LEAF AND TENDRIL 



trims it or renews it as a man trims his orchard, 

 lopping off the dead branches, or grafting new ones 

 on, or resetting it entirely. All denominations are 

 grafting on more liberal and more charitable views. 

 The stock of religious ideas is undoubtedly improv- 

 ing — less personal, perhaps, but more broadly in- 

 tellectual — generalizations from more universal 

 facts. 



In morality, what is one man's truth ought to be 

 all men's truth, because morality is a matter of con- 

 duct toward our fellows. We may fail to keep our 

 promises to our gods and nothing comes of it, but 

 if we forget our promissory notes, something does 

 come of it, and, as like as not, that something 

 takes the form of the sheriff. 



The scientific mind, like Huxley's, looks with 

 amazement upon the credulity of the theological 

 mind, upon its low standard of evidence. 



There are currents and currents in life. A river 

 is one kind of current, the Gulf Stream is another. 

 The currents in the affairs of men are more like the 

 latter — obscure in their origin, vague and shifting 

 in their boundaries, and mysterious in their endings, 

 and the result of large cosmic forces. There are 

 movements in the history of men's minds that are 

 local and temporary like that, say, of the Crusaders, 

 or of Witchcraft, and there are others that are like 

 ocean currents, a trend of the universal mind. The 

 rise and growth of rationalism seems of this kind, 

 252 



