globe; and we have labelled this force electricity. And, instead of
getting down on our knees in reverence, we get impatient if our
communication is delayed two minutes or three. We fool ourselves with
the thought that, because we have called it electricity, we know it, we
have taken the mystery out of the fact. Why, friends, do you know
anything about electricity? Do you know what it is? Do you know why it
works as it does? I do not; and I do not know of anybody on the face of
the earth who does. The wonder of the "Arabian Nights" is cheap and
tame and theatrical compared to the wonder of this everyday workaday
world of ours, in the midst of which and by means of which we are
carrying on our business and our daily avocations. The wonder of the
carpet that would carry the person through the air who sat upon it and
wished is nothing compared with the power of electricity, steam, any
one of these invisible, intangible powers that are thrilling through
the world to-day. There never was so much room for mystery, for awe,
for poetry, for romance, as there is in the midst of our commercial
life in this nineteenth century.

This element of religion, then, is in no danger. We know nothing
ultimately. Who can tell me what a particle of matter is? Who can tell
me what a ray of light is, as it comes from a star? Who can tell me how
the movements in the particles of air striking my eye run up into nerve
and brain, and become translated into thought, into light, into form,
into motion, into all this wondrous universe that surrounds us on every
hand?

Then take the element of trust. People used to think they could trust
in their gods. Rebecca, for example, stole her father's gods, and hid
them in the trappings of her camel, and sat on them. She thought, then,
that she had a god near her who would care for her. The old Hebrew,
with an ox-team, carried his God, in a box that he called the ark, into
battle, and supposed that he had a very present help in time of need.
But we have the eternal stability and order of the universe, a God that
never forgets, a God on whom we can lean, in whom we can trust, who is
not away off in heaven, but here, closer to us than the air we breathe,
a God in whom we live and move and have our being.

And has this evolution of the religious life of the world threatened
the stability of truth? There never was a time on earth when there was
such a passion for truth as there is today. What means all this in