Science Christianity and Modern Civilisation 335 



universal aspiration after One Eternal Reality, to whose true being 

 the infinitely various shapes in which it reveals itself to or conceals 

 itself from men are all alike indifferent. It is not, however, upon 

 the special possibilities of Hinduism as the nucleus of such a universal 

 religion that I desire now to insist, so much as upon the fact that 

 the ideal of a universal religion may be conceived in this form of a 

 mutual agreement by the professors of all religions to acknowledge 

 in all others an equally valid expression of an aspiration common to 

 humanity and transcending all distinctions due to difference of 

 historical context. The negative attitude towards the notion of 

 historical development herein implied may be illustrated from the 

 records of all the great religions, though it is perhaps peculiarly 

 congenial to the temper of Hinduism. 



In marked contrast with this form of the ideal of a universal 

 religion stands that which is especially associated with Christianity, 

 This, like the other, may be presented in a pictorial guise. It is 

 so in the familiar scheme of a historical process which, starting 

 from the creation of man, his temptation and fall, leads, through 

 the selection and discipline of a peculiar people from whom the 

 Redeemer should in the fullness of time proceed, to the redemption 

 of the whole race by Jesus Christ, the incarnate son of God, and 

 the offer of a share in this redemption to all mankind through the 

 missionary activity of the Christian Church ; and culminates in 

 the second coming of Jesus Christ in glory, to exercise the final 

 judgement of God upon every individual human being. This 

 scheme, which satisfied the imaginations of Augustine and of 

 Dante, of Milton and of Pascal, it is not indeed possible for us to 

 accept as more than a symbolic picture. It is too late in the day to 

 rehabilitate the credit of the book of Genesis as a faithful record of 

 the origin of the world and of mankind, or that of the New Testa- 

 ment eschatology as an accurate forecast of their future destiny. 

 Nor can those whose conception of the extent and duration of the 

 physical universe and of the process of evolution whereof human 

 nature and human civilisation are the outcome has been moulded by 

 the scientific discoveries of the last four centuries be content with 

 an account of the world's history which presupposes the cosmology 

 of an age in which these discoveries were undreamed of. But the 

 traditional picture which has so long been associated with the 

 Christian religion may suggest an ideal of a religion for all mankind, 

 capable of being expressed in terms that do not presuppose obsolete 



