will be treated in the 
 next lecture. 
 

 
 
 
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 WHAT WE KNOW AND WHAT 
 WE BELIEVE 
 
 In discussing so vital a theme as that 
 which now engages us we must guard our- 
 selves against the tendency to claim too 
 much knowledge. Sir Leslie Stephen as- 
 serted that “‘some theologians define the 
 nature of the Almighty with an accuracy 
 from which modest naturalists would 
 shrink in describing the genesis of a black 
 Decticw ay clatculiivi creates jarten ally 
 and we cannot aspire to throw the girdle 
 of our thoughts around the Everlasting, 
 nor speak too confidently of the ways of 
 One whose thoughts are as far above our 
 thoughts as the heavens are higher than 
 the earth. Human knowledge occupies an 
 intermediate station between omniscience 
 and nescience, with the _ probabilities 
 favoring nearness to the lower level. 
 
68 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 Nevertheless at the heart of religion is the 
 firm conviction that man in his spiritual 
 life penetrates beneath the semblence of 
 things to Reality. He may know in part, 
 but a part he knows; he may see through 
 a glass darkly, but he sees. 
 
 In the days of her bigotry the church 
 asserted infallible knowledge in many de- 
 partments of interest, discrediting science 
 as a black art, the craft of the Devil. But 
 human nature is the same in the labora- 
 tory as in the pulpit, and many scientists 
 today are as bigoted as was ever a medi- 
 eval monk. To many of them “science is 
 all mud and religion is all mist.” What 
 they do not know is not knowledge. So 
 prevalent is the tendency to affirm that 
 life in all its multitudinous activities—its 
 moral ideals, its poetry, its soul-hunger 
 —can be explained by a materialistic phil- 
 osophy that Sir Oliver Lodge a few years 
 ago, in a presidential address delivered be- 
 fore the British Association, thought fit to 
 say to his fellow scientists: “It is my func- 
 tion to remind you and myself that our 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 69 
 
 studies do not exhaust the universe, and 
 if we dogmatise in the opposite direction 
 and say that we can reduce everything to 
 physics and chemistry, we gibbet ourselves 
 as ludicrously narrow pedants, and are 
 falling short of the richness of our human 
 birthright,’ It has taken the church’) a 
 long time to learn that there are many 
 ways to God, and scientists, not a few, 
 have still to learn that the faculties anc 
 the methods they employ are not the only 
 road to genuine knowledge. “Uno itinere 
 non potest pervemire ad tam grande secre- 
 tum.” “Humbug is humbug,” wrote Wil- 
 liam James, “even though it bear a scien- 
 tific name.” 
 
 Yet many men, both in science and out 
 of it, who are neither narrow-minded nor 
 materialistic, are inclined to confine the 
 word “knowledge” to the sphere of the 
 sciences. Mr. Tyndall, in the eloquent 
 words quoted at the end of the last lec- 
 ture, while fully recognizing that poets, 
 musicians, and saints have commerce with 
 a world that is not the proper domain of 
 
70 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 science, but supplementary to it, is care- 
 ful to claim the knowing faculties for 
 science, and to grant to religion insights 
 and experiences, noble indeed, loftier in 
 their range than those given by science, 
 yet not strictly entitled to be designated 
 as knowledge. He is right in the state- 
 ment that fixity of conception is impossi- 
 ble to religion, for she deals with the Inf- 
 nite. He is right in making a distinction 
 between the faculties used in science and 
 those used in religion. He is right in an 
 assertion which he makes in an address on 
 the “Scientific Use of the Imagination” 
 that the “creative” faculties—by which he 
 means the united action of the reason and 
 the imagination—‘“lead us into a world 
 not less real than that of the senses and of 
 which the world of the senses is the sug- 
 gestion, and to a great extent, the out- 
 come.”’ But is he quite justified in con- 
 cealing in the adjective “creative” the fact 
 that the intuitions of the reason lay hold 
 of reality, and in giving to the word 
 “know” its full significance in connection 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 71 
 
 with the report of the senses? Without 
 the “creative” faculties “Newton never 
 would have invented fluxions, nor Davy 
 have decomposed the earths and alkalies, 
 nor would Columbus have found .another 
 continent.” He submerges the faith that 
 is in science under the word “knowing”’ 
 and the knowledge that is in religion 
 under the word “creative.” 
 
