“Ah, yes—all very fine. We shall be having Madonnas and rosaries and graven images in our English churches next,” said the eldest sister somewhat confusedly.
“He seemed to me a conscientious young man, very much in earnest, I should have said,” observed the younger sister humbly.
“Of course, they take that tone; that is the very danger of it,” answered the elder lady. “I really must ask the Rector to be on his guard.”
And yet by another group seated just across the aisle the stranger’s sermon had been criticised in a very different fashion. By some among his hearers his views were pronounced to be, not too “high,” or “leading to Rome,” but dangerously “broad.”
“I dislike those allusions to ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ in the pulpit. It is not the place for science; our preachers should keep to the Bible, and not give heed to all the talk of the day about matters which have nothing to do with religion,” said an elderly gentleman dogmatically.
His companion smiled; they, too, were walking down the street. “Yes, religion or teachers of religion get rather out of their depth when they touch upon science, certainly,” he said.
“But if science be true, and religion be true, truths cannot disagree,” said a young girl, who was walking between the two, her bright intelligent face raised to the last speaker, her brother, as he spoke. “You are a very clever and learned man, Gerald, and I am only a very young and ignorant girl, but yet I feel you are wrong, and I never felt this more intensely than when listening to this stranger this morning. Why should we refuse to believe what we cannot understand? Is it not the very height of presumption, and even stupidity, to do so? I cannot remember his words, but they seemed to me to say it as I have never heard it said before. And—I hoped you felt it so, too.”
But the philosopher only shook his head. The two were some paces in front of the old gentleman by now; they knew that such talk annoyed him, hedged in, in his “orthodoxy.”
“I am glad if you were pleased, my dear child,” said the brother; “but I must keep to my old opinion. Reality and dreams cannot be reconciled. We can only know that which we have experience of. Still, I allow that he put it in rather an original way.”
“You mean,” said the girl, eagerly, “when he said that our refusing to believe in God and the spiritual universe, because we cannot see and touch them, is like a deaf-mute refusing to believe in music—that we complain of the things of God not being proved and explained to us before we have learned the alphabet of the spiritual language.”