Part 4

That, I answered him, seemed to me a good thing.

Virginia said she thought religion and science were almost the same. She meant that her scientific knowledge of the universe led her to her religious convictions.

Florence said she thought science and religion were altogether separate, had nothing to do with each other.

Marian said she did not see how science could help us to religious knowledge. But it turns out that she has read no science at all, save what she was taught in school.

Ruth said that science was the enemy of religion, that two things seeking in a different way could not possibly both reach the truth; that science might tell us of material facts, but could not possibly give us the divine truth.

I asked: “Are you sure material truth is not divine truth?”

Then I said that I myself thought science was the servant of religion, that it was valuable only in so far as it helped us to a knowledge of life—divine and whole—(I said aside to Ruth) and that I did think it helped us so. It gave us a sense of unity, of our relation with the whole world, because we knew that the same law moved us and the stars.

“Now,” I went on, “Marian mentioned the other day that she had heard people say they were too educated to need religion. They meant they knew too much science. Can science replace religion?”

They all said no.

They saw at once that behind every science was the mystery, the unexplained, and that every scientist must begin with a philosophy.

I said: “I have heard people say that science disproves immortality.”

Virginia answered: “It does not disprove immortality. It proves, indeed, that nothing ever is destroyed.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “that there is such a thing as absolute religious knowledge?”

“Yes,” they said.

“Do you think we can get it? That it is a certain knowledge?”

They answered “Yes.”

“But,” said Ruth, “you would want it proved.”

I used the word “faith,” and the children rightly objected, because, they said, faith could be used to express the most superstitious of mythical beliefs. One must know.

“I mean self-evident knowledge,” I said. “If to-day the priests and the myths are dead, if we are to have a democratic religion, then each one of us must be a prophet. We here to-day, we seven, shall find the unanswerable truth. Shall we?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“How do we know that such truth is to be reached? We do know certain things in ourselves? We know the mystery is there? We know that which we call God?”

“Yes,” they said.

“Is there any other reason for believing that the truth can be known?”

Marian said: “In past times some men have known it, we feel certain.”

“That is just what I meant, Marian. Such men, you mean, as Moses and Jesus?”

“Yes.”

“And we here shall get it. We shall know.

“I believe,” I said, “that when we have talked everything over we shall know the truth, and it shall be the same for each.”