u
were some commonplace atheist or materialist, gainsay the honest logic
of his position.

"You believe that the world, that life, is a spiritual mystery?" he
would say.

"Yes."

"You do not for a moment think that any materialistic science has
remotely approached an adequate explanation of its meaning?"

"Certainly not."

"You believe too that, however it comes about, and whatever it means,
there is an eternal struggle in man between what, for sake of argument,
we will call the higher and lower natures?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, this spiritual mystery, this struggle, are hinted at in
various media of human expression, in an ever-changing variety of human
symbols. Art chiefly concerns itself with the sexual mystery, with the
wonderful love of man and woman, in its explanation of which alone
science is so pitifully inadequate. Literature more fully concerns
itself with the mystery of man's indestructibly instinctive relation to
what we call the unseen,--that is, the Whole, the Cosmos, God, or
whatever you please to call it. But more than literature, religion has
for centuries concerned itself with these considerations, has
consciously and industriously sought to make itself the science of what
we call the soul. It has thrown its observations, just as poetry and art
have thrown their observations, into symbolic forms, of which
Christianity is incomparably the most important. You don't reject the
revelation of human love because Hero and Leander are probably creations
of the poet's fancy. Will you reject the revelation of divine love,
because it chances, for its greater efficiency in winning human hearts,
to have found expression in a similar human symbolism? Personally, I
hold that Christ actually lived, and was literally the Son of God; but,
were the human literalness of his divine story discredited, the eternal
verities of human degeneration, and a mysterious regeneration, would be
no whit disproved. Externally, Christianity may be a symbol;
essentially, it is a science of spiritual fact, as really as geology is
a science of material fact.

"And as for its miraculous, supernatural, side,--are the laws of nature
so easy to understand that we should find such a difficulty in accepting
a few divergencies from them? He who can make laws for so vast a
universe may surely be capable of inventing a few comparatively trivial
exceptions."

Not perhaps in so many words, but in some such spirit, would Chrysostom
Trotter