But behind Nature he sees a vaster power--his father--in whom
mysteriously all contradictions are reconciled. Nature for him is God's,
but it is not God; and '_though God slay me_,' he says, '_yet will I
trust in Him_.' This trust can be attained to only by an act of faith
like this. No observation or experiment, or any positive method of any
kind, will be enough to give it us; rather, without faith, observation
and experiment will do nothing but make it seem impossible. Thus a
belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential
value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a
defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any
ecclesiastical creed. It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of
the Christian symbol, '_I believe in God the Father Almighty_.' It rests
on the same foundation, neither more nor less. Nor is it too much to
say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship
was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.

This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a
little longer. I will take another passage from Dr. Tyndall, which
presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks
explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of
which truth is only the sacramental channel to us. '"_Two things," said
Imanuel Kant_' (it is thus Dr. Tyndall writes), '"_fill me with awe--the
starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man." And in
the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action
has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific
investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking
contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a
power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can
neither analyse nor comprehend._' This, Dr. Tyndall tells us, is the
only rational statement of the fact of that '_divine communion_,' whose