eriment will do nothing but make it seem impossible. Thus a
belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential
value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a
defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any
ecclesiastical creed. It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of
the Christian symbol, '_I believe in God the Father Almighty_.' It rests
on the same foundation, neither more nor less. Nor is it too much to
say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship
was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.

This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a
little longer. I will take another passage from Dr. Tyndall, which
presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks
explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of
which truth is only the sacramental channel to us. '"_Two things," said
Imanuel Kant_' (it is thus Dr. Tyndall writes), '"_fill me with awe--the
starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man." And in
the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action
has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific
investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking
contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a
power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can
neither analyse nor comprehend._' This, Dr. Tyndall tells us, is the
only rational statement of the fact of that '_divine communion_,' whose
nature is '_simply distorted and desecrated_' by the unwarranted
assumptions of theism.

Now let us try to consider accurately what Dr. Tyndall's statement
means. Knowledge of Nature, he says, associates him with Nature. It
withdraws him from '_the hampering details of earth_,' and enables the
individual human being to have communion with a something that is beyond
humanity. But what is communion? It is a word with no meaning at all
save as referring to conscious beings. There could be no communion
between two corpses; nor, again, between a corpse and a living man. Dr.
Tyndall, for instance, could have no communion with a dead canary.
Communion implies the existence on both sides of a common something. Now
what is there in common between Dr. Tyndall and the starry heavens, or
that '_power_' of which the starry heavens are the embodiment? Dr.
Tyndall expressly says that