450 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: SOCIAL 



obedience and consecration which he felt toward nature differ from 

 that which a man offers to God? Is it not a part of that which the 

 most truly religious man offers to God? It is, indeed, the reverence 

 of the child of light. But then, true religion is also the reverence of 

 children of the light. And God is light, and in him is no darkness 

 at all. It is a reverence without fear. But in true religion perfect 

 love casteth out fear. It is a reverence for law, for intelligible 

 sequence, an inviolable ground of confidence that nothing in the 

 universe can ever be capricious or arbitrary. But for true religion 

 also, with God there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. 

 The religious man would say that he was devoted to the truth. But 

 did this man falter in his devotion to the truth? The religious 

 man would serve others with his truth. But did not this man also 

 wish to ameliorate men's lot and to exalt their lives by bringing 

 them into unwavering obedience to the truth? One has a feeling 

 that the difference between such a man as this and the traditional 

 moralist and man of religion is that the latter calls by different names 

 things which are just as real to the former under the names which 

 he has coined for them. If the one does not go quite so far as the 

 other, yet, so far as he does go, every step is real, and every advance 

 solid and secure. 



The very best aspect of much of religious thought in our own day 

 is its willingness to own how much there is that we do not know. 

 It seems strange that that very department of life and thought which 

 you would suppose brought men closest to the sense of the unfath- 

 omed mystery which surrounds our being, should have been so ready 

 to assert that for religion there was little or no mystery. It is sad 

 that the professedly religious should have been the very men who, 

 touching things immortal and eternal, have sometimes allowed them- 

 selves the greatest license of affirmation. No one can deny that it 

 is a gain for religion that the humble confession of much ignorance 

 goes halfway to meet the confession of the limits of knowledge on 

 the part of those who have sometimes been rated as irreligious. 

 But if the sense for mystery and the loving trust that at the depth 

 of that mystery is nothing arbitrary, if the confidence that the 

 Eternal will not put us to confusion is religion, then it cannot be 

 denied that some of the foremost of our men of science have showed 

 that religion. If devotion to the pursuit of truth, and allegiance 

 to it when discovered, is the criterion, then it cannot be said that 

 the theologians have had a monopoly of this kind of religion. If 

 the zeal to spread the truth and the joy of bringing others into its 

 allegiance, and so into peace and harmony and blessedness, is the 

 essence of missions, then it cannot be said that the only missionaries 

 of the truth are those who get called by that name. And if the 

 life of discipline and of responsibility is the witness to morals, then 



