between Science and Religion than a ghost conjured up by speculation.
Thus, religious belief, driven out from "the darkness and the cloud" of
Sinai, takes refuge in the mystery of matter; and if the glory passes
from the Mount of Transfiguration, it is because it expands to
etherialise the whole world as the garment of God. Again, the
evanescence of the atom into galaxies of "electrons" destroys the only
physical theory that ever threatened us with Atheism; and the
infinitesimal electrons themselves open up an immeasurable perspective
into the abyss of an Unknowable in which all things "live and move and
have their being." Therefore it matters little to us, except as a matter
of antiquarian interest, to know what the Vedic singers may have
dreamed; or what Thales or Xenophanes or Parmenides may have thought
about the first principle of things, or about the many and the one. For
our spiritual genealogy is not from them, but from a nearer and double
line of begetters, including seers--in the true sense of the word--and
saints, for both are represented by Kepler and Hooker, Newton and Jeremy
Taylor, Descartes and Spinoza, Leibnitz and Wesley, Spencer and Newman.
And even these have authority not through any divine right of genius or
acquired claim of learning, but because they illumine and interpret
obscure suggestions of our own thoughts. Indeed, to the sacrament of
historic communion with the past, as well as to the chief rite of the
Church, the apostolic injunction is applicable: "Let a man examine
himself; and so let him eat of that bread."

[Sidenote: Suggestions of Nature.]

Obeying that injunction, any man possessing ordinary powers of
observation and reflection may, in the course of a summer day's walk,
find abundant reason for interest in the speculations of historic
Pantheism. For the aspect of nature then presented to him is one both of