How strange that we should crave a creed or a belief that goes outside of our experimental knowledge; that is independent of it, not subject to its tests and limitations; something afar off and irrational and inexplicable, and beyond the reach of time and change! Who is the philosopher who said that we are guided by our common sense in everything but our religious beliefs? We can taste and see and touch and smell and eat and drink and measure and accumulate and organize and assimilate scientific knowledge; it gives us a place whereon to stand our Archimedean lever with which we can move the world and the whole sidereal system of worlds. But with our so-called theological knowledge, and with much of our metaphysical knowledge, it is like trying to move with a lever the mountain upon which one stands. Furthermore, grant that the religious sense of mankind is real, one of the most real things in life,--so real and valuable that the life, the literature, and the art which have it not seem shallow and ephemeral,--a living sense of the Infinite Mystery in which we are embosomed and our constant relation to it,--grant this, I say, and yet our creeds and systems of salvation do not minister to it. They are too legal; they know and explain too much. With them the administration of the universe is as simple and judicial as a police court, save that in human courts of justice there is no deputed sin or atonement. This is a gratuitous, manufactured mystery of the theologians, as are the Trinity and the saving grace of rites and ceremonies. Science has real mysteries. Catalysis is one. How or why the presence of one body should cause two other bodies to unite chemically without parting with an atom of their own substance--as in several cases in industrial chemistry--is certainly a mystery. On the strength of such and similar facts in chemistry, shall we image or invent a whole category of mysteries which are beyond the reach of verification? What mystery hovers about all chemical reactions! What a miracle that two invisible gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, should, when chemically united, produce a body so utterly unlike either as is water! The turning of water into wine is as nothing in comparison, but even that feat we want to see done if we are to believe it. What a mystery shrouds the whole subject of electricity and electro-magnetism! A sort of disembodied force, working its will upon matter and yet subject to none of the laws of matter. Spirit?--but a spirit we can evoke at will, and make to do our bidding, to run our errands, a spirit more friendly than unfriendly. How prone the common mind is to think that because a thing is mysterious it must be true!