 Now knowledge is a very substantial 
 word; it connotes something solid. One 
 Can buildipon ut entrust’ his life) to’ it, 
 without hesitation. It is the sovereign, 
 ultimate word in any department of 
 thought. It is of such inestimable merit 
 that it seems to me the scientists are try- 
 ing to smuggle it into their camp under 
 the cover of very arbitrary and plausible 
 definitions, which they themselves make, 
 and to leave religion something “just as 
 good,” but which does not carry with it 
 the same confidence and power as the 
 word “knowledge.” So valuable is it that 
 they wish the exclusive right to it. 
 
 As I have said, it is the scientists them- 
 selves who lay claim to the use of the 
 
72 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 knowing faculties in their work. Cer- 
 tainly no group of experts in other fields, 
 if asked to define the word “knowledge,” 
 would give it to science as a peculiar pos- 
 session. And surely religion will never 
 consent to have the word dwell perma- 
 nently outside her domain. It has been 
 hers from the beginning, and it is the only 
 word that will accurately describe her 
 experiences. One cannot imagine Jesus 
 of Nazareth admitting: “I know Jerusa- 
 lem and the mountains round about, for 
 my eyes see them, but God and the eternal 
 city of the spirit are the objects of faith. 
 I know the things that are seen, but the 
 things which are unseen I believe.” He 
 never would have assented to Tennyson’s 
 lines 
 “We have but faith, we may not know 
 For knowledge is of things we see.” 
 
 On the contrary he would have affirmed 
 that he knew God better than he knew the 
 temple and the high priest. He would 
 never for a moment have tolerated the 
 idea that the senses bring us nearer Re- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 73 
 
 ality than does the vision of the pure 
 heart. He considered knowledge to be the 
 sovereign reward of fidelity, giving abun- 
 dance to the life that now is and beatitude 
 to that which is hereafter. 
 
 Neither can we imagine one of the 
 elorious succession of apostles, prophets 
 and saints who would think of consenting 
 to the statement that they had more cer- 
 tainty of what their eyes saw and their 
 hands handled than of a Reality reported 
 in their spiritual experience. 
 
 The church thinks of herself as founded 
 upon a rock and not upon the shifting 
 sands of conjecture and hope. She be- 
 lieves that the evidence upon which one is 
 willing to live and die can only be truly 
 phrased in the strongest word of which 
 our language is capable. 
 
 We claim that the difference between 
 the results of scientific experimentation 
 and religious experience is not the differ- 
 ence between knowledge and faith, but be- 
 tween two different kinds of knowledge, 
 each resting on faith, each established on 
 
74 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 experimentation after its own kind. Sci- 
 ence uses the perceptive and the distinc- 
 tively intellectual faculties 1n her oper- 
 ations; religion assumes that the heart has 
 reasons as well as the intellect, that con- 
 science is a doorway into reality, that the 
 imagination and the will are also pathways 
 to truth. Religion employs a larger por- 
 tion of human nature in the discovery of 
 truth than does science. and she believes 
 that she touches a wider environment. 
 
 In order to make our discussion as clear 
 as possible, let us start with a definition of 
 certainty and knowledge. Certainty is an 
 assured conviction that something is so 
 and not otherwise. It is entirely subjec- 
 tive and may be an illusion. Knowledge 
 is to have assurance upon proper evidence 
 that one’s mental apprehensions agree 
 with reality. Subjectively there is cer- 
 tainty, objectively there is reality; the 
 connecting link is proper evidence that the 
 thought tallies with the thing. 
 
 The conviction we are seeking to estab- 
 lish is that religious experience creates a 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 75 
 
 joyous certitude in the breasts of the 
 faithful, the certitude of the individual is 
 repeated in a countless multitude and 
 issues in characters which have all the 
 credentials of truth. These multiplied 
 experiences, these substantial and radiant 
 characters, constitute proper evidence that 
 the inner conviction is not entirely alien 
 to the outer reality. Therefore the saints 
 as well as the scientists are able to say: 
 “We know.” 
 
