never meet!" QTo Sir Isaac Newton, religion was LITTLE 

 something to be believed, not understood. He left re- JOURNEYS 

 ligion to the specialists, recognizing its value as a sort 

 of police protection for the state, and as his share in 

 the matter he paid tithes and attended prayers as a 

 matter of patriotic duty and habit. 

 Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intel- 

 lect, but he could not restrain his aqua fortis and so he 

 said this, "All the scientists were jealous of Newton 

 when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but they 

 got even with him when he wrote his book on the 

 'Hebrew Prophecies'!" Newton wrote that book in 

 his water-tight compartment. 



But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the 

 Primrose Sphinx who bowed his head in the Church of 

 England Chapel the Jew who rose to the highest 

 office Christian England had to offer and repeated 

 Ben Ezra's prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. 

 Darwin waived religion, and if he ever heard of the 

 Bible no one knew it from his writings. Huxley danced 

 on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a 

 valuable and more or less interesting collection of 

 myths, fables, and folk-lore tales. Wallace sees in it a 

 strain of prophetic truth and regards it as gold-bearing 

 quartz of a low grade. Fiske regarded it as the word of 

 God, Holy Writ, expressed often vaguely, mystically 

 and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true 

 when rightly understood. 



And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in ortho- 

 dox pulpits to the great delight of Christian people 



147 



