4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



terms as our fathers' namely, by fidelity to what we see and feel to 

 be true. 



" Few minds in earnest," says Cardinal Newman, " can remain a$ 

 ease without some sort of rational grounds for their religious belief." 

 But it is equally true that half-formed, half-developed minds, which 

 means the great mass of the people of any age, rather draw back from 

 exposing their faith to a light so common, so secular as that of reason. 

 Plutarch quotes Sophocles as saying that the Deity is 



" Easy to wise men, who can truth discern," 

 but adds that the vulgar look with high veneration upon whatever is 

 extravagant and extraordinary, and conceive a more than common 

 sanctity to lie concealed under the veil of obscurity. The average 

 mind clings to the mysterious, the supernatural. Goethe, as lately 

 quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have 

 religion ; and added, let those who have not science and art have re- 

 ligion, that is, let them have the popular faith ; let them have this 

 escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon 

 the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the peo- 

 ple turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, 

 to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the 

 miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus 

 thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of 

 splendor, and pomp, and power which was to be ushered in by-and-by 

 by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, rid- 

 ing upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice 

 within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and 

 familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural ma- 

 chinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life 

 that now is in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the 

 heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest 

 to learn. 



But we must learn it sooner or later. There surely comes a time 

 when the mind perceives that this world is the work of God also and 

 not of devils, and that in the order of Nature we may behold the ways 

 of the Eternal ; in fact, that God is here and now in the humblest and 

 most familiar fact, as sleepless and active as ever he was in old Judea. 

 This perception has come and is coming to more minds to-day than 

 ever before this perception of the modernness of God, of the modern- 

 ness of inspiration, of the modernness of religion ; that there was 

 never any more revelation than there is now, never any more miracles 

 or signs and wonders, never any more conversing of God with man, 

 never any more Garden of Eden, or fall of Adam, or thunder of Sinai, 

 or ministering angels, etc.; in fact, that these things are not historical 

 events, but inward experiences and perceptions perpetually renewed or 

 typified in the growth of the race. This is the modern gospel ; this 

 is the one vital and formative religious thought of modern times. 



