If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a great reality, one of "the many which change and pass," a spot in boundless space, "a chapel in the infinite".
For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins discord--sure sign of error--the confusion and strife of tongues, the jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously reaching--
_Tendentes manus ripae ulterioris amore?_
And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being who "is for ever reason".
But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology. And then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about explaining how that the "God of knowledge" [1] has much in common with their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of infallible texts and articles of religion, a _modus vivendi_ may be arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on at every Church Congress--men who know in their hearts that the "inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly, irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings, glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".