358 THE FUTURE OF EELIGION AND MORALS. 



which is precisely its freedom from all the limits which 

 govern and bind our finite being. 



It is much better not to yoke the fortunes of religion 

 with any dogma, proposition, or assertion of historical 

 fact, the truth of which the progress of science and 

 thought may afterwards compel men to discredit ; better 

 not to subject religion to the serious hazards involved in 

 her acceptance of particular chronologies, cosmogonies, 

 miraculous stories, that may have to give way before 

 better-verified accounts and stricter tests of evidence ; 

 and better not to test the quality of our faith, its truth 

 and purity, by our acceptance or non-acceptance of 

 certain metaphysical determinations of the attributes of 

 the Deity, made in unphilosophic and prescientific ages, 

 and still existing in petrified forms in ancient confessions 

 of faith, but which though still challenging our assent, 

 the highest human thought has shown us are either 

 unmeaning or wholly inapplicable in their reference to the 

 Absolute Being. It is better, we say, not to put theology, 

 and especially religion which, though not identical with 

 theology, is in the closest relationship with it in such 

 perilous alliance with what is questionable or untrue ; 

 for when the day comes, as it does, when the false must 

 fall off and the unmeaning must be surrendered, there is 

 some real danger that the whole of religion may be dis- 

 carded with the perishable accidents with which it had 

 been united, or at least some danger of its eternal truth 

 and reality being for a time obscured from the eyes and 

 effaced from the souls of men. 



6. It has, however, been affirmed that much more 

 than this limited and negative knowledge, which alone 

 a sober philosophy professes to have of God, is possible ; 

 it has been affirmed that men, or certain privileged men, 

 have a special sense or faculty for the immediate and 



