SECULAR LIFE AND RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 449 



engaged in this struggle would, because of their associations with the 

 word religion, perhaps scorn to call themselves religious men. No 

 one w r ho knows the temper of our age will deny that these efforts 

 are the sphere of a consecration upon the part of many which rises, 

 for them and for the world, far toward the worth of the purest 

 religious consecration. And that the religious institutions and the 

 conscious and professed religious experience of our age is so often 

 indifferent or even hostile to these efforts is a fact which is full of 

 peril to religious institutions and of humiliation to the more truly 

 religious mind. 



Some things have been accomplished. But how slowly have they 

 come to pass. How imperfect are they at best. How many mis- 

 understandings still prove obstinate. How many senseless antago- 

 nisms still remain usnubdued. And how often has this progress, 

 such as it is, been made, not by fearless proclamation of truth 

 through the recognized channels of religion, but in opposition to 

 religious authority, and by means against which some of those pro- 

 fessedly religious have set themselves with all their strength. How 

 often, in particular, has that pursuit of scientific truth which within 

 the last two centuries has been the expression of the idealism and 

 the altruism of so many minds, yet involved the seekers after that 

 truth in embittered conflict with that which was proclaimed as 

 divine revelation. How often have the most devoted scientific 

 spirits been deemed to have no religion, and, in turn, how often have 

 they deemed those given to religion to be incapable of manifesting 

 the scientific spirit. 



The theory of knowledge which has come to us with the idealist 

 philosophy sets us over against nature with much of the same 

 feeling toward nature which men had for that to which they ascribed 

 the quality of revelation. It puts before us history and the human 

 consciousness, that we may inquire of these as oracles, much as men 

 once inquired only of a sacred book. But we have been so used to 

 hearing the ideal and the moral, the divine meaning of human life 

 associated with assumptions which are hard to bring into consonance 

 with our genetic explanations, we have been so zealous in controvert- 

 ing those assumptions, that we have not always seen that human life 

 has a meaning which, even after we have refused to phrase it in the 

 old way, still clamors to phrase itself in its own new way. And 

 then we come face to face with a man like Huxley and I take him 

 only as a type of the great class to which he belongs; if ever there 

 was a man who revered nature and looked to nature with expec- 

 tancy, set his whole heart on obedience to nature, dedicated himself 

 to the effort to increase the happiness of others by bringing them 

 into obedience to nature, that man was Huxley. And we ask 

 ourselves, in what respect does the reverence and expectancy and 



