SCIENCE AND RELIGION 155 



that in some remote period of the world God Himself 

 revealed Truth once and for all time, and his profession 

 is to guard it against all comers. I do not believe 

 that the soul any more than the mind can stagnate. 

 It must grow or decay. Christianity cannot be 

 crystallised into a creed binding for all time and, 

 least of all, into a creed dating back to the century 

 that preceded the relapse of Europe into intellectual 

 barbarism. The world changes and has changed in 

 the last hundred years out of all recognition, not on 

 account of anything contained in the Mosaic or 

 Christian revelations, but on account of the new 

 revelations of science. Though these have come 

 about by a process the reverse of supernatural, by 

 laborious experiment and measurement, by slow ac- 

 cumulation of knowledge and honest and unbiassed 

 weighing of the evidence, they constitute an essential 

 part of the whole truth, be our religious convictions 

 what they may. 



There is another important difference between 

 what is understood by truth in the realms of science 

 and religion respectively. A truth that claims to 

 be a divine revelation must necessarily be supposed 

 to be the absolute or ultimate truth, which, by 

 common consent, is unattainable by any of the 

 methods of human inquiry. What a scientific man 

 conceives to be the truth is, in reality, something 

 quite distinct. He is not concerned, and, indeed, it 

 is hardly too much to say that he is not even greatly 

 interested, in ultimate, absolute and unattainable 

 truth. He frames a hypothesis and tests it in every 

 possible way. So long as every known or to be 

 discovered fact is in accord with the hypothesis, and 

 no other hypothesis is in accord with them, it is all 

 he seeks to know. If, in the external universe, every 

 event and phenomenon occurs in the precise and 

 often predicable way it would occur if the hypothesis 



