Science seeks truth and discovers righteousness. Religion seeks righteousness and discovers truth. Both acquire knowledge of nature's right and wrong methods of making progress, and both point the same way to right living.
Science is the deliberate, conscious interpretation of nature. Religion is the instinctive, unconscious expression of natural law in terms of feeling.
Religion is the instinctive feeling for truth, justice and righteousness. Nature is truth, and her way is the way of justice and righteousness. Science takes cognizance of it in measured terms.
Religion is the feeling of wonder, adoration, gratitude and humility. It is largely justified and satisfied by the contemplation of nature through science.
Religion is the recognition of our own imperfections, and a desire for perfection. Nature is a conflict of imperfections. Science shows that the conflict is aimed at, and moves toward, perfection.
Religion demands service. Nature is a growing fabric of cooperating services. Science surveys the process and points the way toward higher service.
In science and religion, there is strife through organized service to discover and attain perfection. Each reflects in its own way the essential character of a universal natural law.
******* We are at present in a better position to use the panoramic vision of science than ever before, because we have now reached a point where the outlook on the evolution of life extends to the horizon, and we may see mapped out in broad perspective the grand preliminaries to life, and the general trend of life's highways.
These great highways of organic evolution, that run back for many millions of years, through the whole gamut of vertebrate and invertebrate life, from man to the simplest and minutest kinds of living things, show us in large terms what organic evolution really is and how it has been accomplished. They reveal to us the ethics and the morals of nature, the fundamentally right and the fundamentally wrong methods of living, for throughout all the highways of progress nature declares, and declares with insistent repetition, that the actual creation of new things and of new powers for service, or the evolution of the varied products' and activities of nature, is never compassed by competition and selfishness; never by destruction, nor by discord, nor by dominion; but by union and by cooperation; by sympathy, submission and mutual service. Until some other being appears, greater than man, the age long processes that have produced him are justified by their product, and are thereby standardized as righteous and moral processes.
(To be continued)
