14 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [i_ 



forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, in relation 

 to human experience, are infinite. 



Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent for 

 its manifestation on particular molecular arrangements as any 

 physical or chemical phenomenon; and, wherever he extends 

 his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation reveal 

 themselves, as plainly as in the rest of Nature. 



Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of 

 Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the 

 action and interaction of man s mind, with that which is not 

 man s mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism 

 or Polytheism ; of Theism or Atheism ; of Superstition or 

 Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, 

 I have nothing to do ; but this it is needful for my purpose to 

 say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the 

 past, it is because the theology of the present has become more 

 scientific than that of the past; because it has not only re 

 nounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the 

 necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and 

 traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs : and of cherishing 

 the noblest and most human of man s emotions, by worship 

 &quot;for the most part of the silent sort&quot; at the altar of the Unknown 

 and Unknowable. 



Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in our 

 minds by the improvement of natural knowledge. Men have 

 acquired the ideas of the practically infinite extent of the universe 

 and of its practical eternity ; they are familiar with the conception 

 that our earth is but an infinitesimal fragment of that part of 

 the universe which can be seen ; and that, nevertheless, its 

 duration is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite. 

 They have further acquired the idea that man is but one of in 

 numerable forms of life now existing in the globe, and that the 

 present existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of 

 predecessors. Moreover, every step they have made in natural 

 knowledge has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the 

 conception of a definite order of the universe which is em- 



