In the last generation the progress of intelligent examination into nature's secrets has been exceedingly rapid. During my active ministry I was hardly aware of it, for though an assailant of the popular religion, a champion of the freest thought, I was a defender of the current religious ideas; since leaving the profession, the significance of the mental revolution that is taking place, has been more fully revealed to me. The advance has approached very near to the heart of the citadel. The questions under discussion are fundamental ones, the existence of a self-conscious deity, the fact of personal continuance beyond the grave, the line of distinction between "material" and "spiritual" things. The dispute hangs on invisible threads of logic. The conservatives occupy positions which radicals of thirty years back could not assume.
The next step in the development of free thought must be toward the realization of all the ideal supports of mankind, the spiritualizing of the secular, the lifting into heavenly places of this world's activity, the transfiguration of our common life. If by religion is understood the striving after perfection in intellectual things by the untrammelled pursuit of knowledge, in social concerns by the exercise of fraternal kindness, in the spiritual world by aspiration towards a complete surrender to natural law, every free thinker will encourage that and will do what he can to promote it. That there is no final truth discoverable must be admitted, but such a confession need not trouble those who look manfully forward to a future of new discoveries, and gird themselves to remove all obstacles to the knowledge of the world they live in.
Robert Browning in his "Paracelsus," published in 1835, anticipates the doctrine of evolution.
Thus He dwells in all,
From life's minute beginnings, up at last
To man—the consummation of this scheme
Of being—the completion of this sphere
Of life; whose attributes had here and there
Been scattered o'er the visible world before,
Asking to be combined.
In 1836, Emerson in his "Nature," reiterated this grand prophecy:
A subtle chain of countless rings,
The next unto the farthest brings,
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages, the rose;
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
In 1867, science had gone so far that it could announce the Unity of Creation; the absolute Order and Law; one continuous Force; Progress as the end of life. The eternal beauty existed for those who had eyes to see. On this foundation the human heart, with its qualities of mercy, pity, peace, and love, its sentiments of justice and equity, its hunger for advance, its idea of goodness, built up a very noble and benignant conception of deity and the sure hope of moral perfection.