xliv Centennial Anniversary 



tude and idleness. The contemplation of his own attributes might 

 seem a fitting employment for a Hindoo Brahm, It hardly fits the 

 character of the Heavenly Father, of whom we are told that he 

 " worketh hitherto." 



In the last suggestion I have ventured outside the realm of 

 science. But most men are not so constituted that they can carry 

 their scientific and their philosophical and religious beliefs in com- 

 partments separated by thought-proof bulkheads. Scientific and 

 philosophic and religious thought, in the individual and in the 

 race, must act and react upon each other. It was,therefore, inev- 

 itable, that our century of scientific progress should disturb the 

 religious beliefs of men. When conceptions of the cosmos, with 

 which religious beliefs had been associated, were rudely shattered, 

 it was inevitable that those religious beliefs themselves should 

 seem to be imjDcrilled. And so, in the early years of the century, 

 it was said, " If the world is more than six thousand years old, the 

 Bible is a fraud, and the Christian religion a dream." And later, 

 it was said, " If physical and vital forces are correlated with each 

 other, there is no soul, no distinction of right and wrong, and no 

 immortality." And again it was said, " If species originate by evolu- 

 tion, and not by special creation, there is no God." So it had been 

 said centuries before, " If the earth revolves around the sun, Chris- 

 tian faith must be abandoned as a superstition." But in the nine- 

 teenth century, as in the sixteenth, the scientific conclusions won 

 their way to universal acceptance, and Christian faith survived. 

 It showed a plasticity which enabled it to adapt itself to the 

 changing environment. The magically inerrant Bible may be 

 abandoned, and leave intact the faith of the church in a divine 

 revelation. The correlation of forces acting in the human cere- 

 brum with those of inorganic nature may be freely admitted ; and 

 yet we may hold that there are in the universe other forms of 

 causation than physical energy, and that the inexpugnable belief 

 of moral responsibility is more valid than the strongest induction. 

 The " carpenter God " of the older natural theology may vanish 

 from a universe which we have come to regard as a growth and 

 not a building; but there remains the immanent Intelligence 



" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean, and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; " — 



the God in whom " we live and move and have our being." 



