Page:Science the handmaid of religion.djvu/12

8 knowledge which had previously been acquired. But without assuming this, let us conceive the world deprived of the teaching of the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. The writings of Augustine, the Summa Theologiœ of Thomas Aquinas, the Divina Commedia of Dante, the Paradise Lost, the Pilgrim's Progress, the Christian Year, the Bible itself, all we suppose banished from the world. Can we conceive anything that would have taken their place? The loss of those religious treasures of the past would, we feel, have caused mankind to be absolutely bankrupt and beggared. And why so? Because religious belief and thought produce in the mind a consciousness of power and enlargement of aim, a sense of spiritual rank and dignity and hope, which only real knowledge can confer. In this point of view it has, though in a far higher degree, the same effect as the knowledge of physical science. A theological teacher who is real in his aims, leaves on the mind something akin to the impression left by the revealer of physical truth. To grasp a theological truth, as, for example, the truth of the Incarnation, produces something akin to the impression made when we have learnt a new fact or law in physics. The mind enjoys a sense of certainty, and rests therein. From this point of view we may consider religion and science as engaged in the same kind of work.