that there is a scientific and a religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either attempts to block the other’s path.  Charles Darwin wisely said, “I do not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself.”  Both physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of “nature” as something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and what supernatural; “nature” is plastic, responding all the while to new stimuli, and the title of a recent book, Creative Evolution, indicates a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.

From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian convictions, with much else, these items: 

(1) The conception of the unity of all life.  When Goethe in a flash of insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole creation.  And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate districts—­the secular and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural.  Principles discovered in man’s spirit in its responses to truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response to God.  There is a “law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus”; and it must be ascertained and worked with.  But “laws” are recognized as our labels for the discoveries we have made of God’s usual methods of working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding His new and completer entrances into the world’s life.

(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and grow in a changing world.

(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God’s existence and attributes from what can be seen in His world.  We cannot expect to find in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and “nature” as it now is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.

  And not from nature up to nature’s God,
  But down from nature’s God look nature through.

(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.

(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to light.