Soulcure’s sermon, and learn how to be good!” Ya-ah! One can hear the animal scream as he or she turns a somersault at the mere suggestion and scuttles away! Society’s neglect of Sunday observance in these early days of the new century is due to many things, chiefest among these being the incapacity of the clergy to inspire interest in their hearers or to fix the attention of the general public. It is unfortunate that this should be so, but so it is. The ministers of religion fail to seize the problems of the time. They forget, or wilfully ignore, the discoveries of the age. Yet in these could be found endless subject-matter for the divinest arguments. Religion and science, viewed broadly, do not clash so much as they combine. To the devout and deeply studious mind, the marvels of science are the truths of religion made manifest. But this is what the clergy seem to miss persistently out of all their teaching and preaching. Take, for example, the text: “In My Father’s house there are many mansions.” What a noble discourse could be made hereon of some of the most sublime facts of science!--of the powers of the air, of the currents of light, of the magnificent movements of the stars in their courses, of the plenitude and glory of innumerable solar systems, all upheld and guided by the same Intelligent Force which equally upholds and guides the destinies of man! Unhappily for the world in general, and for the churches in particular, preachers who select texts from Scripture in order to extract therefrom some instructive lesson that shall be salutary for their congregations, do not always remember the symbolic or allegorical manner in which such texts were originally spoken or written. To many of them the “literal” meaning is alone apparent, and they see in the “many mansions” merely a glorified Park Lane or Piccadilly, adorned with rows of elegantly commonplace dwelling-houses built of solid gold. Their conceptions of the “Father’s house” are sadly limited. They cannot shake off the material from the spiritual, or get away from themselves sufficiently to understand or enter into the dumb craving of all human nature for help, for sympathy, for love--for sureness in its conceptions of God--such sureness as shall not run counter to the proved results of reason. For reason is as much the gift of God as speech, and to kill one’s intellectual aspiration in order, as some bigots would advise, to serve God more completely is the rankest blasphemy. The wilful refusal to use a great gift merely insults the Giver.