our religion, and makes cowards and liars of us, who should be heroes.  It makes our religion a byword with honest unbelievers.  And if they are honest scientific minds, waiting for evidence of the practical value of our religion, why should they believe, when we live so successfully down to the religion which we would scorn to openly profess?  Our fathers may have been narrow or straight-laced; they were not cross-eyed from trying to keep one eye on God and the other on the main chance.  What is the use of whispering, “Lord, Lord,” Sundays, if we shout, “Oh, Baal, hear us,” all the rest of the week.  Let us at least be honest, and “if Baal be god, follow him,” and avow it.  And worst, and most hideous, of all, we are not so much hypocrites as self-deceived.  Let us not forget the old Greek doctrine of Ate, goddess of judicial blindness, sent down only upon those who were living the unpardonable sin of indifference.

But supposing that there is in environment something more and other than material, can we possibly know anything about it?

I am in a boat near the mouth of a river.  The boat is tossed by the waves, driven by currents of wind, and now and then temporarily turned by eddies.  I seem to look out upon a chaos of apparently conflicting forces.  But all the time the wind and tide are sweeping me homeward.  Now the wind, which sometimes indeed does shift, and the great tidal wave are steadily bearing me in a certain direction, though wave and eddy and gust may often make this appear doubtful to me.  So, underneath all waves and eddies of environment, there is a great tidal wave, bearing man steadily onward; and I gain a certain amount of valid knowledge of environment from the direction in which it is bearing me.

Let us change the illustration.  Man survives as all his ancestors have survived before him, through conformity to environment.  Environment has therefore during ages past been continually making impressions upon him.  And he can draw valid inferences concerning the one power, which must underlie the apparent host of forces of environment, from the impressions which these have left upon the structure of his mind and character.  By studying himself he gains valid knowledge of what is deepest in environment.  For man is the most completely and closely conformed thereto of all living beings.

But man is a religious being.  This is a fact which demands explanation just as much as bone and muscle.  Now no evolutionist would believe that the eye could ever have developed without the stimulus of light acting upon the cells of the skin.  Place the animal in darkness and the eye becomes rudimentary and disappears.  Could a visual organ for seeing moral and religious truth have ever originated in the mind of man had there been no corresponding pulsation and thrill of a corresponding reality in environment?  Is not the one development just as improbable or inconceivable as the other?