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.