The stretched-out, graded, striving world of biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy--these great constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind, must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view which centres on the God known in religious experience.

They are true within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis wide enough to contain them.
It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an explanation.

They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to live.

But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the explorations of history and of psychology.

Even contrasted with our every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in a wilderness.