The Christian sets his consecrated bread apart from all the rest of bread and things, and, we must own, he does well. For men see all things as in a glass darkly, and we are, most of us, the slaves of habit and victims of familiarity. What is everywhere and always soon comes to be nowhere and never for our interest and our attention. If the Christian had not kept as a rare thing, a thing enthroned, the bread that is for him no longer common bread, he would of a certainty often, if not for ever, have lost hold on the sublime principle it enshrines for him and for the world. The conflicting currents of speculative thought, as well as the weaknesses of his mental grasp, would have made him loose his hold upon it. Just because it stands there as the central symbol gathering up and establishing his worship and its sanctifying associations, it has lasted through the centuries, preserving its own great principle, a witness, a token and a sign not empty but 'effective'—_signum efficax_ not only for thought but for all human life in its amplitude.
Can you think at all and not pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build up Jerusalem, and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders? _Blake._
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.