 Let us ask to what degree science has 
 knowledge. She begins with an act of 
 faith, faith in the general trustworthiness 
 of the sense perceptions, faith in those 
 mental powers which go beyond sense ob- 
 servation into the region where things are 
 intellectually discerned, faith in an exter- 
 nal world that is dependable and capable 
 of interpretation. By precise observation, 
 experiment, and careful deduction she 
 builds up a body of fact and truth which 
 she calls knowledge, and rightly so. But 
 it is knowledge of a limited kind, knowl- 
 edge of phenomena and of modes of be- 
 
76 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 havior, not of meanings, not of ultimate 
 realities. She uses only those aspects of 
 reality which she needs in her work. The 
 laws of nature, as science describes them, 
 represent, but are not identical with, the 
 laws of nature as they really are. She 
 takes only those serviceable features of 
 phenomena which she can employ for her 
 purposes. But her results are substantial 
 enough, and constitute a body of facts and 
 laws sufficiently valid to sustain our 
 houses, our factories, our civilization. 
 But the scientist does not cover the 
 whole of life with his method, or with his 
 knowledge. The poet, the musician, the 
 prophet have other fields of interest; they 
 live in a world as real as his, a world with 
 its actualities perceived by faculties which 
 he does not use, but which they are conf- 
 dent yield valid knowledge. They deal 
 not so much with facts as with values and 
 forces which are spiritually discerned, 
 which are established in confidence, not by 
 experiment, but by experience. We are 
 all aware of this world which is above 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 77 
 
 sense phenomena. We are as certain of 
 the value of poetry as we are of Ford cars. 
 The sighs of love have shaken men as per- 
 ceptibly as the winds of heaven. “Before 
 the saint,” says Neitzche, “the strongest 
 men in history have always bowed down 
 reverently because they divine beyond his 
 wretched appearance a superior force that 
 will match itself against them.” The 
 spiritual energy which passes from the 
 saint and conquers the will of the strong 
 man is as real as the pressure of steam. 
 A transforming power issues from the 
 holiness of Jesus which is as indisputable 
 as a volt of electricity. We are as sure of 
 this realm of spiritual values and forces 
 Comoe cartiupeticatimoutrmiteer, ») Lhe 
 power of character is as much a part of 
 the nature of things as dynamite, and can 
 be equally verified. Buddha, Confucius, 
 Christ founded world civilizations, and 
 the spiritual and moral energies they re- 
 leased are as truly a part of the world 
 order as the Mississippi or the Amazon. 
 Spontaneously and habitually we use 
 
78 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 the word knowledge in connection with 
 these aesthetic and ethical experiences. 
 Witness the forcible words which Huxley 
 wrote to Kingsley: “The more intimately 
 I know the lives of other men (to say 
 nothing of my own) the more obvious it is 
 to me that the wicked does not flourish nor 
 is the righteous punished. But for this to 
 be clear we must bear in mind what almost 
 all forget, that the rewards of life are 
 contingent upon obedience to the whole 
 law—physical as well as moral—and that 
 moral obedience will not atone for phys- 
 ical sin, or vice versa. 
 
 “The ledger of the Almighty is strictly 
 kept, and every one of us has the balance 
 of his operations paid over to him at the 
 end of every moment of his existence. 
 
 The absolute justice of the sys- 
 tem of things is as clear to me as any 
 scientific fact. The gravitation of sin to | 
 sorrow is as certain as that of the earth 
 to the sun, and more so—for experimental 
 proof of the fact is within reach of us all 
 —nay is before us all in our own lives, if 
 we had but eyes to see it.”’ 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 79 
 
 My contention is that if a distinguished 
 scientist, as a result of long years of ob- 
 servation and experience, can affirm that 
 he is as sure of the absolute justice of the 
 system of things as he is of any scientific 
 fact, and is more certain that sin leads to 
 sorrow than he is of the gravitation of 
 the earth to the sun, because it is subject 
 to experimental proof within the reach of 
 every one, then such certainty can be ex- 
 pressed only by the strongest and most 
 dependable word in our language. It 
 must be either knowledge or a more vigor- 
 ous word. Faith, certainty, belief, convic- 
 tion are weaker words; they are not com- 
 prehensive or vital enough for what 
 occurs in our experience. 
 
 With the affirmation of dependable 
 knowledge of material things and of moral 
 facts and forces many stop and decline to 
 go further. God is to them the Mystery 
 whose veil no man can remove. They call 
 themselves agnostics. They contemplate 
 the Mystery with an awe akin to worship, 
 but to the most important and insistent 
 
80 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 questions which the human mind can ask 
 they reply: “I do not know.” 
 
 Yet most men are not content to leave 
 these deep interrogations of the spirit en- 
 tirely unanswered. They cannot be per- 
 suaded that man can know so much about 
 material things and so little regarding the 
 things which concern him most. They 
 cannot believe that this infinitely rich un1- 
 verse has such abundant satisfaction for 
 their physical needs and nothing for their 
 deepest spiritual necessities. Therefore, 
 with the yearning of a pilgrim for his 
 distant home, they turn to the Mystery 
 from which they emerged, and whose aw- 
 ful shadow encloses their lives, to find a 
 refuge in the day of trouble, explanation 
 of the meaning of life, and re-enforce- 
 ment to meet the difficulties of the journey. 
 
