We of the twentieth century have an overwhelming desire to be up to the times. Nothing but the latest news on any subject will completely satisfy. We are more anxious for late information than for accurate information. We have an almost unconquerable feeling that if it is late it must be accurate. All of us are sensitive to being thought behind the times. We feel that no stigma can be more invidious in the intellectual world than the stigma of being out of date. This pervades the masses quite as strongly as it does the more cultured classes. Under these conditions everybody wants to know the latest theory that science has to offer concerning anything that can be brought within the range of their interests. As a result everybody would like to know about evolution, were it not for the fact that a great mass of people have been brought to believe that there is something inherently irreligious in the idea. Our people have a saving sense of the value of religion. Denominational control may set lightly upon them. Certain long revered doctrines may have little practical influence upon them. Yet inherently they all believe in religion, and most of them believe themselves to be religious, as indeed they really are.

It is a most wholesome tendency which leads us to esteem religion as the main interest in life. We must feel a sense of shame when we consciously permit the influences, which most favorably mold our character, to weaken their hold upon our lives. Certainly in our time religion is the essential agent by which character is molded. Any of us would be foolishly short-sighted were he willing to weaken the hold of religion upon his life for the sake of a scientific theory, the truth or falsity of which could have but little practical bearing upon his conduct. We must hold to religion at all hazards. We may, when circumstances so suggest, change our denominational allegiance. We may and often do interpret our faith quite at variance with the ecclesiastical body with which we are connected. We may constantly modify and develop our beliefs. But it is a pitiful life which has lost the staying and strengthening influence of religion. I believe this conviction is deep-rooted in the minds of our people and that it deserves the place it holds.

To a mind thus essentially religious the announcements of science often come as a shock. They seem to run counter to our deepest convictions. It seems impossible to us that both can be true. Sometimes the more we debate the questions the more contradictory they seem to become. Every good mind needs unity in itself. No clear thinker can be quite content when two distinct departments of thought are at sharp variance in his mind. He may pursue one of two courses. He may hold to one view with conviction and earnestness and look upon the other as essentially false. To many religious people all science that runs counter to their convictions is necessarily false. They label it pseudo-science and pass it by. If the word pseudo-science is unknown to them, they stigmatize it as rationalistic, or still worse as materialistic and let it go at that.

The other course is to have faith both in religion and in science.

Such a fair-minded man must ask himself, what is the truth in the matter? If the scientific fact is true it is to be believed. It may run counter to what we have believed before. It may seem at first entirely incredible. But when once he becomes convinced of its truth the clear thinker must not only accept it, but must accept all legitimate deductions from it. If it seems true to us we must believe it. Absolute demonstrable truth, except in the simplest of matters is almost unattainable. The best we can ordinarily get is a close approach to certainty, and with this we must be content. In many matters, indeed in most matters, we must trust the judgment of others who are better trained in a particular line of thought.

As to the truth of geology we are certainly wise to accept for the present the facts and principles commonly accepted by competent geologists. In biology, we should respect the concurrent opinion of important biologists. We must not assume that a few biologists who think as we do are right against the biological world, or that a few geologists who think as we do are right against the geological world. For theology, we had better go to the educated theologian. But when it comes to reconciling two of these and to catching the inherent correspondence between them, it is often likely that each of these groups of men is unable to see clearly the view-point of the other. Here lies our freedom. Here we must either think for ourselves or think with those wiser than ourselves whose opinions seem to us to ring true and to focus for us our wavering and uncertain thought.

Among students of animals and plants there is no longer any question as to the truth of evolution. That the animals of the present are the altered animals of the past, that the plants of to-day are the modified plants of yesterday, that civilized man of to-day is the savage of yesterday and the tree-dweller of the day before, is no longer debatable to the great mass of biologists. To older men hampered by the convictions of an earlier age this dictum of modern science may still be a little uncertain.

The working biologists of the world have no doubt. They differ radically as to what brought about this change, they dispute vigorously as to the rate of change, but as to the fact of the change there is no difference of opinion. Under these conditions the thinking man is out of joint with the times when he sets himself against the idea of evolution. He may be so immersed in other lines as to be indifferent to the problem; but when he is hostile to it, he marks himself as clearly against his day. Many have been against their day and have been right. Very great men have often been against the opinions of their times and have come to be leaders of the world’s later thought. But ordinary men in ordinary times who think differently on a special subject from the specialists of the times are not very likely to be right. It is safe for most of us to accept as true an opinion on which specialists on that subject agree. It seems clear to me then that the thinking man to-day has in the matter of evolution a double duty. He must become reasonably acquainted with the theory that so largely affects all present knowledge, and he must wrestle with the theory until it no longer hinders the hold of religion upon his life. He may be perfectly sure that he does not clearly understand both, but he must get them into reasonable concordance before he can be quite at peace.

