isgraceful, words never fell
from the lips of a man calling himself a priest of the Church of God."

The last sentence was spoken in a high, shrill voice, which rose above
the angry murmurs which came from all parts of the hall, but these Vane
silenced in a moment, by holding up his hand and smiling as some of the
audience had never seen a man smile before.

"I am glad," he went on, in slow, very distinct tones, "that such an
objection has been raised so early by a brother priest. It will help us
to understand each other more clearly, and so I will try to answer him
at once. The difference between religion and theology is the difference
between the whole and the part; but theology is not a science, for there
is no science of the Infinite. It is only the study of the many
different conceptions which men of all nations and races have formed as
to the nature of the over-ruling Power of the universes--of all the
attempts to solve the insoluble and to answer the unanswerable.

"There are two sayings, one Arabian and one Italian, which I hope I may
quote without offence. One is, 'God gives us the outline of the picture,
we fill it in. We cannot change the outline, but we are responsible for
every stroke of the brush. In the end God judges the picture.'

"The other was the saying of a famous Italian artist, 'Children and
fools should not see work half done.'

"Now let us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and
therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world
which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the
tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will
in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows
through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse
of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal problem as this, must we not all
confess ourselves to be but as children and fools, since we do not and
cannot see even half of the work, but only an immeasurably tiny fragment
of it? For this reason I feel justified in saying that those who deny
the existence of the Divine Architect of the universe and those who
claim to know all about His plans, are, at least, equally mistaken.

"But that, although I have been glad of the opportunity of saying it, is
not quite what I came here to say, and, therefore, we will drop that
part of the subject. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which--I say it
both with wonder and gla