570 RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT -IV 



us. We do not live by breathing pure oxygen: we take 

 it diluted with other gases, and mainly with one which, 

 if taken by itself, is deadly. 



This is but a poor and rough analogy, but it seems a 

 legitimate illustration of a fact which we must take ac 

 count of in the whole history of the human race, past, 

 present, and future. 



It will, in my opinion, be a sad day for this or for any 

 people when there shall have come in them an atrophy of 

 the religious nature ; when they shall have suppressed the 

 need of communication, no matter how vague, with a su 

 preme power in the universe; when the ties which bind 

 men of similar modes of thought in the various religious 

 organizations shall be dissolved; when men, instead of 

 meeting their fellow-men in assemblages for public wor 

 ship which give them a sense of brotherhood, shall lounge 

 at home or in clubs; when men and women, instead of 

 bringing themselves at stated periods into an atmosphere 

 of prayer, praise, and aspiration, to hear the discussion of 

 higher spiritual themes, to be stirred by appeals to their 

 nobler nature in behalf of faith, hope, and charity, and 

 to be moved by a closer realization of the fatherhood of 

 God and the brotherhood of man, shall stay at home and 

 give their thoughts to the Sunday papers or to the con 

 duct of their business or to the languid search for some 

 refuge from boredom. 



But thus recognizing the normal need of religious ideas, 

 feelings, and observances, I see in the history of these an 

 evolution which has slowly brought our race out of lower 

 forms of religion into higher, and which still continues. 

 Nowhere is this more clearly mirrored than in our own 

 sacred books ; nowhere more distinctly seen than in what 

 is going on about us ; and one finds in this evolution, just 

 as in the development of our race in other fields, sur 

 vivals of outworn beliefs and observances which remain 

 as mile-stones to mark human progress. 



Belief in a God who is physically, intellectually, and 

 morally but an enlarged &quot;average man &quot;unjust, whim- 



