Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/648

630 the force of example, by accumulating on the conscience reiterated touches of a new moral color, and by bringing to bear from above the power of an acknowledged ideal, and (if possible) from around the simultaneous influence of a similarly affected environment?

Baptize now all these truths, translate them into the ordinary current language of the Church, and you have simply neither more nor less than the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as carbon is carbon, whether it be presented as coal or as diamond, so are these high and man-redeeming verities—about the inscrutable "I am," and his intelligible presentment in a strangely unique and the transmuting agency of a brotherhood saturated with his Spirit and pledged to keep his presence ever fresh and effective—verities still, whether they take on homely and practical or dazzling and scientific forms. And the foolish man is surely he who, educated enough to know better, scorns the lowly form, and is pedantic enough to suggest the refinements of the lecture-room as suitable for the rough uses of every-day life. A man of sense will rather say: Let us by all means retain and—with insight and trust—employ the homely traditional forms of these sublime truths: let us forbear, in charity for others, to weaken their influence, and so to cut away the lower rounds of the very ladder by which we ourselves ascended: and let us too, in mercy to our own health of character, decline to stand aloof from the world of common men, or to relegate away among the lumber of our lives the ἕπεα φπνᾶντα συνέτοισιν that we learned of simple saintly lips in childhood. Rather, as the hath bidden us, we will "bring out of our treasures things both new and old"; will remember, as Aquinas taught, that "nova nomina antiquam fidem de Deo significant" ; and will carry out in practice that word well spoken in good season, "It is not by rejecting what is formal, but by interpreting it, that we advance in true spirituality."

II. On the other hand, if men of science are to be won back to the Church, and the widening gulf is to be bridged over which threatens nowadays the destruction of all that we hold dear, it can not be too often or too earnestly repeated, The Church must not part company with the world she is commissioned to evangelize. She must awake both from her renaissance and her mediæval dreams. To turn over on her uneasy couch, and try by conscious effort to dream those dreams again, when daylight is come and all the house is fully astir, this surely were the height of faithless folly. An animating time of action is come, a day requiring the best exercise of skill and knowledge and moral courage. Shall we hear within the camp, at such a moment as this, a treasonable whisper go round: "By one act of mental suicide we may contrive to escape all further exertion; science is perplexing, history is full of doubts, psychology spins webs too fine for our self-indulgence