1879.] 1^1 [Chase. 



The cheerful recognition of the intimate connection between religion and 

 wisdom, was not confined to the early sages. In all historical times the 

 wisest men have felt and acknowledged that it was their highest aim and 

 their highest privilege to read and comprehend even the simplest thoughts 

 of God. The boasted intellectual progress of the last three centuries is rightly 

 credited, in large measure, to Bacon's revival and skilful unfolding of the 

 inductive method ; but the religious reformations of Wiclif and Huss and 

 Jerome and Luther had preceded Bacon and prepared the way, through 

 clearer expositions of heavenly truth, for a fuller understanding of worldly 

 truths. Comte attacked theology and metaphysics, at the outset of his 

 career, with Quixotic zeal and Quixotic blindness ; but he ended by deify- 

 ing humanity as a fit object for the worshiping instinct of man, and by 

 promulgating a system of more arrogant metaphysics than ever bewildered 

 the followers of the haughtiest Grecian sophist. The leaders of scientific 

 thought in our own day, with few exceptions, are believers in God ; many 

 of them, perhaps a larger relative number than at any earlier period, are 

 also devout believers in Christian revelation, and their belief is more 

 weighty because it is not merely traditional, but springs from deliberate ex- 

 amination and conviction . The godless theories and ungodly lives which 

 degrade humanity are due to the ignorance of smatterers, not to the teach- 

 ings of earnest and hardworking investigators. 



Christianity, more thoroughly than any previous system, teaches the 

 essential identity of secular and sacred truth. To the Pharisees who would 

 fain regulate all observances by their own narrow interpretations of re- 

 ligious doctrines, it says : "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man 

 for the Sabbath ;" to the Greeks who ignorantly worshiped the Unknown 

 God, it says : " For in him we live, and move, and have our being;" to 

 those who needlessly embitter their lives by over-anxious thoughts for the 

 morrow, it shows the providence of the Father who watches over the 

 ravens and the sparrows and the lilies and the grass of the field ; to those 

 who would set up their own pride or prejudice as a standard of merit, it 

 says: "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." It invests 

 all days, all acts, all thoughts, all pursuits with a holy dignity, so far as 

 they may be made tributary to the highest welfare of a single individual, 

 and inculcates full consecration in the injunction "Thou shalt love the 

 Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 

 strength, and with all thy mind." 



While truth is one, interpretation is legion. Difference of interpreta- 

 tion does not necessarily imply error in any of the holders of views which 

 may appear to be irreconcilable, unless we regard all partial truth as actual 

 error. Imperfect beings can only gradually be brought towards perfec- 

 tion ; in their upward growth an endless variety of shortcomings may 

 need an endless variety of helps, and the truth which is most helpful, in 

 consequence of the greatest number of possible unfoldings, is, for that 

 very reason, the highest truth. 



If we extend the definition of Reason so as to embrace in its province 



