Religion is rightly anthropomorphic, just as ethics is. Man's welfare and destiny are properly and inevitably the important questions for man, and he naturally approached the world with these problems in mind. He used personal and social categories in his vague thinking about his environment. The discovery that nature {121} did not work that way was made slowly and only after comparative civilization had brought leisure and safety. Even to-day, the intellectual restraint, which the application of impersonal and non-moral concepts to nature demands, is distasteful to the majority. But this restraint will become less and less as man is introduced from childhood to a world of law and order to which he can adapt himself with a fair measure of success. His eyes will remove themselves from far horizons and turn to the world around him, nor will he dream of a transcendent realm of which earthly things are only the appearance and veil. He will seek his welfare and find his destiny among his fellows during the normal time allotted to his species. Banded with them, he will become an active and clear-eyed worker for the four great blessings which, he finds, are within his grasp, health, knowledge, goodness and beauty. Many virtues and ideals which religion has sheltered and encouraged will find themselves at home in this valiant and intelligent world, but the religion of the past must shed many things before it will feel in harmony with its new setting. Will sufficient identity remain to make the term still significant? Frankly, it is very hard to say--impossible to say with certainty. What, then, are the limits of personal agency? The limits set to that incarnated intelligence which organisms possess. The ability to re-direct and distribute the energies which surround them in accordance with laws which study reveals, the ability to build dwellings for shelter and for adornment, the ability to use medicines for healing, the ability to drain marshes, dig canals, girdle the earth with iron roads, the ability to conceive things of beauty and to translate these {122} conceptions into sensuous form, all these abilities are theirs. Such agency works within nature as a highly gifted part within a whole to which it is not alien. But experience gives us no hint of a transcendent agent for whom the earth is as a footstool and who whirls stars and planets through space to their appointed orbits. {123} CHAPTER X DO MIRACLES HAPPEN?