Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/191

 be the repository of inspired tradition, a sense of his own logical acuteness. With a warm glow of seif-approval he abandoned the ancient shibboleths and left off going to church, being convinced that no really well-informed intelligence could tolerate the mutual contradiction of science and religion. With no more ability to understand the arguments which supported the one than the philosophy which lay at the root of the other, and quite unaware that religious belief is capable of development and is as much a product of evolution as any material phenomenon, he considered according to temperament that religion was either a mischievous invention calculated to clog the progress of the world, or a pardonable aberration of amiable minds seeking consolation in superstition of one sort or another. The religiously-minded thinker of the same calibre welcomed with enthusiasm the antagonisms of scientific schools discovered for him by the less wary of his teachers, and decided that Darwin was wrong, that Huxley was following false scents, and that science would have to revise all its later conclusions, In neither case {naturally} was

called into the assize. "Mistakes of Moses,"