Religion Meets Science

I

RELIGION and Science — it is a difficult subject, not one that is easy to discuss fully and frankly without arousing angry emotions or bruising intimate and sacred feelings. Yet the task is one which ought to be attempted. Provided that a man treats of these things honestly and sincerely, with no desire to sneer at or provoke others, those who differ from him have indeed no right to be angry or feel hurt.

I have devoted most of my life to science. But I have always been deeply interested in religion, and believe that religious feeling is one of the most powerful and important of human attributes. So here I do not think of myself as a representative of science, but want to talk as a human being who believes that both the scientific spirit and the religious spirit are of the utmost value.

No one would deny that science has had a great effect on the religious outlook. If I were asked to sum up this effect as briefly as possible, I should say that it was twofold. In the first place, scientific discoveries have entirely altered our general picture of the universe and of man’s position in it. And, secondly, the application of scientific method to the study of religion has given us a new science, the science of comparative religion, which has profoundly changed our general views on religion itself.

To my mind, this second development is in many ways the more important, and I shall begin by trying to explain why.

There was a time when religions were simply divided into two categories, the true and the false; one true religion, revealed by God, and a mass of false ones, inspired by the Devil. Milton has given expression to this idea in his beautiful hymn, ’On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.’ Unfortunately this view was held by the adherents of a number of different religions — not only by Christians, but also by Jews, Mohammedans, and others; and with the growth of intelligent tolerance many people began to feel doubtful about the truth of such mutually contradictory statements. But in any case the rise of the science of comparative religion made any such belief virtually impossible. After a course of reading in that subject, you might still believe that your own religion was the best of all religions; but you would have a very queer intellectual construction if you still believed that it alone was good and true, while all others were merely false and bad.

I would say that the most important contribution which the comparative study of religions has made to general thought is this. We can no longer look on religions as fixed; there is a development in religion as there is in law, or science, or political institutions. Nor can we look on religions as really separate systems; different religions interconnect and contribute elements to one another. Christianity, for instance, owes much not only to Judaism, but also to the so-called mystery religions of the Near East, and to NeoPlatonism.

From this point of view, all the religions of the world appear as different embodiments of the religious spirit of man, some primitive and crude, some advanced and elaborate, some degenerate and some progressive, some cruel and unenlightened, some noble and beautiful, but all forming part of the one general process of man’s religious development.

But does there really exist a single religious spirit? Are there really any common elements to be found in Quakerism, say, and the fear-ridden fetishism of the Congo, or in the mysticism and renunciation of pure Buddhism and the ghastly cruelties of the religion of ancient Mexico? Here, too, comparative study helps us to an answer. The religious spirit is by no means always the same at different times and different levels of culture. But it always contains certain common elements. Somewhere at the root of every religion there lies a sense of sacredness; certain things, events, ideas, beings, arc felt as mysterious and sacred. Somewhere, too, in every religion is a sense of dependence; man feels himself surrounded by forces and powers which he does not understand and cannot control, and he desires to put himself into harmony with them. And, finally, into every religion there enters a desire for explanation and comprehension; man knows himself surrounded by mysteries, yet he is always demanding that they shall make sense.

The existence of the sense of sacredness is the most basic of these common elements; it is the core of any feeling which can properly be called religious, and without it man would not have any religion at all. The desire to be in harmony with mysterious forces and powers on which man feels himself dependent is responsible for the expression of religious feeling in action, whether in the sphere of ritual or in that of morals. And the desire for comprehension is responsible for the explanations of the nature and government of the universe, and of the relations between it and human destiny, which in their developed forms we call theology.

