In regard to this matter there is a pressing need for the meeting of science and philosophy with religion. Science and philosophy tear away the veil with which familiarity hides from us the mysteriousness and marvel of all things and of our own personal and common life. They show us unfathomed depths for wonder where we had seen nothing but a smooth accustomed surface. But it is religion that shows us God in all those depths, God made known even by the very surface, and turns our wonder into worship. It is science and philosophy that shall purge religion of the taint it has derived from both the ignorant, and the evil and adulterous, generations after generations who have made it seem what it seems. I say 'seem what it seems,' for this is not what it is. That is no true religion, certainly no religion after the mind of Christ, which passes over the marvels of the lily of the field and of the man indwelt by God and one with God, taking them as things that are of course; while making much of signs interpreted as 'intervention' and therefore taken as the only signs of a God who is nowhere and nothing to us unless he intervenes.
We stand amazed, we who have learnt now to see God everywhere. Can any religious man open his eyes, we ask, and not see signs of God? Can he search in any human life without finding signs in abundance there, signs of the life-giving presence or of the dreadful death-dealing absence of God? What more can he ask or desire? 'Lord God of hosts,' we exclaim, 'heaven and earth are full of thy glory!'
Then we turn to history, the long history of man, and the long history of the Christian religion which goes back, beyond the sublime figure who proclaimed it in Palestine, to the beginnings of the worship of God. We discover those beginnings in the first men who turned their eyes from self to the brother. We look along the ages and cease to be surprised. In his long-drawn education man has but slowly learnt to find God in more and more of his own life and the world. Step by step he has felt his way, led by the spirit given him, to the knowledge of the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the incarnate and redeeming God of all men, the God who comes to indwell all things. Only now, in a new fulness of time, are the teaching of Jesus and the revelation of his life and death finding a new context in new knowledge and reflective thought. Only now are we beginning to see why, if knowledge and reflective thought have so far done their work, it may well be an evil and adulterous generation that seeks for any other signs than those which they and Christ reveal. Just what the earthly presence of the God-revealing Jesus was to that generation—a test of their single-mindedness and will to receive and welcome divine truth—so, when his life and witness meet with a new emphasis in the less but concurrent witness of new knowledge, this generation of religious men is put to the same test. Will they receive new witness to his truth and to God? or will they reject it because it has no likeness to those signs that to their minds are alone fitted to show God? Will they or will they not have humility enough to learn of scientific and philosophic 'builders of Jerusalem' concerning the true methods of God?