And it is the honest, home-loving, God-fearing and praying mothers and fathers of the past three centuries that have made the Anglo-Saxon race and the civilization of to-day what it is.
The Bible says truly, "to be spiritually minded is life," and to be worldly minded is to lead us back to pagan selfishness, when cruelty was a pastime, and poisoning and assassination were fine arts.
This book of God we call man is bound in imperishable atoms that dissolve into-viewless ether, and are tied together with electric bands as pliable as silk and as invisible as thought, and the spirit they enwrap is as strong and enduring as omnipotence.
The statement is often made to the prejudice of religion that religion has been the cause of most of the wars and cruelties that have desolated the earth since the commencement of human history. This is unjust and misleading. Until the formation of our government, church and state were united among all nations and politics and religion were blended, and a purely religious war was impossible. As to the miracles of the New Testament, if they were all discredited the immaculate teachings of the gospel would remain. The peculiar glory of Christianity is the regeneration it brings to man, putting him under the law of love; and without miracles we would still have vital, uplifting, heaven-inspiring Christianity.
As to the infallibility of science, she has nothing to boast of over religion. Science has been groping her devious way from colossal blunder to blunder, and championing as many absurdities and superstitions through all the ages as ever the religious devotee dreamed or the religious concept propagated. She is still teaching some of the grossest superstitions and incredible absurdities. Science has received nearly every fundamental truth from religion, and is at last steadily developing and proving the true religious concept of the universe, in showing that all visible things are the product of invisible spirit, invisible law and invisible force; that the spiritual and invisible world is the supreme reality; that its Creator and Ruler must be the Father of Spirits, and virtually re-echoes the words of Christ, "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." It teaches universal love, helpfulness and equality, which was demonstrated by Christ when He called for water and washed the feet of those who worshiped Him. This was His last object lesson, so little understood in Christian philosophy. But ethical and psychic science have lifted it to be the glory of perfected civilization, and endorsed the exalted truth, "Let him that is greatest among you be the servant of all."
All knowledge and truth are in a sense inspired revelation from God, whether written in nature or the human soul. There is scientific revelation written in physical facts and recognized by the senses; there is God's revelation written in the secret conscience and reasoning power of man, and they naturally sustain and supplement each other and the revealed truths of the Scriptures.
It may be that the first chapter of Genesis was not intended so much as an infallible record of the divine order in the creation of the world as to teach the vastly higher spiritual truth that creation is the work of God, thus leading men to His worship and away from the lower worship of sun, moon and heathen deities.
The mechanical conception as to the mode of inspiration and revelation tends to give way before a larger conception of the process—that God speaks to man through the experience of the events of life. Thus revelation becomes a living process, and all later history may become a commentary on sacred history, renewing and confirming the primal utterance of God to the soul of man.