him have his talk out; if
nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be glad to hear them,
but if you, the reader, find the same questions in your own mind,
you need not be afraid to see how they shape themselves in another's
intelligence. Do you recognize the fact that we are living in a new
time? Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing
as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in
upon the shore. The courtiers of King Canute (I am not afraid of the old
comparison), represented by the adherents of the traditional beliefs
of the period, move his chair back an inch at a time, but not until his
feet are pretty damp, not to say wet. The rock on which he sat securely
awhile ago is completely under water. And now people are walking up and
down the beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair
of King Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are
looking on, at the rate in which it is edging backward. And it is quite
too late to go into hysterics about it.

The shore, solid, substantial, a great deal more than eighteen
hundred years old, is natural humanity. The beach which the ocean of
knowledge--you may call it science if you like--is flowing over, is
theological humanity. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the
teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel. (I
leave the interval wide for others to make narrow.)

The doctrine of heritable guilt, with its mechanical consequences, has
done for our moral nature what the doctrine of demoniac possession
has done in barbarous times and still does among barbarous tribes for
disease. Out of that black cloud came the lightning which struck the
compass of humanity. Conscience, which from the dawn of moral being had
pointed to the poles of right and wrong only as the great current of
will flowed through the soul, was demagnetized, paralyzed, and knew
henceforth no fixed meridian, but stayed where the priest or the council
placed it. There is nothing to be done but to polarize the needle over
again. And for this purpose we must study the lines of direction of all
the forces which traverse our human nature.

We must study man as we have studied stars and rocks. We need not go,
we are told, to our sacred books for astronomy or geology or other
scientific knowledge. Do not stop there! Pull Canute's chair back fifty
rods at once, and do not wait until he is wet to the knee