It is the task of Rationalism to see that religion, this fundamental and important activity of man, shall neither be allowed to continue in false or inadequate forms, nor be stifled or starved, but made to help humanity in a vigorous growth that is based on truth and in constant contact with reality. (_For bibliography, see the end of the next essay._) FOOTNOTE: [43] See W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_; E. Underhill, _Essentials of Mysticism_. VII RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES GOD AND MAN The world of things entered your infant mind To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind. For, once within, corporeal fact could find A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt Built there your little microcosm--which yet Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned. Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day: Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars-- A million isolations burn away. The Universe can live and work and plan, At last made God within the mind of man. RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.” --DANTE. “Ye are the Gods if ye did but realize it.”--CARLYLE. “The next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity.” So says Lord Morley in one of his essays. It is a striking saying, coming as it does from one in whom thought and action have been so intertwined, one to whom reason, not dogma, is the basis of morality, achievement, not emotion, its justification. Let those words be my encouragement; for they challenge at the outset, and to my mind rightly, two of the most persistent difficulties that confront one who tries to write of the relations between Science and Religion. The man of science too often asks what science can have to do with what he brands as utterly and wholly unscientific; the religiously-minded man demands what gain can follow from contact with the cold and inhuman attitude of pure reason. To those questions I hope that this essay will provide a partial answer. Meanwhile I shall begin with a perhaps less ultimate but more pressing question. That question is asked by many men and women of to-day, who on the one hand feel as it were instinctively that religion of some sort is necessary for life, yet on the other are unable to do violence to their intellectual selves by denying the facts that reason and scientific inquiry reveal, or by closing their eyes to them. The question, in briefest form, is this: “What room does science leave for God?”