will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling
that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in
store.

What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would
be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has
happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in
another. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of
events to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole
inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not
metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised
land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one
which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
himself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,
preached to the world.

Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
for a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their
imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
existen