t nature of things.

Religion, in its higher sense, always involves a practical relation to a
spiritual world which, in its significance, in its inclusiveness, in its
unity, and in its close and comforting touch with our most intense
personal concerns, fulfils in a supreme degree the requirements which
loyalty makes when it seeks for a worthy cause. One may have a true
religion without knowing the reason why it is true. One may also have
false religious beliefs. But in any case the affiliation of the spirit
of the higher religion with the spirit of loyalty has been manifest, I
hope, from the outset of this discussion of loyalty. By religious
insight one may very properly mean any significant and true view of an
object of religious devotion which can be obtained by any reasonable
means.

In speaking of loyalty and insight I have also given an indication of
that source of religious insight which I believe to be, after all, the
surest, the most accessible, the most universal, and, in its deepest
essence, the most rational. The problem of the modern philosophy of life
is, we have said, the problem of keeping the spirit of religion, without
falling a prey to superstition. At the outset of this lecture I told
briefly why, in the modern world, we aim to avoid superstition. The true
reason for this aim you now see better than at first I could state that
reason. We have learned, and wisely learned, that the great cause of the
study of nature by scientific methods is one of the principal special
causes to which man can be devoted; for nothing serves more than the
pursuit of the sciences serves to bind into unity the actual work of
human civilization. To this cause of scientific study we have all
learned to be, according to our lights, loyal. But the study of science
makes us averse to the belief in magic arts, in supernatural
interferences, in special providences. The scientific spirit turns from
the legends and the superstitions that in the past have sundered men,
have inflamed the religious wars, have filled the realm of imagination
with good and evil spirits. Turns from these--to what? To a belief in a
merely mechanical reality? To a doctrine that the real world is foreign
to our ideals? To an assurance that life is vain?

No; so to view the mission of the study of science is to view that
mission falsely. The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the
lesson of the vast significance of loyalty to the cause of science.