This is all very well, some of my readers will have been saying to themselves, but there has been no mention of God and no mention of immortality; surely the worship of some God or gods, and the belief in some kind of future life, are essentials of religion? Here again, comparative religion corrects us. Those are undoubtedly very general elements of religion; but they are not universal, and, therefore, not essential to the nature of religion. In pure Buddhism there is no mention of God; and the Buddhist’s chief preoccupation is to escape continued existence, not to achieve it. Many primitive religions think in terms of impersonal sacred forces permeating nature; personal gods controlling the world either do not. exist for them, or, if they do, are thought of vaguely as creators or as remote final causes, and are not worshiped. And a certain number of primitive peoples either have no belief at all in life after death, or believe that it is enjoyed only by chiefs and a few other important persons.

II

The three elements I have spoken of seem to be the basic elements of all religions. But the ways in which they are worked out in actual practice are amazingly diverse. To bring order into the study of the hundreds of different religions known, we must have recourse to the principle of development. But before embarking on this I must clear up one point.

I said that an emotion of sacredness was at the bottom of the religious spirit. So it is; but we must extend the ordinary meaning of the word ‘sacred’ a little if we are to cover the facts. For the emotion I am trying to pin down in words is a complex one which contains elements of wonder, a sense of the mysterious, a feeling of dependence or helplessness, and either fear or respect. And not only can these ingredients be blended with each other and with still further elements in very different proportions, so as to give in one case awe, in another case superstitious terror, in one case quiet reverence, in another ecstatic self-abandonment, but the resulting emotion can be felt about what is horrifying or even evil, as well as about what is noble or inspiring. Indeed, the majority of the gods and fetishes of various primitive tribes are regarded as evil, or at least malevolent; and yet this quality which I have called sacredness most definitely adheres to them. As Dr. Marett points out in one of his books, we really want two words — ‘good-sacred’ and ‘badsacred.’

It will, perhaps, help to explain what I mean if I remind you that Coleridge in Kubla Khan uses the word ‘ holy’ in this same equivocal way, of the ‘deep romantic chasm’ in Xanadu:—

In most primitive religions the two feelings are intimately blended and equally balanced; it is only later that the idea of the ‘good-sacrcd’ gets the upper hand and the ‘ bad-sacred ’ dwindles into a subordinate position, as applied to witchcraft, for instance, or to a Devil who is inferior to God in power as well as goodness.

Do not be impatient at my spending some time over these barbaric roots of religion. They may not at first sight seem to have anything to do with our modern perplexities, but they are as a matter of fact of real importance, partly because they arc fundamental to our idea of what religion is, partly because they represent the base line, so to speak, from which we must measure religious development. And, I repeat, the idea of development in religion is perhaps the most important contribution of science to our problem.

It is not possible for me to go fully into this huge subject of religious development. But I can, perhaps, manage to remind you of some of its major stages.

In the least developed religions, then, it is universally agreed that magic is dominant. And by magic is meant the idea that mysterious properties and powers inhere in things or events, and that these powers can be in some measure controlled by appropriate formulas or ritual acts. It is also universally agreed that the ideas behind magic are not true. Primitive man has projected his own ideas and feelings into the world about him. He thinks that what we should call lifeless and mindless objects are animated by some sort of spirit; and because they have aroused an emotion of fear or mystery in him, he thinks that they are themselves the seat of a mysterious and terrifying power of a spiritual nature. He has also used false methods in his attempts at achieving control; an obvious example is the use of ‘sympathetic magic,’ as when hunting savages kill game in effigy, believing that this will help them to kill it in reality.

But, though the ideas underlying magic are demonstrably false, a good many magic beliefs still linger on, either still entwined with religion, or disentangled from it as mere isolated superstition, like superstitions about good and bad luck, charms and mascots. Anyone who really believes in the efficacy of such luck bringers is in that respect reasoning just as do the great majority of savages about most of the affairs of their life.

As I said before, in the magic stage, gods may play but a small part in religion. The next great step is for the belief in magic to grow less important, that in gods to become dominant. Instead of impersonal magic power inherent in objects, man thinks of personal Beings, controlling objects that are themselves inanimate.

