What may we infer will be the evolution of religious ideas and
sentiments throughout the future? The development of those higher
sentiments which no longer tolerate the ascription of inferior
sentiments to a divinity, and the intellectual development which causes
dissatisfaction with the crude interpretations previously accepted, must
force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given
to the First Cause as they have long since dropped the lower.
Those, however, who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs
and sentiments seem unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the
old interpretation is added to the new. Or rather we may say that
transference from one to the other is accompanied by increase; since for
an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an
explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, then leaves
us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. The truth must grow
ever clearer--the truth that there is an inscrutable existence
everywhere manifested to which the man of science can neither find nor
conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the
more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the
one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence of _AN INFINITE
AND ETERNAL ENERGY_, from which all things proceed.