240 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



Thus would a mind like Jesus Christ's speak in the 

 latter end of the nineteenth century, if he were here to 

 speak. 1 



Who persecuted the great pioneers of science ? the 

 Christian priests they have always endeavoured to cast 

 out the kingdom of knowledge. They enter not them- 

 selves, and would always prevent others from doing so. 

 But the kingdom of knowledge is at hand, for the 

 day is arriving, that " day of days, the great day of the 

 feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to 

 the unity in things " (Emerson). 



This is the conception of true religion. 



ignorant foreigners, unacquainted with the divine constitution of his 

 country. Hence he laughs in his sleeve at all that the missionaries 

 say." ("The Martyrdom of Man," Win wood Reade, 13th Edition', 

 1890, p. 241.) 



1 " Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible as a col- 

 lection of oracles a mass of entangling utterances, fruitful in 

 wrangling interpretations, which have given to the world long and 

 weary ages of ' hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness ' ; of fetichism, 

 subtlety, and pomp ; of tyranny, bloodshed, and solemnly constituted 

 imposture ; of everything which the Lord Jesus Christ most abhorred 

 has been gradually developed through the centuries, by the labours, 

 sacrifices, and even the martyrdom of a long succession of men of 

 God, the conception of it as a sacred literature a growth only 

 possible under that divine light which the various orbs of science 

 have done so much to bring into the mind and heart and soul of 

 man a revelation, not of the Fall of Man, but of the Ascent of Man 

 an exposition, not of temporary dogmas and observances, but of 

 the eternal law of righteousness the one upward path for indi- 

 viduals and for nations. No longer an oracle, good for the ' lower 

 orders ' to accept, but to be quietly sneered at by ' the enlightened ' 

 no longer a fetich, whose defenders must become persecutors, or 

 reconcilers, or ' apologists ' ; but a most fruitful fact, which religion 

 and science may accept as a source of strength to both." (" The 

 History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,'* 

 A. D. White, 1896, vol. ii. p. 395.) 



