THE DECADENCE OF THEOLOGY 127 



law of evolution is not continuous, and if it<is not 

 adequate to cover the whole field of human develop- 

 ment, religious as well as scientific, then we must 

 find some law that is. 



We make a monstrosity of creation when we make 

 it half natural and half supernatural. If religion is 

 something that has only an accidental relation to a 

 man's natural capacity for goodness, and sin some- 

 thing which has only an accidental relation to his 

 natural defects and shortcomings, then are those 

 things contradictory of the rest of our knowledge. 

 Why the man of science has difficulty with the cur- 

 rent faith is because it wUl not fit in with the scheme 

 of things which science discloses. It is an anomaly, 

 an exception. Go into any of the popular churches 

 and listen to a sermon on salvation by Jesus Christ. 

 What you hear will be for the most part a ineaning- 

 less jargon. It does not connect itself with anything 

 else you know in the world. You shall hear some- 

 thing about blood and about sacrifice and about 

 atonement ; that is just as much outside of our 

 knowledge as the cabalism of the Jews or the reme- 

 dies of the Indian medicine man. If the preacher 

 were to say : " My friends, we are all brothers of 

 this man Jesus Christ, flesh of his flesh and bone of 

 his bone ; what he felt we may feel ; what he saw 

 we may see ; what he did we may do ; we have in 

 kind, though maybe not in degree, the same power 

 and capacities he had ; we can live as pure, as noble, 

 as disinterested a life as he lived ; we may show, in 

 a measure, the same meekness, gentleness, humility, 



