130 THE LIGHT OF DAY 



ment, and is true as a sentiment ; it is real, but 

 the objects of faith may be real and they may not. 

 They are not truths unless they are verifiable. 

 The world within we re-create daily. The outer 

 world is always the same. It is only our ability to 

 deal with it that fluctuates. Hence the facts of sci- 

 ence, so far as they are facts, are constant, while 

 systems of ethics, religions, philosophies, theories of 

 this or that, are in endless mutation. Pilate's ques- 

 tion. What is truth ? was not the question of a 

 scoffer. What, indeed, is the truth about the melt- 

 ing and changing forms and figures we see in the 

 cloud-land of man's moral and religious experience ? 

 That there is or can be any final truth in these mat- 

 ters, in the sense in which there are final truths in 

 science, we are beginning slowly to see. 



Where religion imitates science and formulates a 

 creed in which it seeks to give permanent intellec- 

 tual form to its so-called truths, it takes a false step. 

 The creed, as we see, soon pinches and must be made 

 over new. When man draws hard and fast lines in 

 religious matters, he soon finds himself compelled 

 to pull down and build larger. The conception of 

 God is being completely made over in the religious 

 conscience of our time. As man becomes more bene- 

 volent and merciful he makes himself a more bene- 

 volent and merciful God. The God of our Puritan 

 fathers will not do for us at all. The moral diffi- 

 culties of Calvinism are getting to be as insurmount- 

 able as the intellectual difficulties of Catholicism. 

 The God of to-day, or the divine ideal towards which 