Truth is true no matter how it is acquired. There can be no doubt as to the essential truth of religion: its fruits proclaim its worth. There can be no doubt as to the essential truth of evolution; the clarity it has brought into the sciences is the evidence of the value of the conception. That it will persist in its present form, that it will be unchanged by later additions to our knowledge is of course unthinkable. It may be incomplete, it may be undeveloped, but so far as it goes it contains the truth. Under these conditions, how can we bring peace into our own mind? These two important provinces seem so often to be at variance. The difficulty may lie in one of two places. In the first place, each truth may be stated in terms so peculiar to its own subject as to convey no meaning to the student of the other branch. There is a second, and more harassing possibility. The same words may be used by students in each branch but each side may put a different significance into the terms. Then each believes he understands the other, when he really does not.

Our theology is man’s interpretation of God’s revelations of Himself as recorded in the Bible. Our science is man’s interpretation of God’s revelation of Himself in nature. Each is God’s revelation, and so far as we have understood it, that revelation is of the utmost importance in our lives. Each has all the inherent short-comings of man’s interpretation. Each has all the difficulties necessarily found in any stage of a developing understanding. We may be sure if we could thoroughly understand God’s revelation of Himself as recorded in the Bible and his revelation of Himself as recorded in the rocks and the tissues of animals as well as in the body and mind of man to-day, there would be no difficulty. When we understand both completely, as perhaps we never shall, there will be no contradictions of any kind between them. Even now if we are firmly convinced that truth must be in both, there will be little difficulty in reaching a workable unity which will satisfy the present needs of the human mind and will not be so crystallized as to prevent a future growth. If, however, we hope to find a unity between a belief in evolution and a belief in the inspiration and value of the Bible, we must accept both of these in the terms of to-day. To reconcile a twentieth century statement of science with an eighteenth century statement of theology would be as absurd as it would be to reconcile a statement of twentieth century theology with eighteenth century science. Each century must restate its truths in terms of its own time. The truths may be at bottom the same through many centuries but to be clearly intelligible in any century they must be couched in the terminology of the age.

It seems to me if we are to understand, in conformity with the thought of the age, any particular book in the Bible, there are three steps through which we must pass. We must first ask ourselves the kind of people to whom the book was originally written. We must know their habits of life and of thought. Until this is clear in our minds the book can have little significance. Having built up as nearly as may be the life and thought of the time, we must next decide what is the inherent truth taught to the people of that time by the book under consideration. Much that is written must be simply the setting in which alone that truth could reach them. This extraneous detail gives vigor and color to the message but is not the message itself. The last step and the hardest one to take, the one that to some minds seems almost irreverent, is to decide the form that message must take to-day to convey to our minds the same truth which the original message conveyed to the people of its time. In so far as we succeed in taking these three steps, we shall get the true message which this book holds for us to-day.

When Paul in his first burning letter told the Corinthian congregation that their women should be silent in their churches, he is not, it seems to me, giving a message which in those terms applies to the world to-day. If a woman has anything that is worth saying she has a perfect right to say it in church. In any denomination in which religious observance is not ecclesiastically formal she will be allowed that privilege. By an interesting peculiarity of mind on our part she may be permitted to do so upon Wednesday evenings, when our early prejudice still prevents her speaking on Sunday. What is the truth of the teaching of Paul in this matter? The Christians of Corinthian times had already begun to suffer from persecution. They were already despised and distrusted. Men had come to speak ill of them. Paul’s injunction concerning the silence of women in churches was simply an injunction against their doing those things which in the thought and habit of those times were associated generally with looseness of character. Fine Corinthian women did not speak in public. A woman who would consent to speak before a group of men of Corinth of that day would by that fact have proclaimed herself a woman of loose morals. Paul’s injunction is that, in this desperate struggle Christian women should do nothing which could possibly bring them into disrepute. The lives of Christians must be above suspicion. This message is certainly as true to-day as it was in the time of Paul and Corinth. Whether or not a woman speaks in church to-day has no bearing whatever upon the question. The question is how she speaks and what she says. If her life gives force to her message and her message contains God’s truth she is entirely free to speak.

In similar fashion we have changed most beautifully the message which we have come to love, as the Mizpah message: “The Lord watch between thee and me while we are absent one from the other.” We have absolutely transformed and glorified the message. It was once the calling down of the wrath of Jéhovah upon one or other of two herdsmen if either of them should fail to comply with the agreement to remain within his own boundary. These men whose herdsmen were constantly stealing each other’s cattle agreed to separate because they could not live in unity. They set up a heap of unhewn stone, and called upon God to guard and to see that neither of them passed beyond the boundary of the other. What was once a threat between warring herdsmen has become a binding link between Christian brothers. No longer do we call upon the Lord to guard in our absence lest our enemy encroach upon our domain. Now we call upon him to bind our hearts together so that neither time nor circumstance can bring division between us. The menace of a herdsman’s wrath has become one of the tenderest messages of Christian love.

