420 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 



Through religious promptings the little cosmos of man's own soul 

 has responded to the greater cosmos of the wide, wide world. Thus 

 it comes about that religion is ancestress of the sciences. Chemistry 

 springs from alchemy, the child of early religion; astronomy from 

 astrology; pharmacy and the healing art from sorcery. Religion, 

 standing before the mysteries of nature with an inquiring heart, 

 opened the way for all knowledge of nature. So far, then, from there 

 being an antagonism between the true religious spirit and the true 

 scientific spirit, these are identical. It is the attitude of responsive- 

 ness, of obedience, the willingness that the message nature brings may 

 speak what it wishes. Religion without inquiry has lost the primal 

 religious spirit, and science without belief in the unity of things is 

 without a rational basis; and while religionists have sometimes per- 

 secuted the spirit of inquiry as hostile to that of faith, and scientists 

 have ridiculed religionists as hostile to the spirit of investigation, it 

 still remains true that the uniform and irresistible influence of religion 

 has been upon the side of the advancement of human knowledge. 

 It says, with one of the richest religious spirits of the age: 



" Let knowledge grow from more to more, 

 But more of reverence in us dwell, 

 That mind and soul, according well, 

 May make one music as before, 



" But vaster. We are fools and slight. 

 We mock thee when we do not fear, 

 Help thy foolish ones to bear, 

 Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light." 



Religion has also done more than all other agencies to disclose 

 man's proper relation to his fellow men. The sense of the dignity 

 and importance of man, his significance as an immortal being, the 

 sense of obligation toward him as man - - all this has been the fruit- 

 age of religion, more especially of the Christian religion, which, it 

 may be said, was first in discovering the individual in the deepest 

 and richest sense, as of infinite value in himself, as the religious unit, 

 as deserving and demanding to be free. Christianity achieved this, 

 however, not by discovering a new religious principle, but by univer- 

 salizing and unfolding that which was in germ in the religious nature 

 first implanted in the human soul. From the lowest forms of blood 

 brotherhood through a totem, or a kindred animal, up to the very 

 highest conceptions of brotherly love as taught by Jesus and his 

 apostles, religion has kept alive the sense of man's responsibility to 

 man. The application of this principle has often been exceedingly 

 narrow; malice and bloodshed have been born of religious devotion, 

 and yet this only proves the truth of the claim, for brotherhood 

 and obligation always ceased where the sense of religious solidarity 

 ended. A man was a brother if he worshiped the same God, and he 



