630 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing the force of example, by accumulating on the conscience reiterated 

 touches of a new moral color, and by bringing to bear from above the 

 power of an acknowledged ideal, and (if possible) from around the 

 simultaneous influence of a similarly aifected environment ? 



Baptize now all these truths, translate them into the ordinary cur- 

 rent language of the Church, and you have simply neither more nor 

 less than the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as carbon is carbon, whether 

 it be presented as coal or as diamond, so are these high and man-redeem- 

 ing verities — about the inscrutable " I am," and his intelligible pre- 

 sentment in a strangely unique Son of man, and the transmuting 

 agency of a brotherhood saturated with his Spirit and pledged to keep 

 his presence ever fresh and effective — verities still, whether they take 

 on homely and practical or dazzling and scientific forms. And the fool- 

 ish man is surely he who, educated enough to know better, scorns the 

 lowly form, and is pedantic enough to suggest the refinements of the 

 lecture-room as suitable for the rough uses of everj'-day life. A man of 

 sense will rather say : Let us by all means retain and — with insight and 

 trust — employ the homely traditional forms of these sublime truths : let 

 us forbear, in charity for others, to weaken their influence, and so to 

 cut away the lower rounds of the very ladder by which we ourselves 

 ascended : and let us too, in mercy to our own health of character, de- 

 cline to stand aloof from the world of common men, or to relegate awav 

 among the lumber of our lives the t'Trea (pcovavra avviroiaiv * that we 

 learned of simple saintly lips in childhood. Rather, as the Son of 

 MAN hath bidden us, we will " bring out of our treasures things both 

 new and old " ; will remember, as Aquinas taught, that " nova nomina 

 antiquam fidem de Deo significant " ^ ; and will carry out in practice that 

 word well spoken in good season, " It is not by rejecting what is for- 

 mal, but by interpreting it, that we advance in true spirituality." ^ 



II. On the other hand, if men of science are to be won back to the 

 Church, and the widening gulf is to be bridged over which threatens 

 nowadays the destruction of all that we hold dear, it can not be too 

 often or too earnestly repeated, The Church must not jyart company 

 with the loorld she is commissioned to evangelize. She must awake 

 both from her renaissance and her mediseval dreams. To turn over on 

 her uneasy couch, and try by conscious effort to dream those dreams 

 again, when daylight is come and all the house is fully astir, this surely 

 were the height of faithless folly. An animating time of action is come, 

 a day requiring the best exercise of skill and knowledge and moral 

 courage. Shall we hear within the camp, at such a moment as this, a 

 treasonable whisper go round : " By one act of mental suicide we may 

 contrive to escape all further exertion ; science is perplexing, history 

 is full of doubts, psychology spins webs too fine for our self-indulgence 



' Words that have a meaning for those who understand. 

 * The new terms signify the ancient faith concerning God. 

 3 " The Patience of Hope," p. 70. 