In the light of the principles stated above, what is the essential truth that lies back of the earliest chapters of Genesis? First, that there is one God. Slowly it had been borne in upon the Hebrew mind as upon no other tribe in the world that the Lord God is one God. Nearly all the world besides believed in many gods. Each nation had a God peculiarly its own, each city had a minor god caring for it particularly. There were gods of the woods, gods of the oceans, gods of the streams. Gods and goddesses were everywhere. To this people wandering through the terrible monotony of the sandy desert, the “Garden of Allah,” there came the inspired comprehension of the eternal oneness of Almighty God. First, he was to most of them the God of the Hebrew, stronger than the gods of the nations. After a while under the teaching of prophet after prophet there finally came to the entire nation the exalted conception that God is one and there is no other God. This is one of the imperishable revelations of all time. Beside this, all suggestions of fifth or sixth day, of hours or of ages are absolutely insignificant. These are but the clothing of the idea which makes it acceptable to its time. This clothing must change with every age if it would reach thoroughly the minds of the age. Underneath and forever lies the glorious truth that the Lord God is one God.

The second truth which seems to me to underlie this magnificent parable of creation is the truth that this great God has created the universe and that he cares for his people. Gods before had been objects of terror. Gods before had lived lives such as the people themselves would not have respected among their companions. Gods before were to be shunned. If one could but escape the attention of the gods it was his greatest good fortune. Now we have the conception of an all-knowing, ever-present God to whom his people are dear. The terms in which it was stated in those days matter but little. To modern psychologists even the idea that people are dear to God seems speaking too humanly. Yet the truth involved must come in terms that the people of to-day understand. We can best comprehend God if we think of Him as loving and chastening, even though down in our hearts we know that these terms are not high enough, are too human to apply to an Eternal God. But we know no better and they tell us the truth even though the terms may in time pass completely away.

Last of all and perhaps most characteristic of the Hebrew people is the great lesson that this Eternal God, who created the universe and cares for his people, demands righteousness of his people. To the nations round about religion was not a matter of righteousness. For them religion had nothing to do with morality. Thieves might have gods favorable to them quite as well as righteous men. The worship of Diana of the Ephesians or of Astarte in the groves of the Asia Minor coast could be so unspeakably licentious and vile as not to admit of description to-day. Yet this was all religion. To the Hebrew came the inspired, exalted conception of a God who demanded righteousness of his people. Beside this wonderful revelation to the human mind details of serpents, and of apples, of names of men and of women, of gardens and of swords are absolutely but the transitory clothing. This brought them to the minds of the times. The value of the form is evidenced by the fact that it brought the conception. But we must not lose the glory of the conception in an over regard for the clothing in which the idea came.

Does this mean that Genesis has served its purpose and is to-day to be conceived of as a beautiful relic of the past, to be reverently enshrined but not seriously accepted? Far from it. The glory of the Genesis story lies in its wonderful power to grow. It strengthened the minds of a persecuted tribe wandering in the desert who finally settled in a small and barren country. It brought the truth to them so clearly that they have persuaded much of the world of that truth and bid fair to persuade the rest. The story has grown with the mind of man. As it served the Hebrew in his time it has grown to serve others to this day. Each generation has read the story in the light of its own times and each generation will continue to read the story in the light of its advancing knowledge. The only part of the story that can be affected is the clothing, the inherent truth remains forever. Furthermore, the story which persuaded the childhood of race is the story which will persuade the childhood of to-day. In no other form could the great truth of the Bible be brought to our children as well as in the form of these early chapters. In early life our children will accept these stories as literally as the ancient Hebrew accepted them. As they grow in knowledge, unconsciously and without jar, if we do not jar them, our children will read into the story what God has taught them in the world outside. The shock which came to their elders need never come to them. It is our fault if our children are disturbed by the conflict between religion and science which disturbed us. There is no difference between God’s revelation of Himself, as we have it in the Bible, and God’s revelation of Himself in nature. The better we know the Bible and the better we know nature the clearer this will be to us.

