ead with the same
unbiased mind, the same open eye, the same faith, and the same reverence
as all other Revelation. All that is found there, whatever its place in
Theology, whatever its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, whatever its narrowness
or its breadth, we are bound to accept as Doctrine from which on the
lines of Science there is no escape.

When this presented itself to me as a method, I felt it to be due to
it--were it only to secure, so far as that was possible, that no former
bias should interfere with the integrity of the results--to begin again
at the beginning and reconstruct my Spiritual World step by step. The
result of that inquiry, so far as its expression in systematic form is
concerned, I have not given in this book. To reconstruct a Spiritual
Religion, or a department of Spiritual Religion--for this is all the
method can pretend to--on the lines of Nature would be an attempt from
which one better equipped in both directions might well be pardoned if
he shrank. My object at present is the humbler one of venturing a simple
contribution to practical Religion along the lines indicated. What Bacon
predicates of the Natural World, _Natura enim non nisi parendo
vincitur_, is also true, as Christ had already told us, of the Spiritual
World. And I present a few samples of the religious teaching referred to
formerly as having been prepared under the influence of scientific ideas
in the hope that they may be useful first of all in this direction.

I would, however, carefully point out that though their unsystematic
arrangement here may create the impression that these papers are merely
isolated readings in Religion pointed by casual scientific truths, they
are organically connected by a single principle. Nothing could be more
false both to Science and to Religion than attempts to adjust the two
spheres by making out ingenious points of contact in detail. The
solution of this great question of conciliation, if one may still refer
to a problem so gratuitous, must be general rather than particular. The
basis in a common principle--the Continuity of Law--can alone save
specific applications from ranking as mere coincidences, or exempt them
from the reproach of being a hybrid between two things which must be
related by the deepest affinities or remain forever separate.

To the objection that even a basis in Law is no warrant for so great a
trespass as the intrusion into another field of thought of the
principles of Natura