THE DECADENCE OF THEOLOGY 129 



is your theological man, your man of miracles and 

 special providences, of witches and demons, of rid- 

 dles and revelations, who is on the defensive now. 

 He is stripped almost naked ; he has harely a foot 

 of ground to stand upon. The natural man, the man 

 of reason, has the whole of science, the enormous 

 sum of human knowledge, the whole visible order 

 of the universe on his side. Our civilization is his, 

 the future is his, the stars in their courses fight for 

 him. We have learned, if we have learned anything, 

 that spirit loves matter, that it blooms out of it, and 

 that it is from within and not from without that sal- 

 vation comes ; that the race of man has many saviours 

 and must have many more. The enigmas of the 

 old theology are exploded ; religion takes its place 

 in line with other normal forces, unfolding out of 

 man as surely as his poetry or his art. It is natural 

 or it is nothing. No matter how truly supernatural 

 the devotee may think his religion, his very delu- 

 sion is natural. Those poor wretches who confessed 

 themselves witches during the witch-ridden age were 

 the victims of a natural delusion. 



In all religious matters, in fact in all subjective 

 matters, we are fast coming to see that truth is 

 not a fixed quantity that may be seized upon and 

 monopolized by any sect or church. "We are begin- 

 ning to see even further than that. We are begin- 

 ning to see that there are no distinctively religious 

 truths ; that all truth is one ; that the faculties 

 that distinguish truth from falsehood in any sphere 

 are always one and the same. Eeligion is a senti- 



