erent from
atheism. It leaves the door open. It recognizes that some supreme
reality exists beyond and above man. That reality is not intelligible to
the intellect which analyzes and generalizes. But may it not be
approachable through another side of man's nature,--accessible through
gates like those by which one human spirit recognizes another human
spirit? The evolutionary philosophy, in an enlarged construction, raised
no barrier against the access to divinity through the noblest exercise of
humanity.

Live the personal life toward the highest ideals, with the faithfulest
endeavor,--and peace, trust, hope, spring up in the soul. So does man
find access to the supreme power; so does he find himself encompassed and
upborne by it; so is he drawn into closest union with his
fellow-creatures and with the divine source of all. It is the old answer
and the new; it is figured in the Hebrew's assurance that the Lord loveth
the righteous; it gives strength and courage to Epictetus; it inspires
the confidence of Jesus, the loving and holy soul finding its heavenly
Father; it speaks with glad voice in Emerson,--"contenting himself with
obedience, man becomes divine."

The essential truth is old, but in our day it is being disencumbered of
the husk of myth and dogma which obscured it; while by the growth of new
powers and finer sensibilities in man his access to highest reality
becomes more intimate.

As the evolutionary philosophy has already reaffirmed, clarified, and
enriched the moral life, so, blending with the clearest interpretation of
man's deepest experience, it is to reaffirm, purify, and deepen the
religious life.

One disciple of Spencer has applied herself with great genius and art to
creative fiction. George Eliot is a thorough Spencerian, and she is
constantly, effectively, almost with over-insistence, a moralist. Life
may be ruined by self-indulgence,--that is her perpetual theme. Of wide
range and variety, she is powerful above all in picturing the appeal of
temptation, the gradual surrender, the fatal consequence. Shakspere does
not show the inner springs of the fall of Macbeth or Angelo so clearly as
she shows the catastrophe of Arthur Donnithorne, of Tito Melema, of
Gwendolen Harleth. Readers from whom the threat of hell would fall off
as an old wife's tale, feel the dark power of reality in the mischief
which dogs each of her wrong-doers. More scantly, and with growing
infrequence, there a