THE LATEST STAGE 265 



knowledge of comparative religion is grasped by the 

 world at large, men, undeterred and unwarned by 

 experience, will feel their faith in danger and the 

 fountains of the deep unloosed upon them. When 

 they find how many cherished doctrines and how much 

 beloved ritual arose from magic and nature-worship 

 and were common possessions of many faiths ; when 

 they see that on those rites and doctrines Christianity 

 was merely grafted to supply a new interpretation 

 of the mysteries, they will feel religion itself is 

 crumbling before their eyes. 



Yet, in truth, it is but the old story of the sun's 

 place in nature and the old story of evolution. When 

 natural selection gave a comprehensible theory of the 

 method of creation, some men rushed to the conclusion 

 that life and all existence were but the by-play of 

 materialistic mechanism. Slowly they came to see that 

 things stood much as they were, save that a fresh 

 revelation of How had been given to mankind. 



So, in this new field of knowledge, a revelation of 

 the method and process of the development of the 

 religious experience of mankind does not alter the 

 fact of its existence, or make shallow the depths of the 

 soul's sea of awe and reverence for its own life and its 

 intuitive apprehension of the divine. The Kingdom 

 of Heaven is still within. 



The words of Shakespeare are to be found in a 

 dictionary common to all mean books. That does not 

 destroy the genius of the poet. Though the ritual 

 and dogmas of Christianity, as of other religions, lie 

 scattered in a thousand creeds, the conception of the 

 Divine mind that reinterpreted and reinterprets them 

 to all ages is not less Divine. When we understand 



