For the Christian a man is a being capable of receiving and assimilating life as no other creature can, and as the biologist has no biological reason to believe. The Christian declares that he has reason, good and ample. He knows whom he believes. This is a matter of living religious experience to which generations after generations have borne witness. There is a ladder of spiritual reality, he says, up which men are climbing and upon which some have reached great heights. The biologist's ladder, despite its many steps and its length along the ages, is too short for him. Or rather (so he will tell you when he understands what the biologist means) his own ladder is a legitimate and even a natural extension of that, as of all others of the sort that men have anywhere set up.

Is this advance of man, then, an affair of a single departmental business—the religious business? Or, let us ask, can there be kinds of knowledge that are not really knowledge of God? Is it reasonable to regard biological knowledge, or chemical or physical, as knowledge of some alien reality not embraced in God? The supposition is monstrous. If God is, then all truth attained by man is truth of him. If I learn that the world advances from the ether to my brain I shall have learnt something about God. So the Christian should maintain, if he is true to his Christian principles. The advance of man towards communion with God in knowledge is not a mere affair of some one department of knowledge called religious, although it is now for the most part carried on departmentally. Although men separate off for their practical convenience the study of plants from the study of animals, and a specialist may separate off the egg of the newt and study nothing else, and even think, at least seriously, of nothing else; although we may not only speak of religion, or knowledge, or philosophy as separate one from another but act as though they were, yet if the Christian and the philosopher and the scientific man are right in holding that there is a unity in the multiplicity of things, a 'uniformity of nature,' an 'Absolute,' or 'One God,' then religion and science and philosophy are only separated, if separate at all, by an artifice or a convention. You cannot really separate knowing, in a man's activity, from his feeling and acting, nor his feeling from acting and knowing, nor his acting from knowing and feeling, nor his activity from himself; although you can distinguish each from the others. They are different, but their difference is embraced within a oneness. So it is with religion and science and philosophy. They are all results of man's activity in relation to a reality of innumerable aspects and unfathomable depth; and they may all be means by which he ascends the ladder of his experience of God.

Therefore the Christian does his own sacramental and incarnational principles a grave injustice if and when he tries to turn away from science and philosophy. Not only this—he cannot really do it. When he succeeds in turning away from that which he believes to be all there is of science and philosophy, he does not cut out from his creed and his theology the science and philosophy incorporated in them—a science and a philosophy which undoubtedly need correction that they may move and grow with the movement and the growth of experience. It is only the science and philosophy grown to new ripeness and new truth since the day when the great bulk of his Christian tradition was laid down in written words to be transmitted to him, that as a matter of fact he is rejecting. And he is able to reject these just and only because he has already in this tradition such science and philosophy as serves to make for him some sort of a Weltanschauung, a world-picture, you may say. It is useless to protest that a man can be religious without having a world-picture; he cannot even be a man without one. And the only question for him is whether it shall or shall not be as wide in its extent and as good as he can make it, whether he shall or shall not include within it all the knowledge and vision of God he might include.

Plainly—that is, plainly to the Christian—if the scientific man or the philosopher does not include in his view of the world what the Christian knows and sees, he is the loser. His picture is not all it might be. But the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of the Christian. For all is God's and of God. And if we never before discovered this, we see it when we discover the point where science and religion meet, where the scientific knowledge of the world passes into the sacramental, and the scientific knowledge of man, as part of the world, passes into the incarnational; each to be crowned there, each to be interpreted and fulfilled.

To this discovery there is only one theoretic obstacle which is insuperable. It is the acceptance of mechanism as a root-principle in either science or religion. I say nothing of philosophy, because there is now-a-days no mechanistic philosophy (that is, no materialistic philosophy) that need be feared. But in science and in religion mechanism is still a danger, and the acceptance of it as the fundamental principle of working and construction in a world-picture is an obstacle that cannot be passed. There is nothing to be done except to overturn it.

In regard to science much (as we have seen) has already been done; more is being done. How is it in regard to religion? What about mechanism there?