When we study different religions at the beginning of this stage, we find an extraordinary diversity of gods being worshiped. Alan has worshiped gods in the semblance of animals; gods that are represented as half human and half bestial; gods that are obviously deified heroes (in Imperial Rome even living emperors were accorded divine honors); gods that are the personification of natural objects or forces, like sun gods, river gods, or fertility gods; tribal gods that preside over the fortunes of the community; gods that personify human ideals, like gods of wisdom; gods that preside over human activities, like gods of love or gods of war.

From these chaotic origins, progress has been mainly in two directions — ethical and logical. Beginning often by assigning barbaric human qualities to deity, qualities such as jealousy, anger, cruelty, or even voluptuousness, men have gradually been brought to higher conceptions. Jehovah was thought of in very different terms after the time of the Hebrew prophets. His more spiritual and universal aspects came to be stressed, in place of the less spiritual and more tribal aspects which appealed to the earlier Jews. Many men in the great age of Greece revolted against the traditional Greek theology which made the gods lie and desire and cheat like men. A great many modern Christians have put away the traditional idea of Hell from their theology because they hold fast to a more merciful view of God. We may put the matter briefly by saying that, as man’s ethical sense developed, he found it impossible to go on ascribing ‘bad-sacred’ elements to divine personality, and came to hold an ethically higher idea of God.

On the logical side, the natural trend has been toward unity and universality. The many incomplete and partial gods of polytheism give place to a complete and single God; warring tribal gods give place to the universal God of all the world.

What exactly this means, whether man, as his powers develop, is seeing new aspects of God which previously he could not grasp, whether he is investing with his own ideas something which is essentially unknowable, or whether, as some radical thinkers believe, the concept of God is a personification of impersonal powers and forces in nature, it is not possible to discuss here. What is assuredly true is that man’s idea of God gradually alters, and becomes more exalted. Theology develops; and, with the change in theology, religious feeling and practice alter too.

At the moment a new difficulty is cropping up as a result of the progress of science. If nature really works according to universal automatic law, then God, regarded as a ruler or governor of the universe, is much more remote from us and the world’s affairs than earlier ages imagined. Modern theology is meeting this by stressing the idea of divine immanence in the minds and ideals of men.

III

Here I must get back to the general idea of religious development. There is one rather curious fact about this. The intensity of religious feeling may be as great, the firmness of belief as strong, in the lowest religions as they are in the highest. The difference between a low and a high religion is due to the ethical, moral, and intellectual ideas which are interwoven with the religious spirit, which color it and alter the way it expresses itself in action.

The spiritual insight of the Hebrew prophets could not tolerate the idea that material sacrifices and burnt offerings were the best means of propitiating God, and they inaugurated a new and higher stage in Hebrew religion, epitomized in the words of the psalmist, ’The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’ Jesus could not tolerate the idea that forms and ritual observances were the road to salvation, and inaugurated not only a new religion but a new phase in world history by his insistence on purity of heart and self-sacrifice, epitomized in the words, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ Paul could not tolerate the idea that God would offer salvation to one nation only, and made of infant Christianity a world religion instead of merely an improved religion for the Jews.

Those are cases where the new insight was from the start applied directly to religion. But often the new ideas begin their career quite independently of religion, and only later come to influence it. Orthodox religion, for instance, was on the whole favorable to the institution of slavery. The abolition of slavery was due at least as much to new humanitarian and social ideas, often regarded at the time as heterodox or even subversive, as to religious sentiment. But, the change in public sentiment once effected, it had a marked effect on religious outlook. The same sort of thing could be said about our changed ideas on the use of torture, on the treatment of criminals and paupers and insane people, and many other subjects.

