The sermon dealt with the relations of religion to society.  It began by claiming that all being and all thought rose by slow gradations to God,—­ended in Him, for Him—­existed only through Him and because of being His.

The form of act or thought mattered nothing.  The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work.  It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.  The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science.  “If there is still a feeling of hostility between them,” he said, “it is no longer the fault of religion.  There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer.  Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,—­that idea which the church has never ceased to embody,—­I am!  Science like religion kneels before this mystery; it can carry itself back only to this simple consciousness of existence.  I am is the starting point and goal of metaphysics and logic, but the church alone has pointed out from the beginning that this starting-point is not human but divine.  The philosopher says—­I am, and the church scouts his philosophy.  She answers:—­No! you are not, you have no existence of your own.  You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I am, of which the church is the emblem.”

In this symbolic expression of his right of property in their souls and bodies, perhaps the preacher rose a little above the heads of his audience.  Most of his flock were busied with a kind of speculation so foreign to that of metaphysics that they would have been puzzled to explain what was meant by Descartes’ famous cogito ergo Sum, on which the preacher laid so much stress.  They would have preferred to put the fact of their existence on almost any other experience in life, as that “I have five millions,” or, “I am the best-dressed woman in the church,—­therefore I am somebody.”  The fact of self-consciousness would not have struck them as warranting a claim even to a good social position, much less to a share in omnipotence; they knew the trait only as a sign of bad manners.  Yet there were at least two persons among the glorified chrysanthemums of St. John’s Garden this day, who as the sermon closed and the organ burst out again, glanced at each other with a smile as though they had enjoyed their lecture.