Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/140

Rh defence of this pantheistic piety by quoting the patriarch of many tribulations, in his impassioned cry, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!” is as vain as it is profane. This is only to repeat in a new form the fallacious paradox of those grim and obsolete sectarians who held that the test of a state of grace was “willingness to be damned for the glory of God.” The spirit that truly desires righteousness longs with an unerring instinct for immortality as the indispensable condition of entire righteousness, and when invited to approve its own immolation for the pretended furtherance of the Divine glory will always answer as a noble matron applying for admission to the church once answered the inquisitorial session of her Calvinistic society, — “I certainly am not willing to be damned for the glory of God; were I so, I should not be here!”

This sense of our vocation to moral perfection, and of all it implies as to freedom and continuance, is what makes our main question of such thrilling concern. The question starts a ghastly fear, lest science may be the doom of our loftiest hopes. If so, it will quench the aspirations which have been the soul of man’s grandest as well as sublimest endeavours; for the beliefs it will destroy are the real foundation of all that has given majesty and glory to history. To present universal Nature as the deep in which each soul with its moral hopes