held with Plato-the farther they penetrated into the secrets of the universe the nearer they got to God. For they believed, as he did, that the world was "a perceptible God, image of the intelligible, greatest and best, the most beautiful and perfect, the one only-begotten universe." *

But there is no desire to speak as if men of science were alone to blame. They are not. Theologians are unreasonably jealous of scientists, given to ill-considered and ill-informed criticism, to rash and harsh judgments, to the words that now do the work once done by bell, and book, and candle. They are too fearful of free inquiry, confront science too much in the interests of the creeds, too little with the open sense that seeks God's truth everywhere. They well understand the sanctity of forms and doctrines, but not so well the sanctity of eternal fact. Yet the theologian has an apology for his failings on the ungenerous side that the scientist wants. Theology, by the very necessities of its nature, is more conservative and retrospective than science. Religion receives from the past the notional forms which seem to it the very truths by which it lives. But science reads the past simply as a history of mingled success and failure, written to stimulate the present to win by wiser methods more splendid triumphs. Religion builds on what it believes to be accomplished and explained facts, and so fears every change that touches its fundamental realities, or the forms which possess a sacramental

meaning and sanctity. But science, never satisfied with the old, ever seeking the new, welcomes every revolution. that changes the lines of its thought and widens the circle of its knowledge.

Yet religion is in no proper sense the antithesis of science. Only confusion can come from so conceiving it. Constructive religious thought may be opposed to science, but only as one science to another, as distinct, or even contrary, but not as contradictory. In a sense quite other than the man who said it meant, we can say, "Theology is anthropology." "* All science is anthropological, the creation of human faculties, the symbol of so much human culture, so many human ideas, the mirror of mind attempting to interpret itself and Nature. Man is the universe in little, but the universe idealized, become conscious mind. He can approach its interpretation from two sides, the real and the ideal, as it appears to thought or as it exists in thought, as it is revealed to mind or as it is unfolded by mind. The realist interpretation is science, but the idealist theology. Science is nature explained by man; theology is nature explained in and through him. But so understood, theology is a science, the science of the highest in the universe. Man, as the highest being in Nature, is the highest revelation of its secret, the Λόγος προφορικός, by

* Prof. Steinthal, of Berlin, in an article sadly significant in some respects, "Zur Religions-Philosophie, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychol.," vol. viii. 271.

which knowledge of the eternal Aóyos évdáletos is won. If, therefore, "theology is anthropology," it is because the aveρwTos is the image of the Oeós, man the translucent manifestation of God.

But religion is not a science, or any constructive or reasoned system of thought that can be opposed to it. It is simply spirit expressing in symbol its consciousness of relations other and higher than physical and social. Religion is a permanent and universal characteristic of man, a normal and necessary product of his nature. He grows into religion, but works into theology, feels himself into the one, thinks himself into the other. He is religious by nature, theological by art. In a sense it can be said, there is only one religion, but there are many theologies, just as every human being knows he is a man, but not every human being knows what man is. The feelings of dependence, reverence, devotion, are universal, everywhere seek out and worship an appropriate object. And the object must be personal, a Being to love and command, be loved and obeyed. And only as the intellect begins to speculate on this Being, His relations to man and nature, does a theology arise. But these speculations, while right in the end to which they strive, may be wrong in the methods by which they work and the forms in which they are expressed. Imperfect and transitory doctrines in theology can as little disprove religion as provisional theories in science can discredit Nature.

An object, of worship, a Being worthy of love and reverence, in other words, a God, is necessary to religion. But this religious idea is one thing, its scientific expression another. Man may conceive God and His relation to the world under forms the most varied. As a matter of fact he has done so, does so still. He borrows from Nature the symbols by which he tries to articulate his faith. Thought must, as it becomes abstract and metaphysical, refine the symbols, but cannot, save by the most violent revolution, break away from the ideas they represented, or the lines in which these ideas moved. The phenomena of generation have suggested an emanational relation of Deity to the world; those of organic life an immanent; those of adaptation an architectonic. Theism, both philosophical and religious, has conceived God under these and many other forms, and been still Theism and still religious. The theistic idea and the cosmic form may thus so grow together as to seem indissoluble, and even identical. But while this union may secure to the idea clearness and intelligibility, it may expose it to the greatest possible danger. In ages when science is active and progressive, it may so revolutionize our knowledge of natural processes and laws as to break up our cosmic conception, and change into antiquated errors the forms in which the theistic idea had been expressed. Men on both sides may think the old conception of Nature necessary to Theism, the notions of action and

relation it supplied the only modes in which it is possible to conceive God and the world as related to each other, and so, an angry wail rising from the one side and a shout of defiance from the other, theology and science may join battle on the radically false issue, that a given cosmic conception is essential to faith in God. It is as if all the theistic words in a language had suddenly been lost or forgotten, and speech as to God made impossible. There would indeed be great temporary, in some respects permanent, loss. Words consecrated by tender memories, by holy associations, by sacred use, would no longer exercise their spell-like influence on the devout mind. Terms sharpened by centuries of definition and debate into watchwords of rival systems, would, by ceasing to be, cease to excite the enthusiasm of love on the one side or hate on the other. But theistic thought would not perish with its old verbal vehicles, would soon create a new and nobler speech, making the loss gain. The present, freed from the tyranny of the past, would speak its own thoughts in its own tongue. Religion, proved independent of its symbols, unweighted by a history of mingled good and ill, would win its way, not as letter to civil, but as spirit to moral supremacy. So the decay of old cosmic notions may involve the decay of theological formulæ, but need not touch the truth they provisionally expressed. It will survive the shock of dissolution, assume another body, and live through another of those epochs when men who “see