 Men need God, they trust him, they 
 seek to learn his will and obey him. The 
 steps one takes in solving his religious 
 problems are much the same as those he 
 takes in solving his scientific problems. In 
 science we trust our sense perceptions and 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 81 
 
 the conclusions of our intellect. In relig- 
 ion we trust our spiritual intuitions and 
 the validity of the claims of our moral and 
 emotional natures. Religious faith is our 
 reason acting bravely in the presence of 
 life’s gravest problems. It is a valor of 
 soul which makes us commit the highest 
 in ourselves to what we believe is the 
 Highest in the universe. 
 
 To give unity to our thought and faith 
 we conceive the Supreme Power which 
 science recognizes and the Supreme 
 Worth which ethics knows to be manifes- 
 tations of the one Reality from which all 
 things proceed. We assume that good- 
 ness and righteousness are not human 
 conventions, but are expressions of the 
 character of God. And when we attempt 
 to form some conception of the nature of 
 the Eternal we know no better way than 
 to do precisely what the prophets of Israel 
 did. We interpret him by his most ex- 
 alted manifestation—the spirit of a right- 
 eous and holy man. We use the highest 
 symbol we possess to frame our thought 
 
82 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 of the Infinite. To us the loftiest spiritual 
 being in humanity—the being of highest 
 worth—must be God manifest in the flesh. 
 The glory which shines in the face of the 
 noblest of the sons of men we take to be 
 the raying forth of the glory of God. 
 
 To Christians the fulness of that glory 
 is seen in Jesus Christ. Because the light 
 which issues from his mind solves our 
 most vital problems, because his spirit, 
 whenever it is reproduced in men, brings 
 the redemption which is humanity’s great- 
 est need, we believe we have found a 
 manifestation of the Everlasting Reality. 
 This light is the true Light, not an illusion, 
 not a temporary flash of splendor, but the 
 steady shining of the Ultimate Truth. 
 
 Now this faith upon which our religion 
 is founded is as bold, as rational, and as 
 comprehensive as any scientific general- 
 ization. Will it stand the test of experi- 
 ence? Can this faith prove its truth by 
 its effects upon life? 
 
 If one man tries it out and finds that it 
 will work, he will have an inner certitude 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 83 
 
 Obits truthiy ile willisayy> Libelievewiy It 
 he finds that his experience has been re- 
 peated in ten thousand times ten thousand 
 lives which have followed the same pro- 
 cedure then he will exclaim, ‘““We know!’ 
 Know, not all about God, but know God 
 to the extent that he comes into human 
 experience, know him as a reality because 
 he produces real effects. For surely vir. 
 tues of highest worth are not nurtured 
 on what is entirely illusion. 
 
 This faith that the universe is friendly 
 will certainly stand the test of experience. 
 Mr. Tyndall gives at the close of his ad- 
 dress) upon, the) scientific’) Use of ithe 
 Imagination” what seems to be a personal 
 experience. ) 
 
 ““Two things’ said Immanuel Kant, 
 ‘fill me with awe; the starry heavens, and 
 the sense of moral responsibility in man.’ 
 And in his hours of health and strength 
 and sanity, when the stroke of action has 
 ceased, and the pause of reflection has set 
 in, the scientific investigator finds himself 
 overshadowed by the same awe. Break- 
 
84 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 ing contact with the hampering details of 
 earth, it associates him with a Power, 
 which gives fulness and tone to his ex- 
 istence, but which he can neither analyse 
 nor comprehend.” He cannot, indeed, 
 analyse and comprehend the Power, but 
 he can analyse his experience with the 
 Power! The “fulness and tone” which 
 come when the reflecting mind associates 
 itself with God disclose something of his 
 majesty and its outflowing energy. As 
 this experience is not peculiar to Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall, but is universal, it shows 
 that quality which the religious man not 
 inappropriately calls the divine grace. 
 When a man vitally associates himself 
 with “that Power which alone is great’ 
 certain spiritual changes take place within 
 him. From being, in the language of Pro- 
 fessor James, “consciously wrong, inferior 
 and unhappy; he becomes consciously 
 right, superior and happy.” Science can 
 trace the process, but only religion can 
 perform the miracle. Emerson gives a 
 similar experience. “It is a secret which 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 85 
 
