SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY SUSTAIN RELIGION 191 



be work for us to do. What radiant ministrations, 

 what infinite activities, what never-ending progress, 

 what immeasurable happiness, what living ecstasies 

 of unknown raptures may surround us in the beauty 

 and loveliness of the land of the leal, in the life 

 supernal ? 



Heaven is not a reward but a continuity, not a 

 change but a development. It means a place of 

 love and goodness where we are one with God and 

 playfellows with the angels. Present science would 

 change God into a struggle of careless forces or a 

 complexity of impersonal laws. Let us reject the 

 Chinese idea; they believe in God, but worship the 

 devil, because they think the devil's rule predomi- 

 nates. 



Let us discard the pagan deification of annihi- 

 lation, and the modern agnostic's plea for suicide, 

 and the Greek poet's pessimistic postulate: "It were 

 best never to have been born, and next best to de- 

 part as soon as possible." Let us grieve at the 

 dark shadows flung by theologians athwart God's 

 light upon those who believe that human reason, 

 conscience, and experience, as well as Scripture, are 

 the books of God. Phrases which belong to meta- 

 phor, to imagery, to poetry, to emotion should not 

 be formulated into dogmas, or crystallized into 

 creed. 



Discard the tyrannous realism of ambiguous meta- 

 phors, the asserted infallibility of isolated words. 

 Canon Farrar says : " Erase from our Bible the erro- 

 neous disputed renderings of the three words, * dam- 

 nation, hell and everlasting.' Not one of these 

 three expressions ought to stand any longer in our 

 English Bible." 