But it is in the intellectual sphere, during the last few centuries at least, that changes which in their origin were unrelated to religion have had the most considerable effect upon the religious outlook. Those who are interested will find a lucid and thought-provoking treatment of the whole subject in Mr. Langdon-Davies’s new book, Man and His Universe. Here I must content myself with two brief examples. When Kepler showed that the planets moved in ellipses instead of circles, when Galileo discovered craters on the moon, spots on the sun, or showed that new fixed stars could appear, their discoveries were not indifferent to religion, as might have been supposed. On the contrary, they had as much influence on the religious outlook of the day as did the ideas of Darwin on the religious outlook of the Victorian age, or as the ideas of Freud and Pavlov are having on that of our own times. For to the Middle Ages a circle was a perfect form, an ellipse an imperfect one; and the planets ought to move in circles to justify the perfection of God.

So, too, mediaeval religious thought was impregnated with the idea (which dates back to Aristotle) that change and imperfection were properties of the sublunary sphere — the earth alone. All the heavenly regions and bodies were supposed to be both perfect and changeless. So that the discoveries of imperfections, like the sun’s spots or the moon’s pockmarks, or of celestial changes like the birth of a new star, meant an overhauling of all kinds of fundamental ideas in the theology of the time.

As a second example, take Newton. We are so used to the idea of gravity that we forget what a revolution in thought was caused by Newton’s discoveries. Put simply, the change was this. Before Newton’s time, men supposed that the planets and their satellites had to be perpetually guided and controlled in their courses by some extraneous power, and this power was almost universally supposed to be the hand of God. Then came Newton, and showed that no such guidance or controlling power was, as a matter of fact, needed; granted the universal property of gravitation, the planets could not help circling as they did. For theology, this meant that men could no longer think of God as continually controlling the details of the working of the heavenly bodies; as regards this aspect of the governance of the universe, God had to be thought of at one remove farther away, as the designer and creator of a machine which, once designed and created, needed no further control.

And this new conception did, as a matter of historical fact, exert a great influence on religious thought, which culminated in Paley and the Bridgewater School, early in the last century.

IV

It is considerations like these which lead us on to what is usually called the conflict between science and religion. If what I have been saying has any truth in it, however, it is not a conflict between science and religion at all, but between science and theology. The reason it is often looked on as a conflict of science with religion is that the system of ideas and explanations and reasonings which crystallizes out as a theology tends to become tinged with the feeling of sacredness which is at the heart of religion. It thus gets looked on as itself sacred, not to be interfered with, and does, in point of fact, become an integral part of the particular religion at its particular stage of development. So we may, if we like, say that science can be in conflict with particular stages of particular religions, though it cannot possibly be in conflict with religion in general.

Now the man of science, if he is worth his salt, has a definitely religious feeling about truth. In other words, truth is sacred to him, and he refuses to believe that any religious system is right, or can satisfy man in his capacity of truth seeker, if it denies or even pays no attention to the new truths which generations of patient scientific workers painfully and laboriously wrest from nature. You may call this a provocative attitude if you like; but on this single point the scientist refuses to give way, for to do so would be for him to deny himself and the faith that is in him — the faith in the value of discovering more of the truth about the universe.

He knows quite well that what he has so far discovered is the merest fraction of what there is to know, that many of his explanations will be superseded by the progress of knowledge in the future. But he also knows that the accumulated effect of scientific work has been to produce a steady increase in the sum total of know ledge, a steady increase in the accuracy of the scientific explanation of what is known. In other words, scientific discovery is never complete, but always progressive; it is always giving us a closer approximation to truth.

Thus, knowing as he does that both science and religion have grown and developed, and believing that they should continue to do so, he does not feel he is being subversive, but only progressive, in what he asks. And what he asks is that religion, on its theological side, shall continue to take account of the changes and expansions of the picture of the universe which science is drawing.