 every inteliectual man quickly learns, that 
 beyond the energy of his personal con- 
 scious intellect he is capable of a new 
 energy (as of an intellect doubled on it- 
 self) by abandonment to the nature of 
 things; that besides his power as an indi- 
 vidual man, there is a great public power, 
 upon which he can draw, by unlocking at 
 all risks his human doors, and suffering 
 the etherial tides to roll and circulate 
 through him.” If the beauty of the starry 
 heavens above us, the sense of moral re- 
 sponsibility within us, the aspirations of 
 our better natures towards ideals of per- 
 fection, the fulness and tone which come 
 when the pause of reflection has set in, 
 give us no true insight into the nature of 
 that Power which sustains man and the 
 universe, then what do they give us? 
 
 But religious faith sweeps farther and 
 higher than such experiences as I have 
 quoted. It postulates a divine benignity 
 which cares for the individual, and works 
 with boundless grace even through the 
 wrath and terror of the world. Men in 
 
86 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 vast numbers have actually ventured 
 everything on the hypothesis that in liv- 
 ing a life of love they were reproducing 
 in a measure the divine nature, and they 
 have not been put to confusion. If their 
 faith were vain, then when they took the 
 leap they would have fallen into vacuity, 
 but their concurrent testimony has been 
 that they found a Rock beneath their feet. 
 If this faith in a divine Providence were 
 a delusion, then the men who came under 
 its baleful influence would have deformed 
 and brittle characters. On the contrary 
 theirs are the most firm-fibred and lus- 
 trous characters the world has produced. 
 Those who have sent the roots of their 
 being down most deeply into the faith of 
 a divine Love have been the most revered 
 men in history. The men who brought 
 back the grapes of Escol may have known 
 little about Canaan and the processes of 
 grape culture, but they knew that there 
 was soil in Palestine and that it was good, 
 the lusciousness of the grapes was suff- 
 cient evidence. 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 87 
 
 Religious faith would have vanished 
 from the world long ago, if it had put one 
 out of joint with the Nature of Things. 
 If no help had ever come from the Unseen, 
 the impulse to pray would long ago have 
 died out. The saints may be confused 
 and confusing in their speech about re- 
 ligion, but with unanimity they report the 
 same experience. Christians sing in 
 twentieth century America psalms which 
 were written in Asia three thousand years 
 ago. Catholics and Protestant use the 
 same prayers and the same hymns. Their 
 creeds differ, but they touch the same 
 Reality, and experience the same peace 
 and spiritual liberty. 
 
 Reason, acting valorously on the as- 
 sumption that the Soul of the Universe 
 abundantly meets every need of the soul 
 of man, is not duped, it obtains through 
 experience a strong inner certainty, and 
 this inner certainty the saint finds is not a 
 private possession, but is shared by a 
 ereat host whom no man can number. 
 He accepts multiplied experience as proper 
 
88 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 evidence that the inner certitude reflects a 
 Reality and is genuine knowledge. He 
 may not have fixity of conception, but he 
 knows God. 
 
 I listened the other day to a cultivated 
 man who is actually living a life of love. 
 He is practising the incarnation. Going 
 down into the slums, he is living among a 
 vicious and ignorant people for the sole 
 purpose of conforming them to Jesus 
 Christ. By an act of faith he has com- 
 mitted everything he has and is to the re- 
 demptive power of love. Here is faith in 
 a good God put to the severest test. What 
 is the result? He has found there in the 
 mud and scum of things spiritual strength, 
 liberty, peace, and a strong, calm char- 
 acter. He has also learned in that school 
 of tough experience that there is some- 
 thing divine in the most degraded men 
 that, touched by the energies of love, will 
 make them new creatures. After fifteen 
 years of such work could that man be per- 
 suaded to say: “I know the dirt of these 
 streets, but I can only affirm a faith that 
 
IN AN AGE OF §CIENCE 89 
 
 love is of God.” On the contrary he 1s 
 more sure that through the passion of love 
 he has found the Everlasting Strength 
 and Mercy than he is sure of the filth of 
 the street. The only word strong enough 
 to express his experience is the word 
 “know,” and one looking at the granite 
 strength and gentle sweetness of a charac- 
 ter refined in such conditions is convinced 
 that this manhood is not nurtured on illu- 
 sions. His intellectual conceptions may 
 be very limited, but he has drawn his 
 nutriment from Reality. 
 
