s in the universe _are_ as
superficially they _look_. The earth looks flat and, as long as we
gaze on it, it never will look any other way, but it is spherical for
all that. The earth looks stationary and if we live to be as old as
Methuselah we never will see it move, but it is moving--seventy-five
times faster than a cannon ball! The sun looks as though it rose in
the east and set in the west, and we never can make it look any other
way, but it does not rise nor set at all. So far as this earth is
concerned, the sun is standing still enough. We look as though we
walked with our heads up and our feet down, and we never can make
ourselves look otherwise, but someone finding a safe stance outside
this whirling sphere would see us half the time walking with our heads
down and our feet up. Few things are ever the way they look, and the
end of all scientific research, as of all spiritual insight, is to get
behind the way things look to the way things are. Walter Pater has a
rememberable phrase, "the hiddenness of perfect things." One meaning,
therefore, which Christ has for Christians lies in the realm of
spiritual interpretation. He has done for us there what Copernicus and
Galileo did in astronomy: he has moved us out from our flat earth into
his meaningful universe, full of moral worth and hope. He has become
to us in this, our inner need, what the luminous phrase of the Book of
Job describes, "An interpreter, one among a thousand." And in spite of
all our immediate expectancy, born out of our scientific control of
life, mankind never needed that service more than now.

V

There is a second proposition to which we should attend as we endeavour
to define the need for religion with reference to the scientific
mastery of life. Consider why so often men are tempted to suppose that
science is adequate for human purposes. Is it not because science
supplies men with power? Steam, electricity, petroleum, radium--with
what progressive mastery over the latent resources of the universe does
science move from one area of energy to another, until in the
imagination of recent generations she has seemed to stand saying: all
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. With such power to
bestow, is she not our rightful mistress? But who that has walked with
discerning eyes through these last few years can any longer be beguiled
by that fallacious vision? Look at what we are doing with this new
power that science h