Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/547

Rh extension of the span of human life, within a few decades, is an index of what has already been attained in this direction.

The fact that any one, to-day, can buy at small cost works of the best thinkers and poets, and excellent reproductions of works of art, is a witness to how much richer, not only our external, but also our inner lives have become, through technical achievements that rest absolutely on scientific progress. So, a fruitful stream, bearing all manner of opportunities for intellectual and esthetic culture, flows among the people.

Yet more deeply does science now influence the spiritual life of man. Self-respect has already been alluded to as holding first place among the conditions that make for happiness. No religion can impart this highest good of mankind, this deep harmony which can withstand all vicissitudes of life. This results from the circumstance that every religion is impelled to construct a fixed and permanent standard for all believers out of the mode of thought of its founder. Now the founder must have been able to raise himself far above the level of his contemporaries in order to become such a founder. But it is no less true that he must have stood on the foundation which his time furnished, otherwise he could have had no profound influence over his own age. Herein lies a necessary limitation.

Again, to science we owe our recognition of the evolution of the human species and of its continued foregoing to higher and higher planes of thought and feeling. This recognition involves the corollary that every religion, in proportion as it becomes older, is brought into ever greater contradiction with the science of the present.

Protestantism is nothing else than a four-century effort to accommodate the content of the christian religion to the time, more fully than was possible with the Romish church. This form of religion succeeded, accordingly, for several hundred years in meeting the needs of the masses, but not so completely those of more advanced religious thinkers. Here again the tendency to become outgrown, which is inherent in every religion, became irresistible, and a sense of the conflict disturbed the conscience, alike of the most spiritually minded and of the multitude.

In contrast with this inevitable, inexpugnable, drift toward senescence of all religions, science shows itself of another character, as being eternally young. Since with her no condition, no cognition, is ever regarded as final or unalterable, and since by her all things are subjected to a ceaseless, conscientious criticism, errors may indeed occur, but they can not become firmly fixed. "Inner self-respect," the unshakable determination to tolerate no internal contradiction, is her life's element and the condition of her existence, hence she must, as against death, defend herself against every attempt to limit the right of