Perhaps the most severe shock that has come to the mind of religious man from the teachings of science has been the at first almost unsupportable idea that man is the descendant of creatures of which the ape is to-day the nearest representative. He had learned from Genesis the altogether adorable conception that he was made in the image of his Maker. It lifted him; it strengthened him; it gave him more power to struggle. He might know that he had marred that likeness by wrong-doing, he might understand that the fullness of the glory of God’s image could not shine through his own face. Yet he believed that he was, in spite of all his imperfections, made in the image of his Maker. Now comes this horrible linkage with a miserable brute to either shock and confound him or to degrade him. We can easily imagine, some of us have bitterly experienced, the shock of this changed conception. But it was only because we mistook the clothing for the truth in both cases. We read science in its own terms; we read Genesis in its own terms. They did not use the same language and they jarred us to the very soul. Slowly, however, we are coming out of the darkness of that battle; slowly the glorious light of the beautiful truth is breaking into our minds and our hearts.

Michael Angelo painted a wonderful picture of “The Judgment.” Here, seated upon a throne, which after all is only a magnificent chair, sits a venerable figure of what is really but a nobly-proportioned man, to whom the nations come for their final reward. He separates the righteous from those who must forever be sundered from their God. Seen through the distant past it still remains a majestic picture; but no painter would think of repeating its conception to-day.

Quite in the modern spirit is the beautiful lunette which John Sargent placed in the Boston Library, above his well known frieze of “The Prophets.” It represents “Jéhovah confounding the gods of the nations.” The naked figure of suppliant Israel stands before an altar of unhewn stones, on which burns the sacrifice. The smoke ascends to Heaven. On one side stands the mighty figure of Assyria with uplifted mace ready to strike its awful blow upon the shoulders of helpless Israel. On the other side the lithe, subtle form of Egypt, clasping the knout, watches its chance to bring its treacherous thong upon the helpless shoulders of suffering Israel. But Jéhovah may not appear, man may not look on God and live. Jéhovah is seen as a glory behind the cloud of smoke shrouded by winged cherubim. From one side of the cloud comes a mighty hand meeting with power the force of Assyria. From the other side, a lithe and sinewy hand thwarts the subtlety of Egypt. But Jéhovah is behind the cloud.

Again we understand that we are made in the image of our Maker. Again we understand the power of the uplift of this idea. From the conflict it has emerged in new and glorified form. Hath a God eyes that he may see? Hath a God ears that he may hear? Hath a God hands that he may work? These we know to be but human forms of speaking. Eyes, ears, and hands we may owe to the brute from whom we have sprung; in our eyes and ears and hands we show the relationship we bear to them. These are not the image of God. God is a deeper, a finer, a nobler something than hands, than ears and eyes. The image of God lies within ourselves: the image of God is that which makes us what we are. In every noble purpose, in every earnest endeavor to uplift ourselves or our fellowman, in every thought that turns us from the evil of a repented past, in every desire with which our hearts yearn to strengthen, support and sustain our friends and even our enemies, shines forth the image of Almighty God. This it is that links us with the Eternal: this it is that makes it worth while that we should be Eternal. Besides this what are hands and ears and eyes? We are made, all in us that is noblest and highest, in the image of our Maker.

A word in closing. The time is ripe for a broader conception of theology and of science on the part of those who are not trained to be specialists in either. We are becoming more and more inherently religious. We are becoming more and more enamored of the truth in all its forms. The times are ripe for us to cease the struggle and to strive for peace. So long as men insist that the important things in faith are the things on which men differ there will be eternal strife. So soon as men endeavor to find the common ground between them and each tries to state his belief in forms acceptable to himself but involving no hostility to his neighbor, we shall be working for peace.

Some of our finest men of to-day are being trained in modern science and in modern theology. There is no scorn in their minds for early science or for early theology. Each served its age, and each taught its truth. But its truth must be restated in terms of to-day. The old creeds will always be loved. The old creeds will always hold our reverence and allegiance. But each age must be at liberty to interpret these creeds in the terms in which that age best understands truth. Each age must be at liberty “to restate the doctrines of the past in accordance with the newness of the age and with the ancient verity of truth.” How feeble my own attempt is in this matter, I quite understand; I am still a child of the struggle. It has all come in my lifetime and I have seen and felt not a little of the bitterness of it. I believe the time is ripe for a definite peace. I believe our children, if we do not hamper them, will never know the struggle we have had. In every great institution throughout this broad land men of earnest mind and noble soul are teaching the truth as God gives it to them to know the truth. Let us not hesitate to entrust our children to their hands. To us they may seem to be teachers of discord but they are not speaking in terms that we understand. They are using the language of a new age. Underneath their teaching lies the everlasting truth. Out of their teaching will come everlasting life. Let us trust God in the world. Let us believe that in this age he is teaching men’s lips and dwelling in men’s hearts. Only so can we give to our children the best their times can give them. If we insist in holding these men back to our conception we but deny them the privilege of moving with God’s great procession. We make them laggards when they should be in the front ranks, their faces lighted by a nearer and clearer vision of Almighty truth.