 What I wish to claim is this: Science 
 does not have knowledge and religion 
 Ssimplymtaitin » Dhevlover,theartist,; ‘the 
 musician know, so does the saint. Relig- 
 ion has always used the word ‘“knowl- 
 edge” freely and always will, because no 
 lesser term expresses her experiences. 
 Both science and religion begin with an 
 act of faith. Both reach results. Those 
 of science are sufficiently verified for a 
 man to base his actions and his civiliza- 
 tion upon them. Those of religion are so 
 
90 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 tested that one can build his whole life 
 upon them with ever increasing satisfac- 
 tion both to his mind and to his soul. 
 
 There is this difference to be noted 
 between scientific and religious knowl- 
 edge. A scientific experiment may be per- 
 formed in an hour and its results demon- 
 strated, but moral and spiritual truths 
 require centuries for their vindication. 
 We believe in liberty so implicitly that we 
 consider no sacrifice too great to conserve 
 it, yet to establish beyond cavil that free- 
 dom of thought and speech 1s better than 
 intellectual servitude would require the 
 whole range of human history. Ina very 
 short time you can prove that two atoms 
 of hydrogen will unite with one of oxygen 
 to form water; but to validate the state- 
 ment that righteousness exalteth a nation 
 demands the experience of many gener- 
 ations. Yet am I more positive of the 
 one than of the other? Shall I affirm of 
 the former, “I know,” and of the latter, 
 “T believe’? Any such distinction would 
 do violence to our convictions and to our 
 habitual use of language. 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 91 
 
 Moreover, scientific knowledge is inde- 
 pendent of the personal equation. A mur- 
 derer can perform a chemical experiment 
 as well as a saint. Religion on the other 
 hand, is more personal. Its knowledge is 
 conditional on character. Only the pure 
 in heart can see God; only the unselfish 
 and obedient can realize his love. 
 
 Our moods have much to do with all our 
 apprehensions of spiritual values. We 
 live on the border line of the physical and 
 the spiritual. If we were wholly of the 
 earth, we should never dream of the 
 higher realities. If we were wholly spirit- 
 ual, we should never doubt them. As we 
 belong partly to the seen and partly to 
 the unseen, vision alternates with doubt. 
 On these conditions we hold our knowl- 
 edge. The perception of ethical and re- 
 ligious values and forces is so vitally 
 influenced by our moral and spiritual con- 
 dition that our certitude is sometimes 
 shadowed. The stars still shine, but the 
 clouds cover them; God seems to forsake 
 us and the walls of the celestial city lose 
 
92 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 their lustre. This condition we recognize 
 and take account of, as we do the mist 
 which obscures the mountains, the ebb and 
 the flow of the ocean. 
 
 As if to counter-balance this we find 
 that religious knowledge is more intimate 
 than scientific knowledge. The mathema- 
 tician knows about his circles and angles; 
 the musician knows much about music, he 
 also knows music. The lover knows love; 
 the saint tastes the very flavor of holi- 
 ness. The scientist knows something 
 about the forces with which he deals; the 
 religious man knows the quality of that 
 which he apprehends; he learns something 
 of the nature of that which produces the 
 emotion. Thus religious apprehension 
 reaches nearer the heart of its object than 
 scientific knowledge. 
 
 In another way religious knowledge is 
 superior to scientific. Science deals with 
 the world out there beyond us. It knows 
 only symbols of reality which are inter- 
 preted to the consciousness through the 
 senses. But when we deal with what 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 93 
 
 takes place in our own inner nature, we 
 send the shaft down deeper into Reality. 
 There, if anywhere, we surprise Reality 
 unveiled. “By being religious,” says Pro- 
 fessor James, “we establish ourselves in 
 the possession of Ultimate Reality at the 
 only point at which reality has been given 
 us to guard.” 
 
 Knowledge is religion’s normal word. 
 Without it her scriptures are tame, her 
 teachings ineffectual, and her promises 
 pallid. “If any man willeth to do his will, 
 he shall know of the teachings”; “Ye shall 
 know the truth and the truth shall make 
 Wonsireca we Uilississite eternal to know 
 thee, the only living and true God, and 
 Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” 
 “Every one therefore which heareth these 
 words of mine, and doeth them, shall be 
 likened unto a wise man, which built his 
 house upon the rock.” Religion is indeed 
 conceived in faith, but 
 
 “The steps of faith 
 
 Fall on a seeming void, and find 
 The rock beneath.” 
 
