Thus a belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any ecclesiastical creed.

It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of the Christian symbol, '_I believe in God the Father Almighty_.' It rests on the same foundation, neither more nor less.

Nor is it too much to say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.
This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a little longer.

I will take another passage from Dr.Tyndall, which presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of which truth is only the sacramental channel to us.

'"_Two things," said Imanuel Kant_' (it is thus Dr.Tyndall writes), '"_fill me with awe--the starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man." And in the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe.