RELIGION AND SCIENCE 297 



of magic, or of animal sacrifice ; to accept the first 

 chapter of Genesis as literally true ; or to believe 

 that God has human parts and passions. But there 

 was a time when all these could be, and were, 

 believed. 



The time is obviously coming when a great many 

 other ideas must be cast aside in favour of new ones. 

 If you have followed me, you will agree that it is 

 impossible for me and those who think like me to 

 believe in God as a person, a ruler, to continue to 

 speak of God as a spiritual Being in the ordinary way. 

 Consequently, although the value of prayer persists in 

 so far as it is meditative and a self-purification of the 

 mind, yet its commonly accepted petitive value must 

 fall to the ground ; ^ so must all idea of miracle and of 

 direct inspiration ; so must all that is involved in 

 the ordinary materialist ideas of ritual, self-denial, 

 and worship as merely propitiation or ' acceptable 

 incense ' ; so must all the externally-projected parts 

 of the ideas concerning the ordaining of special priests ; 

 so must all notion of our having a complete, peculiar, 

 or absolute knowledge of God, or of there being a 

 divinely-appointed rule of conduct or a divinely- 

 revealed belief 



On such matters most advanced thinkers have 



been long in general agreement. But there is one 



very important point which, so far as I know, has 



been very little touched upon — chiefly, I think, 



^ See Turner, 'i6. 



