will seem reactionary
and conservative a thousand years hence.

Since I am upon this topic, may I say just a little more without boring
you? You say that criticism such as mine is merely destructive, and that
I have nothing to offer in place of what I pull down. This is not quite
correct. I think that there are certain elemental truths within our
grasp which ask for no faith for their acceptance, and which are
sufficient to furnish us with a practical religion, having so much of
reason in it that it would draw thinking men into its fold, not drive
them forth from it.

When we all get back to these elemental and provable facts there will
be some hopes of ending the petty bickerings of creeds, and of including
the whole human family in one comprehensive system of thought.

When first I came out of the faith in which I had been reared, I
certainly did feel for a time as if my life-belt had burst. I won't
exaggerate and say that I was miserable and plunged in utter spiritual
darkness. Youth is too full of action for that. But I was conscious of a
vague unrest, of a constant want of repose, of an emptiness and hardness
which I had not noticed in life before. I had so identified religion
with the Bible that I could not conceive them apart. When the foundation
proved false, the whole structure came rattling about my ears. And then
good old Carlyle came to the rescue; and partly from him, and partly
from my own broodings, I made a little hut of my own, which has kept me
snug ever since, and has even served to shelter a friend or two besides.

The first and main thing was to get it thoroughly soaked into one that
the existence of a Creator and an indication of His attributes does in
no way depend upon Jewish poets, nor upon human paper or printing ink.
On the contrary, all such efforts to realise Him must only belittle Him,
bringing the Infinite down to the narrow terms of human thought, at
a time when that thought was in the main less spiritual than it is
at present. Even the most material of modern minds would flinch at
depicting the Deity as ordering wholesale executions, and hacking kings
to pieces upon the horns of altars.

Then having prepared your mind for a higher (if perhaps a vaguer)
idea of the Deity, proceed to study Him in His works, which cannot be
counterfeited or manipulated. Nature is the true revelation of the Deity
to man. The nearest green field is the inspired page from which you may
read all that it i