salvation is escape from self into the
larger being of life. . . .

What can this "religion of the future" be but that devotion to the
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already found,
like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed away the
confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an inquiry setting
out from a purely religious starting-point we have already reached
conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of an extreme
materialist.

This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our God--an
altar rather indistinctly inscribed.

2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD

Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were the
statement of an anonymous God. Everything is said that a religious
writer would say--except that God is not named. Religious metaphors
abound. It is as if they accepted the living body of religion but denied
the bones that held it together--as they might deny the bones of a
friend. It is true, they would admit, the body moves in a way that
implies bones in its every movement, but--WE HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE
BONES.

The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--between
the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at times almost
as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to students of physics,
whether the scientific "ether" is real or a formula. Every material
phenomenon is consonant with and helps to define this ether, which
permeates and sustains and is all things, which nevertheless is
perceptible to no sense, which is reached only by an intellectual
process. Most minds are disposed to treat this ether as a reality. But
the acutely critical mind insists that what is only so attainable by
inference is not real; it is no more than "a formula that satisfies all
phenomena."

But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that
satisfies all my forms of consciousness?

Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to
believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly real,
from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy moral and
spiritual phenomena. The former has encountered him, the other has as
yet felt only unassigned impulses. One says God's will is so; the other
that Right is so. One says God moves me to do this or that; the other
the Good Will in me which I sha