CREDO QUIA POSSIBILE

I

THERE is something almost unfilial in the stolid indifference with which we pass by old Christian dogmas. Earnest generations thought, prayed, yearned, over their interpretation of the meaning of life, and fashioned dogmas which they believed would light the steps of their children and their children's children to endless generations, yet we scarce look to see what these dogmas may mean. Creeds of a thousand years are no more heeded than old letters garnered in the garret; yet it may happen that among those old yellowing sheets, franked and sealed, are love-letters which, however dull and childish they may seem to the fancy-free, rekindle old fires in the hearts of those who have loved and lost, or loved in vain.

The dogma-makers lived on our earth, they had faculties like ours, they loved and suffered, they were amazed and confounded; they, too, tried to discover a formula that should prove the key to the mystery of life. The same mystery that confronted them confronts us still. To some men

those old dogmas brought peace, self-mastery, power; why may we not linger a little to examine them?

We are not free to use dogmas that postulate facts inconsistent with the discoveries of science; but science and religion have different duties. Science seeks a formula that shall square with human experience and satisfy the reason; religion seeks a formula that shall minister to what in our ignorance we call the soul's needs and quicken the emotions. May we not find in the old dogmas something not forbidden by science that may still minister to the soul's needs?

The Christian creed says, Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. Is there nothing in human experience to justify this dogma? At one time in the Middle Ages there was a sect of men who came under the potent influence of this aspect of the Godhead. They believed that to each Person of the Trinity was allotted his period of divine dominion. God the Father had had his reign, God the Son was still reigning. Both reigns had had their special characters, but neither had been wholly adequate to the soul's needs, therefore there was ground for hope that the Holy Ghost would soon begin to reign, and that the season of children, of lilies, of good men triumphant, was at hand.

Were not Abate Gioacchino del Fiore and his disciples right, in thinking that the hope of good tidings for the soul lay in worship of the Holy Spirit? The conception of God the Creator has its difficulties. The Beginning is the deep, permanent mystery; and the creation of a world in which pain and suffering mark every individual life, renders the claims of a Creator to man's gratitude very questionable. Also the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is God is very difficult. But when we turn toward the third Person, to that aspect of Deity which has never yielded to man's anthropomorphic needs, which at best has been represented by a dove, a bringer of peace, do we not discern more light?

II

We look through the telescope at night and see thousands upon thousands of suns, glorious in the surrounding dark. Their majesty inspires us with mingled feelings: fear before the vast unknown, reverence before the very great, exaltation at being a part of this mighty whole. But what, in the end, do we take away except bewilderment? There is no peace in the empyrean; there is turmoil, effort, energy. Do we perceive there the presence of God the Father or God the Son?

Yet if there is a Divine Spirit, how fit a working-place is this majestic universe for its incessant toil.

We look through the microscope; physicists, chemists, biologists, pry into the inner recesses of matter, only to find energy - everywhere, in the egg, in spermatozoa, in the minutest particles of matter, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, restless energy, eternal effort. If we turn to the history of past life upon our globe, what do we find but records of energy, whether physical, chemical, or of that seemingly peculiar form which marks living organisms, everywhere energy leaving its trace in innumerable forms. In this history of life, according to our human standards, there has been a long procession, in which the principle of organic life, from the earliest period of vegetable existence, has advanced through manifold forms, upward, upward, in the depths of the sea, in the air, on land, by devious routes and strange passages, up, up, to the fish, to the bird, to four-footed beasts, and finally to man. Gradually, steadily, those mysterious forces which determine the nature of things, have been shaping gases and solids, crystals, drops of water, the pistil and stamens of the plant, the heart, lungs, eye, hand, and brain of man. In all organic life there are

cells in restless energy; cells piled on cells, cells in many kinds of combinations, all taking shape according to the will of some strenuous, persistent, experimenting force. The cells of the clover arrange themselves to fashion the flower which shall secrete honey, the cells of the bee to create an insect which shall gather it, the cells of the man to form a creature with an appetite for that honey and also with a yearning to find something divine in the universe. Everywhere that man can peer he finds energy intent upon changing all that is into new forms. This process, different as it looks in the very large and in the very small, in distant stars, in the tides of ocean, in the flora, in sea creatures or in mammals, seems to be one and the same, proceeding through myriad forms of activity, always seeking to effect a change.

If this seeming is true, if all our world, all our universe, is the workroom, or playground it may be, for the same energy, may we not judge it, must we not judge it, by the only part of the pattern that is open to our judgment, by human life within our experience? How can corporeal creatures like ourselves, busily at work turning food into living tissue, entertain but the most remote understanding of elementary gases? What do we know of the ambitions, the enthusi