each fresh acquisition in
knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed
have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
and sovereign pitifulness.

And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in
new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
much our destiny is s