relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is
true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as
your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no
cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a
great reality, one of "the many which change and pass," a spot in
boundless space, "a chapel in the infinite".

For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true
in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in
agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins
discord--sure sign of error--the confusion and strife of tongues, the
jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way
in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the
veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously
reaching--

_Tendentes manus ripae ulterioris amore?_

And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of
tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in
our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its
departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the
Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every
new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being
who "is for ever reason".

But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it
fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and
theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is
passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science
is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology. And
then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about
explaining how that the "God of knowledge" [1] has much in common with
their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of
infallible texts and articles of religion, a _modus vivendi_ may be
arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on
at every Church Congress--men who know in their hearts that the
"inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly,
irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue
to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings,
glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what
they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".

Science and relig