What is that event? Unless a man is prepared to say that the present chaotic condition of religious thought is to perpetuate itself, or that we are to revert to the ideal of mediaevalism—a world iron-bound by the dogmatism of self-appointed representatives of "all truth,"—or unless we are to expect a mental paralysis consequent upon a universal scepticism, there must be some definite bourne for which the forces now at work in humanity are making. We are not able to believe in the perpetuity of an unstable equilibrium in the world of mind any more than in the universe of matter, nor does history show any warrant for the expectation that the world will return to the discarded ideal of a mediaeval theocracy, nor does the language of modern agnosticism, with its hesitations and falterings, encourage one to believe that therein is a solution, complete and final, of those obstinate questionings which beset us. No; we believe with Kant in the indestructibility of the religious sentiment. We hold that if the soul of man have not whereon to feed, it will feed upon itself to its own destruction. We are persuaded that the Infinite which is necessary to explain the finite, is alone adequate to satisfy its desires. Our faith is in a "religion within the boundaries of mere reason".
In the first place, its beliefs are the one element of truth in all the "little systems" of this and of all time. It is here they touch the confines of the eternal. It is in this centre of changeless truth that all their wandering, broken lights do meet. This is the one reality behind the phantoms and phenomena wherewith they have been perplexing and confusing man's thoughts; it is at the same time the great ideal, the passion for which is the star of life.
What a majestic source of unity is there here! The soul positively thrills at the thought of the boundless possibilities of good which centre in this conception of religion. That which the faiths of the world aspired to do, might hope to become an accomplished fact did their votaries believe with Shelley that only
The One remains, the many change and pass;
did they obey the ancient prophet's command, "Depart from your idols". For what are all the current creeds and orthodoxies of every age and land but so many "idols of the market place," veritable simulacra or images of something ineffable, beyond the power of man's mind to completely conceive, or of his stammering tongue to utter? They served their purpose in the childhood of humanity, they were schoolmasters to train it to higher things, tabernacles of skins wherein to enshrine the Holy of Holies in rude and uncultured times. But now that humanity is reaching the full stature of its manhood, is it not time to preach from the house-tops what philosophers have been thinking ever since the emancipation of European intellect, aye and before it too, in the great Moorish schools, which sprung up before the scholasticism of the middle ages? Is it not time that intelligent clergymen of every school in Christendom should openly declare in their pulpits what they think, believe and discuss in the privacies of their studies?
If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a great reality, one of "the many which change and pass," a spot in boundless space, "a chapel in the infinite".
For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins discord—sure sign of error—the confusion and strife of tongues, the jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously reaching—
Tendentes manus ripae ulterioris amore?
And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being who "is for ever reason".
But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology. And then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about explaining how that the "God of knowledge" [1] has much in common with their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of infallible texts and articles of religion, a modus vivendi may be arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on at every Church Congress—men who know in their hearts that the "inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly, irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings, glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".