"Give me thy wings, thy wings of steel, And I with thee will cleave the skies, And broken on the eternal wheel My God may take his sacrifice."
"And yet," he says in conclusion, "Truth, to those who follow it, may at last bring its own reward."
"Though storms may blow, though waves may roar, It may be, ere the day is done, Mine eyes shall turn to thine once more, And learn that thine and his are one."
_The Veil of the Temple_ winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the latter cannot be.
_The Reconstruction of Belief_ is a synthesis of the main arguments urged or suggested in these two preceding volumes. The necessity of religious belief as a practical basis of civilization is restated. The absurdity of all current attempts on the part of clerical apologists to revindicate it by scientific reason is set forth in detail. The true vindication is shown to reside in the fact that religious belief works, and that scientific negation does not work, and that here we have the practical test by which the validity of the former is to be established, though the process by which this fact will be apprehended by the modern world may be slow.
[3] In an early chapter of _The Veil of the Temple_ one of the characters describes the situation as follows:
"(For a long time after the death of Hegel) these separate living species seemed radically separated from one another, or connected only as contrivances of the same deity. Thus the different kinds of life--in especial the life of man--seemed to stand up alone above the waters of science, like island peaks above the sea, the objects of a separate knowledge. But all this while the waters of science were rising slowly like a flood, and were signalizing their rise by engulfing from time to time some stake or landmark that a moment before was protruding from them, or by suddenly pouring over a barrier and submerging some new area. No doubt even by this process many people were frightened, but there was no more general panic than there was in the days of Noah. Men from their superior status watched the tide in security. They ate, they drank at their old sacramental altars. They were married before them and given in marriage. But one fine day--as we look back on it now it seems the work of a moment--something happened which, as I often amused myself by thinking, would have been for a transhuman spectator the finest stage effect in the world. The gradual rise of the waters gave place to a cataclysm. The fountains of the great deep were broken up when Darwin struck the rock, and an enormous wave washed over the body of man, covering him up to his chin, leaving only his head visible, while his limbs jostled below against the carcasses of the drowned animals. His head, however, was visible still, and in his head was his mind--that mind antecedent to the universe--that redoubtable, separate entity--staring out of his eyes over the deluge, like a sailor on a sinking ship. Then came one crisis more. The waters rose an inch or two higher, and all at once, like a sponge, the substance of his head had begun to suck them up--suck them up into the very home of life and thought; and the mind, sodden all through, was presently below the surface, sharing the doom of limpets, and weeds, and worlds."