I say shall continue, for it has done so in the past, although often grudgingly enough. It gave up the idea of a flat earth; it gave up the ideas that the earth was the centre of the universe and that the planets moved in perfect circles; it gave up the idea of a material heaven above a dome-like sky, and accepted the idea of an enormous space peopled with huge numbers of suns, and indeed with other groups of suns each comparable to what we for long thought was the whole universe; it accepted Newton’s discovery that the heavenly bodies need no guidance in their courses, and the discoveries of the nineteenth-century physicists and chemists about the nature of matter; it has abandoned the idea that the world is only a few thousand years old, and has accepted the time scale discovered by goology. And it finds itself no worse off for having shed these worn-out intellectual garments.

But there are still many discoveries of science which it has not yet woven into its theological scheme. Only certain of the churches have accepted evolution, though this was without doubt the most important single new idea of the nineteenth century. Religion has not yet assimilated recent advances in scientific knowledge of the brain and nervous system, of heredity, of psychology, or of sex and the physiology of sex. And in a great many cases, while accepting scientific discoveries, it has only gone halfway in recasting its theology to meet the new situation.

But, whatever this or that religion may choose to do with new knowledge, man’s destiny and his relation to the forces and powers of the world about him are, and must always be, the chief concerns of religion. It is for this reason that any light which science can shed on the nature and working of man and the nature and working of his environment cannot help being relevant to religion.

V

What, then, is the picture which science draws of the universe to-day, the picture which religion must take account of (with due regard, of course, for the fact that the picture is incomplete) in its theology and general outlook? It is, I think, somewhat as follows. It is the picture of a universe in which matter and energy, time and space, are not what they seem to common sense, but interlock and overlap in the most puzzling way. A universe of appalling vastness, appalling age, and appalling meaninglessness. The only trend we can perceive in the universe as a whole is a trend toward a final uniformity when no energy will be available, a state of cosmic death.

Within this universe, however, on one of the smaller satellites of one of its millions of millions of suns, a different trend is in progress. It is the trend we call evolution, and it has consisted first in the genesis of living out of nonliving matter, and then in the steady but slow progress of this living matter toward greater efficiency, greater harmony of construction, greater control over and greater independence of its environment. And this slow progress has culminated, in times which, geologically speaking, are very recent, in the person of man and his societies. This is the objective side of the trend of life; but it has another side. It has also been a trend toward greater activity and intensity of mind, toward greater capacities for knowing, feeling, and purposing; and here, too, man is preeminent.

The curious thing is that both these trends, of the world of lifeless matter as a whole, and of the world of life on this planet, operate with the same materials. The matter of which living things are composed is the same as that in the lifeless earth and the most distant stars; the energy by which they work is part of the same general reservoir which sets the stars shining, drives a motor car, and moves the planets or the tides. There is, in fact, only one world-stuff. And since man and life are part of this world-stuff, the properties of consciousness or something of the same nature as consciousness must be attributes of the world-stuff, too, unless we are to drop any belief in continuity and uniformity in nature. The physicists and the chemists and the physiologists do not deal with these mind-like properties, for the simple reason that they have not so far discovered any method of detecting or measuring them directly. But the logic of evolution forces us to believe that they are there, even if in lowly form, throughout the universe.

Finally, this universe which science depicts works uniformly and regularly. A particular kind of matter in a particular set of circumstances will always behave in the same way; things work as they do, not because of inherent principles of perfection, not because they are guided from without, but because they happen to be so made that they cannot work in any other way. When we have found out something about the way things are made so that we can prophesy how they will work, we say we have discovered a natural law; such laws, however, are not like human laws, imposed from without on objects, but are laws of the objects’ own being. And the laws governing the evolution of life seem to be as regular and automatic as those governing the movements of the planets.

