When Science and Religion thus clash, Science must give way. Mother knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. She had lived longer than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more—some things more than life itself.
Science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. These are the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through Bacca, make it a well. Knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in its hair.
The other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in Boston on the stars. Wonder and awe held the audience as it traveled the stellar spaces with the help of the astounding pictures on the screen. The emotion was deep; the tension almost painful as the lecturer swept on and on through the unthinkable vast, when, coming to his close, he turned and asked lightly, “Now, what do you think of immortality? Is it anything more than the neurotic hope of a very insignificant mote in this immensity?”
The effect was terrific. The scientific smiled. The simple left the hall dazed and stunned. They lost all sense of time and space, they lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. They had been carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven, then hurled to earth. The lecture failed—not of instruction, not of emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. The lecturer may be right—for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for poetry. He may have uttered the last word—for science; but this end is only the beginning for religion.
How much greater an astronomer this college professor than that shepherd psalmist on the far-off Syrian hills! Ranging the same astral field as our scientist, sweeping the same stellar spaces, with only a shepherd’s knowledge, the psalmist’s thought takes the same turn as the scientist’s, down to man, but on different wings,—the wings of poetry:
“When I consider thy heavens,
The work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars
Which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?