8 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



universe, reconciling his incompleteness and his 

 failures with its apparent sternness and inexorableness, 

 is called the Son. 



Some men lay more weight on one of these aspects 

 than on the others. I know a clergyman of the 

 Church of England who, on being reproached during 

 a theological argument with failure to pay sufficient 

 respect to the doctrine of God the Father, replied : 

 * I am not interested in God the Father ' ; and I 

 know intellectually-minded men who wish to reject 

 the validity of all religious experience because their 

 minds are so made that they pay more attention to 

 external fact and because their reason refuses to let 

 them agree with the interpretations of fact pro- 

 pounded by most religious bodies. But, for a properly 

 balanced construction, for the finding of something 

 which shall serve not as the basis of a creed for this 

 or that sect, but of a creed for humanity, of something 

 which instead of dividing shall unite, we need all 

 aspects. 



The idea of Progress constitutes, as I hope to show, 

 the most important element in the first part of our 

 construction — that which attempts to synthesize the 

 facts of Nature ; and besides, no inconsiderable portion 

 of the third, the interrelation of inner and outer. 



Readers of Bury's interesting book on the Idea of 

 Progress ^ will perhaps, with me, have been surprised 

 at the modernity of that conception. He shows 



1 Bury, '20. 