In this universe lives man. He is a curious phenomenon: a piece of the universal world-stuff which, as result of long processes of change and strife, has become intensely conscious — conscious of itself, of its relations with the rest of the world-stuff, capable of consciously feeling, reasoning, desiring, and planning. These capacities arc the result of an astonishingly complicated piece of physical machinery — the cerebral hemispheres of his brain. The limitations to our capacities come from the construction of our brains and bodies which we receive through heredity; with someone else’s body and brain, our development even in the same environment could have been different. And these differences in human capacity due to differences in inheritance may be enormous. The method of inheritance in men is identical in principle with the method of inheritance in poultry or flies or fish. And by means of further detailed knowledge we could control it, and therefore control human capacity, which is only another way of saying that man has the power of controlling his own future; or, if you like to put it still more generally, that not only is he the highest product of evolution, but, through his power of conscious reason, he has become the trustee of the evolutionary process. His own future and that of the earth are in large measure in his hands. And that future extends for thousands of millions of years.

Lastly, we must not forget to remind ourselves that we are relative beings. As products of evolution, our bodies and minds are what they are because they have been moulded in relation to the world in which we live. The very senses we possess are relative — for instance, we have no electric sense and no X-ray sense, because electrical and X-ray stimuli of any magnitude are very rare in nature. The working of our minds, too, is very far from absolute. Our reason often serves only as a means of finding reasons to justify our desires; our mental being, as modern psychology has shown, is a compromise— here antagonistic forces in conflict, there an undesirable element forcibly repressed, there again a disreputable motive emerging disguised. Our minds, in fact, like our bodies, are devices for helping us to get along somehow in the struggle for existence. We are entrapped in our own natures. Only by deliberate effort, and not always then, shall we be able to use our minds as instruments for attaining unvarnished truth, for practising disinterested virtue, for achieving true sincerity and purity of heart.

I do not know how religion will assimilate these facts and these ideas; but I am sure that in the long run it will assimilate them as it has assimilated Kepler and Galileo and Newton and is beginning to assimilate Darwin; and I am sure that the sooner the assimilation is effected, the better it will be for everybody concerned.

VI

So far I have spoken almost entirely of the effect of science upon the religious outlook — of the effect of scientific method upon the study of religion itself, leading us to the idea of development in religion; and of the effect of scientific discoveries in general upon man’s picture of the universe, which it is the business of religion to assimilate in its theology. Now I must say something about the limitations of science. Science, like art, or morality, or religion, is simply one way of handling the chaos of experience which is the only immediate reality we know. Art, for instance, handles experience in relation to the desire for beauty, or, if we want to put it more generally and more philosophically, in relation to the desire for expressing feelings and ideas in aesthetically satisfying forms. Accuracy of mere fact is and should be a secondary consideration to art. The annual strictures of the Tailor and Cutter on the men’s costumes in the Academy portraits are more or less irrelevant to the question of whether the portraits are good pictures or bad pictures.

Science, on the other hand, deals with the chaos of experience from the point of view of efficient intellectual and practical handling. Science is out to find laws and general rules, because the discovery of a single law or rule at once enables us to understand an indefinite number of individual happenings — as the single law of gravitation enables us to understand the fall of an apple, tire movement of the planets, the tides, the return of comets, and innumerable other phenomena. Science insists on continual verification by testing against facts, because the bitter experience of history is that, without such constant testing, man’s imagination and logical faculty run away with him and in the long run make a fool of him. And science has every confidence in these methods because experience has amply demonstrated that they are the only ones by which man can hope to extend his control over nature and his own destiny. Science is in the first instance merely disinterested curiosity, the desire to know for knowing’s sake; yet in the long run the new knowledge always brings new practical power.

But science has two inherent limitations. First, it is incomplete, or perhaps I had better say partial, just because it only concerns itself with intellectual handling and objective control. And secondly, it is morally and emotionally neutral. It sets out to describe and to understand, not to appraise or to assign values. Indeed, science is without a scale of values; the only value which it recognizes is that of truth and knowledge.

