f Nature Religion is only
half complete; that without a God of Nature the God of Revelation is
only half intelligible and only partially known. God is not confined to
the outermost circle of environment, He lives and moves and has His
being in the whole. Those who only seek Him in the further zone can
only find a part. The Christian who knows not God in Nature, who does
not, that is to say, correspond with the whole environment, most
certainly is partially dead. The author of "Ecce Homo" may be partially
right when he says: "I think a bystander would say that though
Christianity had in it something far higher and deeper and more
ennobling, yet the average scientific man worships just at present a
more awful, and, as it were, a greater Deity than the average Christian.
In so many Christians the idea of God has been degraded by childish and
little-minded teaching; the Eternal and the Infinite and the
All-embracing has been represented as the head of the clerical interest,
as a sort of clergyman, as a sort of schoolmaster, as a sort of
philanthropist. But the scientific man knows Him to be eternal; in
astronomy, in geology, he becomes familiar with the countless
millenniums of His lifetime. The scientific man strains his mind
actually to realize God's infinity. As far off as the fixed stars he
traces Him, 'distance inexpressible by numbers that have name.'
Meanwhile, to the theologian, infinity and eternity are very much of
empty words when applied to the object of his worship. He does not
realize them in actual facts and definite computations."[60] Let us
accept this rebuke. The principle that want of correspondence is Death
applies all round. He who knows not God in Nature only partially lives.
The converse of this, however, is not true; and that is the point we are
insisting on. He who knows God only in Nature lives not. There is no
"correspondence" with an Unknown God, no "continuous adjustment" to a
fixed First Cause. There is no "assimilation" of Natural Law; no growth
in the Image of "the All-embracing." To correspond with the God of
Science assuredly is not to live. "This is Life Eternal, to know Thee,
_the true God_, and _Jesus Christ_ Whom Thou hast sent."

From the service we have tried to make natural science render to our
religion, we might be expected possibly to take up the position that the
absolute contribution of Science to Revelation was very great. On the
contrary, it is very small. The _absolute_ contr