148 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



There is something in us that delights in fables and 

 in heroic deeds ; that rises superior to times and 

 circumstances, and makes the devotion of martyrs 

 and the triumphs of the Davids over the Goliaths 

 tonic and refreshing. There are books and poems 

 that ventilate and tone up a man's whole nature. 

 We are by no means summed up by our knowing 

 faculties. Truth of fact and truth of sentiment 

 make up life, and about in the proportion of the 

 bone and the fleshly tissue in our systems. We 

 may say there is relative truth and absolute truth. 

 All scientific truth if it be truth is absolute ; it is 

 verifiable and must hold good at all times and 

 places. A man's opinion of a matter, that is, his 

 inference from observed facts, is true from his con- 

 ditions and point of view ; it is the outcome of his 

 relations, capacity, and antecedents; it is modified 

 by his temperament, his culture, his health, his 

 sympathies, his race, his environment, and many 

 other things. If strictly speaking there are reli- 

 gious truths, truths that in no wise depend upon your 

 view or my view of the case, they are verifiable. 

 But religious truths I should say are relative truths, 

 and any attempt to make them fixed and absolute, 

 as the creedmongers have tried to do, must end in 

 failure. Truth in all subjective matters is not a 

 fixed quantity ; it is something that must be ever 

 newly grown like organic Nature herself. 



A recent theological writer says that when men ac- 

 customed to the demonstrative evidence of science 

 " enter a province where moral evidence rather than 



