Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty. Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new superstition which he himself has fostered--the bastard ideal of love. This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images of the inward Laws. Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing, but not unkindly seas. FOOTNOTES [25] Recently I attended on successive Sundays an extremely Catholic and an extremely Protestant celebration of the Holy Communion. The solemnity of the former was injured by the priest’s sermon, which evinced the pumping process, the “defence-mechanism,” referred to above. At the other service, the mound of bread-cubes that appeared on the table below the pulpit, alongside a pitcher of grape-juice, was suggestive, I fear, of the above mentioned junk-heaps. For the minister interrupted his readings from old sacramental liturgies to explain how much the ceremony rightly meant to his sect, and how much it wrongly meant to the Catholics. [26] Luke IV, 9-13. [27] This word is borrowed from the late Baron Friedrich von Hügel, in whose life and writings the truth of it is powerfully and beautifully illustrated.