modern religion. Our minds and hearts are not bounded to one among the phenomena of this one among the bodies in the universe; and to attempt to set this finite phenomenon before us as an object of worship is an attempt to turn the history of religion backwards, and to close on us once more those Jewish fetters which Christian civilization, after so many efforts, has burst through. If humanity is adorable, it is so only because it is not merely the last product of terrestrial developement, but because the idea of the identity of God and man is the absolute truth, because finite rational mind (wherever it exist) is not merely such, but, in another sense than physical or animal nature, is the self-realization of the Spirit in which all moves and lives, and so is an organic whole in that unity. Such a thesis I do not affirm, and to the enormous difficulties which beset it I am not blind. A scientific basis can be given to it, if at all, by a critical metaphysic, whose problems begin where Mr. Harrison’s end, and which asks where he dogmatizes. But whether such a science is possible or impossible, after all a great religion is still a great religion; nor is it easy to believe that it will not be so, when another of the sects which have lived and live in its life has gone the way it seems likely to go.
THE END.