This neutrality of science in regard to emotions and moral and aesthetic values means that, while in its own sphere of knowledge it is supreme, in other spheres it is only a method or a tool. What man shall do with the new facts, the new ideas, the new opportunities of control which science is showering upon him does not depend upon science, but upon what man wants to do with them; and this in turn depends upon his scale of values. It is here that religion can become the dominant factor. For what religion can do is to set up a scale of values for conduct, and to provide emotional or spiritual driving force to help in getting them realized in practice. On the other hand, it is an undoubted fact that the scale of values set up by a religion will be different according to its intellectual background: you can never wholly separate practice from theory, idea from action. Thus, to put the matter in a nutshell, while the practical task of science is to provide man with new knowledge and increased powers of control, the practical task of religion is to help man to live and to decide how he shall use that knowledge and these powers.

The conflict between science and religion has come chiefly from the fact that religion has often been afraid of the new knowledge provided by science, because it had unfortunately committed itself to a theology of fixity instead of one of change, and claimed to be already in possession of all the knowledge that mattered. It therefore seemed that to admit the truth and the value of the new knowledge provided by science would be to destroy religion. Most men of science and many thinkers within the churches do not believe this any longer. Science may destroy particular theologies; it may even cause the downfall of particular brands of religion if they persist in refusing to admit the validity of scientific knowledge. But it cannot destroy religion, because that is the outcome of the religious spirit, and the religious spirit is just as much a property of human nature as is the scientific spirit.

What science can and should do is to modify the forms in which the religious spirit expresses itself. And once religion recognizes that fact, there will no longer remain any fundamental conflict between science and religion, but merely a number of friendly adjustments to be made.

In regard to this last point, let me make myself clear. I do not mean that science should dictate to religion how it should change or what form it should take. I mean that it is the business and the duty of the various religions to accept the new knowledge we owe to science, to assimilate it into their systems, and to adjust their general ideas and outlook accordingly. The only business or duty of science is to discover new facts, to frame the best possible generalizations to account for the facts, and to turn knowledge to practical account when asked to do so. The problem of what man will do with the enormous possibilities of power which science has put into his hands is probably the most vital and the most alarming problem of modern times. At the moment, humanity is rather like an irresponsible and mischievous child who has been presented with a set of machine tools, a box of matches, and a supply of dynamite. How can religion expect to help in solving the problem before the child cuts itself or blows itself up if it does not permeate itself with the new ideas, and make them its own in order to control them?

That is why I say — as a human being and not as a scientist — that it is the duty of religion to accept and assimilate scientific knowledge. I also believe it to be the business of religion to do so, because if religion does not do so, religion will in the long run lose influence and adherents thereby.

I see the human race engaged in the tremendous experiment of living on the planet called earth. From the point of view of humanity as a whole, the great aim of this experiment must be to make life more truly and more fully worth living; the religious man might prefer to say that the aim was to realize the kingdom of God upon earth, but that is only another way of saying the same thing.

The scientific spirit and the religious spirit both have their parts to play in this experiment. If religion will but abandon its claims to fixity and certitude (as many liberal churchmen are already doing), then it can see in the pursuit of truth something essentially sacred, and science itself will come to have its religious aspect. If science will remember that it, as science, can lay no claim to set up values, it will allow due weight to the religious spirit.

At the moment, however, a radical difference of outlook obtains as between change in science and change in religion. An alteration in scientific outlook — for instance the supersession of pure Newtonian mechanics by relativity — is generally looked on as a victory for science; but an alteration in religious outlook — for instance, the abandonment of belief in the literal truth of the account of creation in Genesis — is usually looked on as in some way a defeat for religion. Yet, either both are defeats or both are victories — not for particular activities such as religion or science, but for the spirit of man. In the past, religion has usually been slowly or grudgingly forced to admit new scientific ideas; if it will but accept the most vivifying of all the scientific ideas of the past century, — that of the capacity of life, including human life and institutions, including religion itself, for progressive development, — the conflict between science and religion will be over, and both can join hands in advancing the great experiment of man, of ensuring that men shall have life and have it more abundantly.