The most
civilized people in the world are not so given to these things in their
religious development. We do not care so much about creed as they did a
thousand or five hundred years ago. We do not believe that God is going
to judge us by our intellectual conceptions of him and of our fellow-
men. And I suppose it is true, always has been true as it is to-day,
that the adherent of any particular form or theory of the religious
life has the feeling that, when that is threatened, religion is
threatened; and he defends it passionately, fights for it, perhaps
bitterly, feels justified in opposing, perhaps hating, those he regards
as the enemies of God and his great and sacred and religious hopes. And
yet we know, as we study the past, whether we can quite appreciate it
as true in regard to the theories which I am voicing to-day, that the
truth has never been in any danger, and the highest and finest and
sweetest things in the religious life have never been in any danger,
are not in any danger to-day.

Let me indicate in two or three directions. There has been a class of
thinkers, which has done a good deal of talking and writing in this
direction, who are telling us that the poetry, the romance, the wonder,
the mystery, of the world those things that tend to bring a man to his
knees and to lift his eyes in awe and reverence are passing away; that
science is going to explore everything; that there is going to be no
more unknown; and that, when we have completed this process, one of the
great essentials of religious thought and feeling and life will have
perished from among men. I venture to say to you that there has never
been a time in the history of the world when there was so much of
mystery, so much of wonder, so much of reverence, so much of awe, as
there is to-day. We are apt to fool ourselves in our thinking, and,
when we have observed a fact, and labelled it, to think we know it.

For example, here is this mysterious force that we call electricity,
which is flashing such light in our homes and through our streets as
the world has never known before. The cars, loaded, are speeding along
our highways with no visible means of propulsion. We step up to a
little box, and put a shell to our ear, and speak and listen, and
converse with a friend in Boston or Chicago, recognizing the voice
perfectly, as though this friend were by our side. We send a message
over a wire, under the deep, and talk to London and all round the