order and popular consent to prevent
the spread of germs. Comparatively few people are appealing to God;
almost everybody is appealing to the health commissioner. Not many
people are relying upon religion; everybody is relying upon science.
As one faces the pregnant significance of that contrast, one sees that
in important sections of our modern life science has come to occupy the
place that God used to have in the reliance of our forefathers. For
the dominant fact of our generation is power over the world which has
been put into our hands through the knowledge of laws, and the
consequence is that the scientific mastery of life seems man's
indispensable and sufficient resource.

The issue is not far to seek. Such has been public confidence in the
efficacy and adequacy of this scientific control of life to meet all
human needs, that in multitudes of minds religion has been crowded to
the wall. Why should we trust God or concern ourselves with the deep
secrets of religious faith, if all our need is met by learning laws,
blowing upon our hands, and going to work? So even Christians come
secretly to look upon their Christianity as a frill, something gracious
but not indispensable, pleasant to live with but not impossible to live
without. Christian preachers lose their ability, looking first upon
their spiritual message and then upon their fellow men, to feel how
desperately the two need each other. Religion has become an "elective
in the university of life." But religion cannot persist as a frill; it
either is central in its importance or else it is not true at all. Its
great days come only when it is seen to be indispensable. We may use
what artificial respiration we will upon the Church, the days of the
Church's full power will not come until the conviction lays hold upon
her that the endeavour to found civilization upon a materialistic
science is leading us to perdition; that man needs desperately the
ministry of religion, its insight into life's meanings, its control
over life's use, its inward power for life's moral purposes; that man
never needed this more than now, when the scientific control of life is
arming him with so great ability to achieve his aims.

II

As we try to discern wherein man's need of religion lies with reference
to the scientific control of life, let us start with the proposition
that, when we have all the facts which science can discover, we still
need a spiritual interpretation