ounders, and places, and sources, and
contents, and methods: Arminian--Augustinian--Calvinistic--Lutheran--
Gallican--Genevan--Mercersburg--New England--Oxford--national--
revealed--Catholic--evangelical--fundamental--historical--
homiletical--moral--mystical--pastoral--practical--dogmatic--
exegetical--polemic--rational--systematic. That sounds a little
like Polonius," said David, stopping suddenly, "but there is no
humor in it! One great lesson in the history of them all is not to be
neglected: that through them also runs the great Law of Evolution, of
the widening thoughts of men; so that now, in civilized countries at
least, the churches persecute to the death no longer. You know what the
Egyptian Priesthood would have done with me at my trial. What the
Mediaeval hierarchy would have done. What the Protestant or the
Catholic theology of two centuries ago might have done. Now mankind is
developing better ideas of these little arrangements of human
psychology on the subject of God, though the churches still try to
enforce them in His name. But the time is coming when the churches will
be deserted by all thinking men, unless they cease trying to uphold, as
the teachings of God, mere creeds of their ecclesiastical founders.
Very few men reject all belief in God; and it is no man's right to
inquire in what any man's belief consists; men do reject and have a
right to reject what some man writes out as the eternal truth of the
matter."

"And now," he said, turning to her sorrowfully, "that is the best or
the worst of what I believe--according as one may like it or not like
it. I see all things as a growth, a sublime unfolding by the Laws of
God. The race ever rises toward Him. The old things which were its best
once die off from it as no longer good. Its charity grows, its justice
grows. All the nobler, finer elements of its spirit come forth more and
more--a continuous advance along the paths of Law. And the better the
world, the larger its knowledge, the easier its faith in Him who made
it and who leads it on. The development of Man is itself the great
Revelation of Him! But I have studied these things ignorantly, only a
little while. I am at the beginning of my life, and hope to grow. Still
I stand where I have placed myself. And now, are you like the others:
do you give me up?"

He faced her with the manner in which he had sat before his professors,
conceiving himself as on trial a second time. He had in him the stuf