nto the present, and the present proceed from
the past, we readily enough allow as a natural and necessary law;
yet baptized heathenism is often heathenism still, under another
name. Again, we are sometimes so short-sighted that we deny to
former periods the paternity of their own more fortunate offspring,
and behave like prosperous children who ungratefully ignore their
poorer parents, to whom they owe their breath and being. Such
treatment of history is to be emphatically deprecated, whether it
arises from ignorance or ingratitude. We ought to know, if we do
not, and we ought also to acknowledge, that our perfect day grew
out of primeval darkness, and that the progress was a lingering
dawn. This we hold to be the clearest view of the Divine causation.
Our modern method in philosophy, largely owing to the _Novum
Organum_ of Bacon, is evolution, the _novum organum_ of the
nineteenth century; and this process recognises no abrupt or
interruptive creations, but gradual transformations from pre-existent
types, "variations under domestication," and the passing away of the
old by its absorption into the new. Our religion, like our language, is
a garden not only for indigenous vegetation, but also for
acclimatisation, in which we improve under cultivation exotic plants
whose roots are drawn from every soil on the earth. And, as Paul
preached in Athens the God whom the Greeks worshipped in
ignorance, so our missionaries carry back to less enlightened
peoples the fruit of that life-giving tree whose germs exist among
themselves, undeveloped and often unknown. No religion has fallen
from heaven, like the fabled image of Athene, in full-grown beauty.
All spiritual life is primordially an inspiration or intuition from the
Father of spirits, whose offspring all men are, and who is not far
from every one of them. This intuition prompts men to "seek the
Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him." Thus prayer
becomes an instinct; and to worship is as natural as to breathe. But
man is a being with five senses, and as his contact with his
fellow-creatures and with the whole creation is at one or other of
those five points, he is necessarily sensuous. Endowed with native
intelligence, the _intellectus ipse_ of Leibnitz, he nevertheless
receives his impressions on _sensitive_ nerves, his emotions are
_sentiments_, his words become _sentences_, and his stock of
wisdom is his common _sense_. A few, very few, words express his