Painted Windows eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 185 pages of information about Painted Windows.

Painted Windows eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 185 pages of information about Painted Windows.

I believe that there are more evidences for the existence of Christ in the modern world than in the whole lexicon of theology.  I believe it is more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the Christian tradition.  I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the documents of the Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present hour from the torch of science.

“Why seek ye the living among the dead?”

For twenty years I have followed this clue to the meaning of Christ and the nature of His message.  I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view of philosophy.  I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets to the soul of man—­an immanent teleology, an invisible direction towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent movement towards greater understanding.  And I have seen the demonstration by science that this visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and intangible—­a phantasm of the senses.

I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to follow this clue.

One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and said to me, “We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest neighbour than our earth from the nearest star.”

I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are not yet understood.

The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the metaphysicians, the world of religious seers—­a world which is real and visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.

Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on the other side.  Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so photographed as to reveal its skeleton.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Painted Windows from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.