94 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 These lectures have been concerned 
 largely with our knowledge of God. I 
 cannot close, however, without saying a 
 word about our certitude of redemption 
 through Christ. Most of us are willing to 
 admit that he is the divinest spirit within 
 our view, but his claims are staggering, 
 and we are often sorely puzzled. Is he 
 rightfully the Lord ‘ot our lives? Yes 
 for we must needs love and obey the high- 
 est when we see it. Whether he be God 
 incarnate, or humanity realized, he com- 
 mands us. We must “give the best we 
 have to the best we know.” 
 
 Can he redeem us from the power and 
 the love of sinr The answer need not be 
 theoretical. It is possible to put him to 
 the most searching test. For a month try 
 to reproduce his mind, his purpose and 
 disposition. Give his spirit sovereign 
 control for four weeks, and what will be 
 the result! At the end of that experiment 
 you will be purer in heart, stronger in 
 will, more sympathetic in feeling. You 
 will also be persuaded that his spirit is not 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 95 
 
 only redemptive, but is the most revo- 
 lutionary power ever let loose in your 
 lite’ or fin!) history.) ;Practice; this spirit 
 for a life-time and you will exclaim at the 
 end; “I know whom I have believed, and 
 am persuaded that he is able to keep that 
 which I have committed unto him.” Your 
 ideas about him may be very imperfect, 
 but you will know him and the quality of 
 his manhood. The certitude of his re- 
 demptive power will reach to the very 
 innermost sanctuary of your being. Hor- 
 ace Bushnell, one of the loftiest spiritual 
 geniuses ever produced in this country, 
 said after years of discipleship: “I know 
 Jesus Christ better than I know any man 
 in Hartford.” If you will live intimately 
 within the circle of his influence, you will 
 both know him better than you know your 
 neighbor, and you will have a calm assur- 
 ance that the light that is in him is no will- 
 o-the-wisp exhaled from the swamps of 
 human superstition, but issues from the 
 central throne of Power. You will also 
 find how true are these words of Brown- 
 
 ing: 
 
96 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 “I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 
 All questions in the earth and out of it, 
 
 And has so far advanced thee to be wise.” 
 
 A future existence must be a matter of 
 lofty faith, not of certitude. Jesus had 
 little to say regarding the life hereafter. 
 He did not argue about it, he assumed it. 
 His purpose was to produce in men a cer- 
 tain quality of life which is independent 
 of the flight of time. Truth, righteous- 
 ness, goodness do not belong to the tempo- 
 ral order, and our Lord would have the 
 spirit of man so incorporated into truth, 
 goodness, righteousness, that it would be 
 permeated with their vitality and radi- 
 ance. This kind of life he called the 
 “eternal life’ because it is unrelated to 
 temporal standards, it is fed on the Un- 
 seen. One who lives the eternal life quite 
 naturally assumes immortality, as an 
 architect presupposes space when he pro- 
 jects a building. 
 
 This belief in the future life may have 
 originated, as many students claim, in the 
 savage dreaming of his dead, but the 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 97 
 
 cause of its persistence does not lie in hu- 
 man superstition. It rests on the deep 
 needs of our hearts and consciences. Life 
 as we know it is so tragically fragmentary 
 that we naturally expect its completion 
 elsewhere. Man seems too richly endowed 
 for the short years of his earthly life. If 
 he is only a higher order of animal, then 
 take from him his reason and give him a 
 few keen instincts, take away his imagina- 
 tion and his ideals and put in their place 
 some healthy appetites, and he would be 
 far better fitted for happiness in this 
 world. If there is nothing beyond these 
 hills of time, the Creator has but tor- 
 mented his creature by implanting con- 
 science and a dream of the perfect. He 
 has made man too great for his environ- 
 ment and therefore unhappy. 
 
 We believe, moreover, that the wages 
 of sin is death; we cannot believe that the 
 wages of virtue is dust. Here are two 
 young men in battle. One in obedience to 
 the noblest impulse within him gives his 
 life at the call of duty; the other skulks to 
 
98 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 a place of safety and preserves his life by 
 faithlessness. What a topsy-turvy uni- 
 verse this would be if the wages of virtue 
 is annihilation, and the wages of sin is 
 life! 
 
