It is easy to forget and misinterpret, very easy to substitute for divine spirit and life and the divine 'word,' a machinery of logic or tradition or institutional arrangement. But it is destructive of the possibility of mutual understanding between us. Again, we must urge, it is machine-like scheming that divides, not real religion or knowledge of life. 'Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your tradition' is a prophet's saying of the widest application in the affairs of men. But when we recognize this, even on one side only of a dividing line, the process of correction has begun. And as a matter of fact there is recognition now on both sides, and day by day it extends itself and its influence. Science and philosophy and religion are met together as they have never in the history of the world been met before, open-eyed, conscious of the common heritage of training in the battle of the world and in the struggles of practical life, which has biased every one of us and been the chief agent in turning the common search after truth by men of good will into a war of opinions.
To confess that we are all, in so far as we are honest seekers, 'builders of Jerusalem' after our own manner and degree, is the first and perhaps the hardest step to take towards full co-operation between us. What children we are, that we do not know it! Yet, in truth, we cannot know it until on both sides we give up the fond belief, the delusion, that we are not seekers but have either attained or received, either attained the full truth of the world and ourselves by knowledge, or received it through an external and externally given revelation. Once we know that we are all pilgrims and that the divine city lies ahead for every one of us, both in knowledge and in life, we may travel together.
With the Christian we may work for the divine kingdom. We share his belief and his trust in the omnipotence of redeeming love. Nothing, we see, can redeem this earth but love. There is love to be seen faintly, amid dark and conflicting shadows, in the biologist's picture of a world-Eden, where it is after all and in spite of all 'creation's final law.' But the fulness of its glory is unveiled only in the love of Christ, passing our knowledge.