nd positive knowledge of conceptions
essentially ideal and poetic--that science, consciously or
unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as
any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its
subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when,
manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or
inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this
feeling makes claims which traverse our knowledge of nature, science,
as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is
against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than
against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her
protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be
taken for what it is worth--as an effort on the part of man to bring
the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as
a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge
of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal
approach.

The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. It is, for
example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the
wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be
remembered that under the circumstances poetry may be the purest
accessible truth. In other influential quarters a similar spirit is
at work. In a remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St.
Andrews in the September number of the 'Nineteenth Century,' amid
other free utterances, we have this one: 'If matter is not eternal,
its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others
dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed
out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material
world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined; [Footnote: Professor
Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of
whose Collects begins thus: 'O God, who by thy mighty power halt made
all things of nothing.] its emergence into order out of chaos when
"without form and void" of life, is merely a poetic rendering of the
doctrine of its slow evolution.' These are all bold words to be spoken
before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch university, while those
I have underlined show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred
text. They repeat in terser language what I ventured to utter four
years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. 'Pro