SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 161 



of verification by the reason or by experience. Truth has many phases, 

 and reaches us through many channels. There is a phase of truth which 

 is apprehended by what we call taste, as poetic truth, literary truth ; 

 another phase which is felt by the conscience, as moral truth ; and still 

 another, which addresses the soul as the highest spiritual and religious 

 truths. All these are subjective truths, and may be said to be quali- 

 ties of the mind, but they are just as real for all that as the objective 

 truths of science. These latter are the result of a demonstration, but 

 the former are a revelation in the strict sense. Such a poet as Words- 

 worth, such a writer as Emerson, speaks to a certain order of minds. 

 In each case there is a truth which is colored by, or rather is the product 

 of the man's idiosyncrasy. In science we demand a perfectly colorless, 

 transparent medium ; the personality of the man must be kept out of 

 the work, but in poetry and in general literature the personality of the 

 man is the chief factor. The same is true of the great religious teach- 

 ers ; they give us themselves. They communicate to us, in a measure, 

 their own exalted spirituality. The Pauline theology, or the theology 

 which has been deduced from the teachings of Paul, may not be true 

 as a proposition in Euclid is true, but the sentiment which animated 

 Paul, his religious fervor, his heroic devotion to a worthy cause, were 

 true, were real, and this is stimulating and helpful. Shall we make 

 meat and drink of sacred things ? Shall we value the Bible only 

 for its literal, outward truth ? Convince me that the historical part 

 of the Bible is not true, that it is a mere tissue of myths and super- 

 stitions, that none of those things fell out as there recorded ; and yet 

 the vital, essential truth of the Bible is untouched. Its morals, its 

 ethics, its poetry are forever true. Its cosmology may be entirely un- 

 scientific, probably is so, but its power over the human heart and soul 

 remains. Indeed, the Bible is the great deep of the religious senti- 

 ment, the primordial ocean. All other expressions of this sentiment 

 are shallow and tame compared with the briny deep of the Hebrew 

 Scriptures. What storms of conscience sweep over it ; what upreach- 

 ing, what mutterings of wrath, what tenderness and sublimity, what 

 darkness and terror are in this book ! What pearls of wisdom it 

 holds, what gems of poetry ! Veiily, the Spirit of the Eternal moves 

 upon it. Whether, then, there be a personal God or not, whether our 

 aspirations after immortality are well founded or not, yet the Bible is 

 such an expression of the awe, and reverence, and yearning of the 

 human soul in the presence of the facts of life and death, and of the 

 power and mystery of the world, as pales all other expression of these 

 things ; not a cool, calculated expression of it, but an emotional, re- 

 ligious expression of it. To demonstrate its divergence from science is 

 nothing ; from the religious aspirations of the soul it does not diverge. 

 What I wish to say, therefore, is that we are conscious of emotions 

 and promptings that are of deeper birth than the reason, that we are 

 capable of a satisfaction in the universe quite apart from our exact 



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