ps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted
religion, finds himself adoring

that Beauty
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world,
Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.

Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know
it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from
the highest Beauty, which is God." They who begin with the cult of
Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with,
or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is
supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our
thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown."

Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is
over all and through all and in all. Truth is one, and scientific
investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the
one Reality faith names God. Science of itself can never lead us beyond
visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith
many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all. Present-day
science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a God who is
no occasional visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception
of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a
Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that
He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces,
like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the
water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of God,
and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of God
always did, in love's cause.

Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as "our more or
less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," helps us to
make clear our idea of God. A philosopher is just a thoughtful person
who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, aesthetic,
scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all
he knows of truth, beauty, right, God.

In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of God, Christian
thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It was,
first, an attempt to hold fast