APPENDIX 409 



efforts to accommodate the sanctities of religious reverence with the 

 earnestness of scientific seeking after truth, all heartfelt endeavours 

 to worship God, ' not on this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,' but 

 literally ' in spirit and in truth.' 



II 



What sensible man can doubt that we must, for the present, at 

 all events, acquiesce in suspension of judgment with regard to the 

 nature of the Supreme Being ? 



Let us remember that all attempts to present God to the 

 imaginative reason have been, are, and will ever be nothing better 

 than symbols of an unknown, unknowable power. This will render 

 the exercise of patience, now demanded from us as the proof of faith, 

 more easy. What we are called upon to do, is to get on as well as 

 we can through life and in death, not indeed without faith, but 

 without the definite symbolic forms which made faith comfortable 

 to our forefathers. 



The revolution in all our conceptions of the world which has 

 been performed during the last three centuries is so tremendous, that 

 no dogmatic theology of any sort can gain a hold upon our minds. 

 At this stage, it is surely enough if, having displaced the old con- 

 ception of an extra-mundane Creator, who governed a universe 

 which had man for its centre, we have not thereby abandoned 

 the belief in God. Quis Deus incertum ; est Deus. Let us, in 

 reverence and humility, retain our religious attitude. Let us, so 

 far as we are able, refer our aspirations to God, as the only Life, 

 the only Love, the only Law, the ground of all Reality, the source 

 of all Being. So long as we do this, we keep alive the sacred 

 flame in Vesta's temple of the human heart, and march in the 

 procession of saints, martyrs, and confessors. What must of 

 necessity remain at present blank and abstract in our idea of God 

 may possibly again be filled up and rendered concrete when the 

 human mind is prepared for a new synthesis of faith and science. 

 That, in its turn, will have to be decomposed like elder, simpler 

 syntheses; and so forth perpetually, until the inevitable day of 

 Gotter-Dammerung, the day of dying for our planet, comes. 

 Meanwhile for man, through all these transformations of the 

 religious idea, abides one motto fixed : TOVS &vras ev 8pdv, ' while 

 living do thy duty.' l 



1 These words were written before the publication of Darwin's Life, 

 vol. i. p. 307. See p. 399, above. 



