Whether one Mason in a thousand to-day apprehends and realizes this fact, has nothing whatever to do with the real question. The evidence is there, and the indifference or superficial intelligence of numbers cannot alter it.
CHAPTER XI
CONCEPTIONS AND PORTENTS OF AN AVATAR
The conflict between Science and Religion has been thoroughly thrashed out during the last half century, and the “reign of law,” and orderly, and progressive evolution, have made for themselves a habitation and a name that nothing is likely to overthrow.
It is recognized that every effect has a sufficient and a commensurate cause, not en bloc, but in matter, energy, mind, and spirit. Action and reaction are definite mathematical processes. The parallelogram of force tends everywhere to equilibrium and secures further action and new processes under universal law.
The “special creation” theory—everything made out of nothing by a personal God—is no longer regarded as tenable by intelligent individuals, though miracle and special providence are often included in accounting for the vicissitudes of life, just as the so-called scientist superficially and flippantly uses the word “coincidence,” as though it really explained anything.
“The rational order that pervades the universe,” as Prof. Huxley defined the concept and aim of scientific discovery, has steadily gained ascendancy, until it dominates and measures individual intelligence.
The criticism is still occasionally made that this means Pantheism, overlooking the fact that in all mythologies and cosmologies, an ideal and pure theism was recognized as lying back of and beyond the pantheons of the gods and the deification of the powers of Nature.