ool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy.
Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor
Ptolemy without the Chaldees; and as it is with the
minor sciences, so far more is it with the science of
sciences--the science of life, which has grown through
all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of
the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present
which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it,
we shall never understand it, till we have learnt to see
in that past, not error but instalment of truth, hard
fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic
effort. The promised land is smiling before us, but
we may not pass over into possession of it while the
bones of our fathers who laboured through the
wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the
unclean birds; we must gather them and bury them,
and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of
their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph.
If Christianity really is passing away, if it has done its
work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back
from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for
our affectionate acknowledgment, not for our heaping
contempt on what it is, but for our reverent and patient
examination of what it has been, that it will be content
to bid us farewell, and give us God speed on our
further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions certain broad
phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in
the highest thought extant at the time of their origin;
the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it.
It grows through a long series of generations into the
heart and habits of the people; and so long as no
disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the
centre of it survives; a healthy, vigorous, natural life
shoots beautifully up out of it. But at last the idea
becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit
petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while quite
new questions rise among the thinkers, and ideas enter
into new and unexplained relations. The old formula
will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing;
and habit and superstition cling to the past, and policy
vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as
serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly,
and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
symbolism becomes at last no better than "a whited
sepulchre full of de