To study nature without fear is possible, but without reproach,
impossible. The man who worships in the temple of knowledge must carry
his arms with him as our Puritan fathers had to do when they gathered
in their first rude meeting-houses. It is a fearful thing to meddle with
the ark which holds the mysteries of creation. I remember that when I
was a child the tradition was whispered round among us little folks that
if we tried to count the stars we should drop down dead. Nevertheless,
the stars have been counted and the astronomer has survived. This
nursery legend is the child's version of those superstitions which would
have strangled in their cradles the young sciences now adolescent and
able to take care of themselves, and which, no longer daring to
attack these, are watching with hostile aspect the rapid growth of the
comparatively new science of man.

The real difficulty of the student of nature at this time is to
reconcile absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness with that respect
for the past, that reverence, for the spirit of reverence wherever we
find it, that tenderness for the weakest fibres by which the hearts of
our fellow-creatures hold to their religious convictions, which will
make the transition from old belief to a larger light and liberty an
interstitial change and not a violent mutilation.

I remember once going into a little church in a small village some miles
from a great European capital. The special object of adoration in this
humblest of places of worship was a bambino, a holy infant, done in wax,
and covered with cheap ornaments such as a little girl would like to
beautify her doll with. Many a good Protestant of the old Puritan type
would have felt a strong impulse to seize this "idolatrous" figure and
dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must
have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this
poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble,
unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office
of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue
of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many
years in the mind of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it
is no longer a wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation
quite as real as that of the Eucharist. The moral is that we must not
roughly smash other people's idols because we know, or t