This is the age of the dominance of science. When a man asks, What
shall I believe? only one answer can be returned: Believe the things
that are. An age now past found it easy to believe that it believed
what it was told, even the things that it knew were not so. But to-day
at least has the merit of finding no merit in that form of
self-deception.
The passion for absolute truth and rightness is one of the noblest that
can spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion. The
scientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the
religious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in
their power to instill a primary love for truth and to lift up ideals
of exactness and equity.
When we translate religion into terms of life, into actuality as
contrasted with imagination, we begin to discover the necessity for
foundations deeper than legend or romance. So long as a man's religion
consisted in what he might picture in glowing colours of imagination on
the canvas of fancy about his past or future he did not need to take
his designs from facts.
But when religion becomes the science of right living, the process of
securing right social relationships and character as the expression of
ideal personal and individual character, it is evident that in such a
work religion must proceed on ascertained, indisputable verities.
We may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family,
and we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal
heaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our
social and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based
on facts, for truth. Religion thus becomes a science.
Much eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and
science. It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new
form, between the gray dawn and the growing day. Our fathers were not
wilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so
long had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to
give them up for those of the full day's printing.
The most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear
that it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known. He who
in the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the
full facts is religion's greatest foe. Only the full truth can set us
fully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.
Why should we fear the light of investigation on the things of
religion? There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy.
It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by
sophistry. How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built
out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no
pole of truth?
In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem
slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our
own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet,
we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among
the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find
the rock of truth.
But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one
great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all
nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream,
that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite
wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of
science.
Truth always is safe. The holiest error must be born of hell. We can
make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that
she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the
doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as
unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.
Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to
read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend
the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the
harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion;
shall know things as they are and be what we should be.