a recrudescence of superstition; the passionate resolve to keep hold on what is slipping away from them by giving up more and more the use of reason in religion, and by resting more and more on authority. The Church of Rome is the great upholder of authority as against reason in religion; and it will be strange if in the coming time of transition the Church of Rome does not gain.
But for many more than those whom Rome attracts there will be an interval, between the time when men accept the religion of the Bible as a thaumaturgy and the time when they perceive it to be something different, in which they will be prone to throw aside the religion of the Bible altogether as a delusion. And this, again, will be mainly the fault,—if fault that can be called which was an inevitable error,—of the religious people themselves, who, from the time of the Apostles downwards, have insisted upon it that religion shall be a thaumaturgy or nothing. For very many, therefore, when it cannot be a thaumaturgy, it will be nothing. And very likely there will come a day when there will be less religion than even now. For the religion of the Bible is so simple and powerful, that even those who make the Bible a thaumaturgy get hold of the religion, because they read the Bible; but, if men do not read the Bible, they cannot get hold of it. And then will be fulfilled the saying of the prophet Amos: 'Behold, the days come, saith the Eternal, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Eternal; and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Eternal, and shall not find it.'[1]
Nevertheless, as after this mournful prophecy the herds man of Tekoah goes on to say: 'There shall yet not the least grain of Israel fall to the earth!'[2] To the Bible men
