When scientific knowledge advances, when more and more of the phenomena of nature are found to obey simple laws, daring philosophers assert and convince others that all natural phenomena obey such laws, that nothing in nature depends on the whims of human-like wills. Religion, then, seems to be deprived of its foundations. If God does not arbitrarily interfere with the laws of nature, how can any aid come from him? However, the need of religion remains, and religion adapts itself to the new views of the world. The highest form of religion is the outcome of this development. Prayer, then, has a purely mental value for him who prays. It gives him hope, confidence, courage, and thus he succeeds in accomplishing that of which he seemed incapable without aid. The witchcraft of the priest is reduced to a purely mental influence. In the sacrament he brings about a sanctification of the mind. God, far from being lost from the world, is regarded as the world itself, the source from which every phenomenon of nature springs. And again religion can give man what he longs for, protection from the overpowering unknown, peace for the restless heart. But life is like a hydra: as fast as one head is hewn off, two others grow. Man overcomes the depression caused by his feeling of impotence by the help of religion, and immediately has two other troubles besetting him. (1) It is natural that of all the creations of mind religion possesses the strongest inertia. God is unchangeable. But knowledge is changeable: our ways of thinking of the world differ greatly from those of a thousand, five hundred, or a hundred years ago. Much knowledge has become attached to religion. Shall it remain unchanged on that account? The resulting disharmony has been felt at all times, in varying degrees of intensity. The representatives of science cannot help contradicting the faith of their ancestors; and the priests profess that they alone possess true knowledge, that the knowledge of the scientists is merely a mass of hypotheses. Bitter was the struggle about the geocentric system, and no less bitter more recently was the opposition to the theory of evolution. During the later centuries of antiquity scientists tried to comprehend the influence of the sun on plant life by conceiving its power as emanating and yet constantly remaining in its former strength at the point of its origin. The early Christian theologists were very modern in their scientific theories. Could they compare God with anything else better than with the heavenly body on which all earthly life depends? So they developed the conception of emanations flowing from God without diminishing his former powers, that is, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Other religions of the time accepted similar emanation doctrines: the Philonic philosophy recognized a twofoldness, the Neo-Platonic a fourfoldness of God. To-day every schoolboy is taught that the sun cannot produce any effect on earth without losing so