ibution, that is, is
very small. The contribution on the whole is immense, vaster than we
have yet any idea of. But without the aid of the higher Revelation this
many-toned and far-reaching voice had been forever dumb. The light of
Nature, say the most for it, is dim--how dim we ourselves, with the
glare of other Light upon the modern world, can only realize when we
seek among the pagan records of the past for the groupings after truth
of those whose only light was this. Powerfully significant and touching
as these efforts were in their success, they are far more significant
and touching in their failure. For they did fail. It requires no
philosophy now to speculate on the adequacy or inadequacy of the
Religion of Nature. For us who could never weigh it rightly in the
scales of Truth it has been tried in the balance of experience and found
wanting. Theism is the easiest of all religions to get, but the most
difficult to keep. Individuals have kept it, but nations never. Socrates
and Aristotle, Cicero and Epictetus had a theistic religion; Greece and
Rome had none. And even after getting what seems like a firm place in
the minds of men, its unstable equilibrium sooner or later betrays
itself. On the one hand theism has always fallen into the wildest
polytheism, or on the other into the blankest atheism. "It is an
indubitable historical fact that, outside of the sphere of special
revelation, man has never obtained such a knowledge of God as a
responsible and religious being plainly requires. The wisdom of the
heathen world, at its very best, was utterly inadequate to the
accomplishment of such a task as creating a due abhorrence of sin,
controlling the passions, purifying the heart, and ennobling the
conduct."[61]

What is the inference? That this poor rush-light by itself was never
meant to lend the ray by which man should read the riddle of the
universe. The mystery is too impenetrable and remote for its uncertain
flicker to more than make the darkness deeper. What indeed if this were
not a light at all, but only part of a light--the carbon point, the
fragment of calcium, the reflector in the great Lantern which contains
the Light of the World?

This is one inference. But the most important is that the absence of the
true Light means moral Death. The darkness of the natural world to the
intellect is not all. What history testifies to is, first the partial,
and then the total eclipse of virtue that always follows the a