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 nature is '_simply distorted and desecrated_' by the unwarranted assumptions of theism. Now let us try to consider accurately what Dr. Tyndall's statement means. Knowledge of Nature, he says, associates him with Nature. It withdraws him from '_the hampering details of earth_,' and enables the individual human being to have communion with a something that is beyond humanity. But what is communion? It is a word with no meaning at all save as referring to conscious beings. There could be no communion between two corpses; nor, again, between a corpse and a living man. Dr. Tyndall, for instance, could have no communion with a dead canary. Communion implies the existence on both sides of a common something. Now what is there in common between Dr. Tyndall and the starry heavens, or that '_power_' of which the starry heavens are the embodiment? Dr. Tyndall expressly says that he not only does not know what there is in common, but that he '_dare_' not even say that, as conscious beings, they two have anything in common at all.[26] The only things he can know about the power in question are that it is vast, and that it is uniform; but a contemplation of these qualities by themselves, must tend rather to produce in him a sense of separation from it than of union with it. United with it, in one sense, he of course is; he is a fraction of the sum of things, and everything, in a certain way, is dependent upon everything else. But in this union there is nothing special. Its existence is an obvious fact, common to all men, whether they dwell upon it or no: and though by a knowledge of Nature we may grow to realise it more keenly, it is impossible to make the union in the least degree