This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The Chaplain's Testimony
189

ligion of Nature, which is based upon the determination not to believe anything which is unsupported by indubitable evidence, will become the faith of the future, the fulfilment of progress. It is as Huxley said, 'Religion ought to mean sinply reverence and love for the Ethical Ideal, and the desire to realise that Ideal in life.' Miracles do not happen. There has been no supernatural revelation, and nothing can be known of what Herbert Spencer calls the Infinite and Eternal Energy save by the study of the phenomena about us. And I repeat that the discovery we hear of to-day makes a thorough intellectual sanity possible for each living man. Doubt will disappear."

"Yes, Mr. Schuabe," said Mrs. Armstrong, "you are right, incalculably right. It is to human intellect and that alone — the great Intellect of The Nazarene among others — that we must look from henceforth. Already by his unaided efforts man's achievements are everywhere breaking down superstition. The arts, the laws of gravitation, force, light, heat, sound, chemistry, electricity, and all that these imply — botany, medicine, bacteria, the circulation of the blood, the functions of the brain and nervous system (last-named abolishing all witchcraft and diabolic possession, such as we read of in the 'inspired' writings) — all these are but incidents in a progress never aided by the supernatural, but always impeded by the professors of it. Christians tortured the man who discovered the rotation of the earth, and in every church today absolutely false accounts of the origin of the world are publicly read. And as long as the world was content to believe that Jesus rose from the dead so long error has hindered development."

"Yes," replied Schuabe, "all this will, I believe, inevitably follow the discovery of the professors in Palestine. And what does Christianity, as it is at present