 Science can neither affirm nor deny im- 
 mortality, but she has opened great spaces 
 for this faith to live in. A man trained 
 to our modern world-vision, gazing back 
 over the long, toilsome, costly process 
 from the fire mist up to man, and from 
 primitive man to our present highly or- 
 ganized society, cannot readily believe 
 that he is contemplating the haphazard 
 whirl of unintelligent forces, a riot of 
 chance! Rather he detects an increasing 
 purpose running through the ages, work- 
 ing towards man and the development of 
 the race. Surely the unfolding purpose is 
 prophetic of an outcome worthy of the 
 process. If materialism is right, and hu- 
 manity returns to the dust from whence it 
 came, and the earth is at last only a burned 
 out cinder; if the struggle of the ages, the 
 prayers of the holy, the sacrifices of the 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 99 
 
 martyrs, the devotion of the brave, ulti- 
 mate in dust and ashes, then we are put to 
 “permanent intellectual confusion.” The 
 ages have toiled and brought forth noth- 
 ing. The Eternal has blown a soap bub- 
 ble, and painted it with wondrous colors 
 at awful cost of agony to the iridescent 
 figures, and then allowed it to burst! The 
 wisdom, the power, the sacrificial love re- 
 vealed in the long and orderly upward 
 movement create the expectation that the 
 culmination will be worthy of the cost. 
 The evolutionary hypothesis gives to 
 this argument another turn. There was 
 a time when the highest form of life upon 
 the planet was a jelly-like mass, floating 
 about in the water. It was without power 
 of locomotion, sightless, senseless, capable 
 only of absorbing such food particles as 
 the primeval ocean drifted against it. But 
 the push of nature was init. As the cen- 
 turies and milleniums passed, life acquired 
 the power of locomotion, it developed the 
 faculty of vision, it accumulated experi- 
 ences, becoming conscious and then self 
 
100 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 conscious; it attained the noble faculty of 
 reason; it distinguished sensations, and 
 choosing between them, became aware of 
 freedom; it formed glorious ideals of a 
 nobler self; it began to crave to be fash- 
 ioned in the likeness of the Perfect 
 Righteousness, to commune with the Infi- 
 nite Goodness, and to crown all these 
 achievements it dreamed of immortality! 
 In this steady acquisition of riches there 
 is a forshadowing of the future. If life 
 in its long upward journey has acquired 
 locomotion, sense-perception, reason, con- 
 sciousness, self-determination, a feeling of 
 moral responsibility, it is not incredible 
 that when it thirsts for immortality the 
 craving is a prophecy that the desire will 
 be satisfied. This faith has 
 “great allies. 
 
 Its friends are exultations, agonies, 
 
 And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.” 
 
 In a brief space let me sum up the argu- 
 ment of this lecture. The contrast be- 
 tween science and religion is not a contrast 
 between knowledge and belief, but be- 
 
IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE 101 
 
 tween two different kinds of knowledge. 
 Religion can use the word “know” as 
 legitimately as science. When we become 
 aware of ourselves we are aware of a 
 Power not ourselves. By cooperating 
 with this Power we can develop charac- 
 ters of moral strength and _ spiritual 
 beauty. Virtue and its transforming ener- 
 gies we know as well as we know any 
 scientific fact, even better for we have the 
 sure test of daily experience. Experience 
 warrants us in affirming that God is the 
 “Power, not ourselves, which makes for 
 righteousness.” We take a step further. 
 Power is an anthropomorphic term, and so 
 is personal spirit, but the latter is more 
 significant, it represents higher worth. 
 God cannot be inferior to the highest sym- 
 bol we use in interpreting him. God can- 
 not be less than personal, he may be infi- 
 nitely more. By faith, therefore, we think 
 of him as a living Spirit operating through 
 the electric framework of the world. When 
 we seek him as the Father of our spirit in 
 whom dwells all that we desire, we put this 
 
102 RELIGIOUS CERTITUDE 
 
 belief to the searching test of life. Thus 
 trusting and obeying we meet with those 
 responses which change faith into an as- 
 surance which often finds even the word 
 “know” too feeble to express the experi- 
 ence. 
 
 We may know the redemptive energies 
 summed up under the name of Jesus 
 Christ, and our deepening knowledge of 
 him will lead to a high faith in the sig; 
 nificance of his nature. 
 
 Science can neither affirm, nor deny a 
 life hereafter, but if man in his long jour- 
 ney has made such marvelous progress, 
 and now aspires to something further on, 
 it is a rational faith to believe that when 
 
 “The white sail of the soul 
 
 Rounds the mystic cape, 
 
 The promontory death,” 
 it will move in brave adventure over the 
 deep until it comes to a blessed country 
 where a glorious company look upon the 
 very face of God. 
 

 
 
 
 
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