This, then, is the first great reason why our religion has gradually become more rational.  The rationality of the universe constantly presented to our thought has developed a rationality in our thoughts about the universe.  The mind, like the dyer’s hand, is subdued to what it works in.  The response of primitive man to the pressure of Nature upon him was a response of wonder and awe and fear; his religion was instructive, emotional; but through the long tuition of the ages, the old nurse has taught him how to use his reason; and he now finds unity where he once found strife, and order and law where once confusion and chaos reigned.  His religion has become rational.

But what do we mean when we say that man’s great teacher has been Nature?  Nature, as we have seen, is instinct with Reason, and the Reason which is revealed in Nature is only another name for God.  It is the immanent God, the Eternal Reason, who has been patiently disclosing himself to us in the world round about us, and thus cleansing our minds from the crude and superstitious conceptions with which in our ignorance and fear we had invested him.

The second of the sources from which the influences have come for the purification of religion is humanity itself.

We are told, in the Book of Genesis, that man is made in the image of God; and the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, on which the entire teaching of Jesus rests, is but a stronger statement of the same truth.  It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen.  It does not yet appear what we shall be.  But we have learned, in our evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected type before we can make up our minds about it.  The eaglet just hatched does not give us the right idea of the eagle, nor does the infant in his swaddling clothes reveal to us the man.  So it is with species and races; if they are undergoing a process of development, we must wait for the later stages of the process before we judge.  The apple is not the crab, but the Northern Spy; the horse is not the mustang, but the Percheron or the German roadster.  In estimating any living thing, you take into consideration its possibilities of development; the ideal to which it may attain must always be in sight.

In the same way when we think of man, we do not take the Patagonian as the type, but the best specimens of European or American manhood.

If, then, we are taught to believe that man is a child of God, we should be compelled to believe that it is the most perfectly developed man who most resembles God.  We have some conception of the ideal man.  Our conceptions are not always correct, but they are constantly improved, as we strive to realize them.  And in the ideal man we see reflected the character of God.  We are sure that a perfect humanity would give us the best revelation we could have of divinity.  If we could see a perfect man, we could learn from him more about God than from any other source.