"I have not come here to make any attempt to settle these differences between us. As a priest of the Church, I wish, with all my soul, that I could. As a man, I know that I can't. But there is one ground at least upon which we can meet as friends, whatever our opinions may be as regards religion and theology—two terms which, I think every one here will agree with me, are very far from meaning the same thing."
"As a priest of the Church, I cannot hear that without protest!" cried a tall, high-browed, thin-featured, deep-eyed clergyman, springing to his feet in the middle of the hall. "If theology, the Science of God, does not mean the same thing as religion, the word religion has no meaning. More dangerous, I had almost said more disgraceful, words never fell from the lips of a man calling himself a priest of the Church of God."
The last sentence was spoken in a high, shrill voice, which rose above the angry murmurs which came from all parts of the hall, but these Vane silenced in a moment, by holding up his hand and smiling as some of the audience had never seen a man smile before.
"I am glad," he went on, in slow, very distinct tones, "that such an objection has been raised so early by a brother priest. It will help us to understand each other more clearly, and so I will try to answer him at once. The difference between religion and theology is the difference between the whole and the part; but theology is not a science, for there is no science of the Infinite. It is only the study of the many different conceptions which men of all nations and races have formed as to the nature of the over-ruling Power of the universes—of all the attempts to solve the insoluble and to answer the unanswerable.
"There are two sayings, one Arabian and one Italian, which I hope I may quote without offence. One is, 'God gives us the outline of the picture, we fill it in. We cannot change the outline, but we are responsible for every stroke of the brush. In the end God judges the picture.'
"The other was the saying of a famous Italian artist, 'Children and fools should not see work half done.'
"Now let us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal problem as this, must we not all confess ourselves to be but as children and fools, since we do not and cannot see even half of the work, but only an immeasurably tiny fragment of it? For this reason I feel justified in saying that those who deny the existence of the Divine Architect of the universe and those who claim to know all about His plans, are, at least, equally mistaken.
"But that, although I have been glad of the opportunity of saying it, is not quite what I came here to say, and, therefore, we will drop that part of the subject. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which—I say it both with wonder and gladness—has produced a very much wider and deeper effect than I could have hoped it would do. That was a sermon preached in a Christian church to a congregation, which, at least, professed and called itself Christian. To-night I am going to ask you to listen to a secular sermon preached from the same text. It will be very brief, because I know that you have a custom, and a very good one, of following discourses with discussion, and as I am going to raise a few distinctly controversial subjects, I want to leave plenty of our available time over for the discussion.