wrong. We can now no longer expect the light to come from anything but right-thinking and right-acting, and our test of what is best in these directions must come from the knowledge we gain from the best books and the teachings of our experience through our senses. The danger of Protestantism lies in its opposition to the light for which it prays.
Some of us seem to be contented to live less perfect lives, occupied with the task of adapting ourselves to the immediate wants and conditions which surround us. Others strive to look beyond these and to ascertain the general drift of humanity in politics, religion, art and science. Nothing can be more fatal to the individual than a mis-conception of this drift, a failure to make out clearly the actual condition of affairs and their nearer outcome. Yet these mistakes are made daily. They come from imperfect generalizations drawn from a misconception of the existing state of things. At the bottom they are the result of defective knowledge in the department in which they are made. But indeed something of all departments of human thought should be known by the man who attempts a generalization in any; so many-sided are we and so wide is now the elbow-room we have forced ourselves into in this world. But every thinker works with a more or less restricted subject matter. His ability to let new light into his subject depends on his knowledge of related affairs, and his work will be most effectual for good when he labors to bring his particular subject into a correspondence with things as they are seen to be in other departments.
If there is one subject which now seems to me more important than another, it is the bearing of our recognition of the process of Evolution upon the existing state of our religious creed. It is not that the teachings of Christ are to be rejected, or the morality of the Hebrew Bible to be condemned, but that we are to correct our views as to the way in which existing plants and animals, including man, came to be what they are to-day. For Astronomy and Geology the struggle is nearly over. Out of this struggle has sprung
