THE DECADENCE OF THEOLOGY 117 



above, too, is it not ? and quite as needful, though 

 not quite as bewitching and misleading as morning 

 light or starlight. The objects of faith may be real 

 and again they may not ; the proof is wanting. At 

 any rate, it is at last daylight in the world, and the 

 lights that are obscured or that fade away and are 

 lost, it seems to me, we can very well do without. 

 We shall never again believe in angels, or demoni- 

 acal possessions, or in witchcraft, or in spooks, or in 

 spirit rappings, or in charms and incantations, or 

 in the lake of flre, or in the city of the golden 

 streets. In this morning of the world man is no 

 longer the child that cried for the moon of the night 

 before. 



The analogy suggested by our religious editor is 

 no doubt a true one ; the difference between our 

 times and the times of our fathers is mainly in the 

 greater light of our day, the light of exact science. 

 We see things as they are ; we see how and where 

 the delusions of the past arose, that they were inci- 

 dent to the general obscurity, that these portentous 

 forms that were so real and threatening to our 

 fathers are either shadows or harmless inanimate 

 objects. No doubt we have lost something, some- 

 thing in the direction of poetry and religion, the an- 

 thropomorphic gift. Man cannot make the world 

 in his own image, or project himself into it as in 

 the presoientific ages. Nature is not so plastic and 

 neutral in the light of the sun as under the light of 

 the moon. The day has its own obscurities and 

 illusions, but they are not those of the night. 



