[ p. 152 ]
In the concluding paragraph of a book on the relationship between science and religion, this startling ultimatum is delivered: “Mysteries must give place to facts.” ‘The more one considers it, the more he sees concentrated in that curt and summary dictum a large amount of popular thinking upon the relationship between the known and unknown. With strange cocksureness, folk to-day regard science as a sort of irrigation service, gradually fructifying the waste lands of mystery, until at last all of them shall be reclaimed and cultivated. In university lecture-halls, popular magazines, and Sunday supplements, one finds himself on tip-toe, expectantly awaiting the solution of the last mystery. While, of course, no one claims to have grasped “this sorry scheme of things entire,” popular thought, for practical purposes, comes perilously near to , living in an explained universe.
Says one writer of the last decade: “Science [ p. 153 ] brings into camp every day a new fact captured by its pickets, scouting along the line between the known and the unknown. ‘The mysteries are fading away, and if they are the capital of religion, or of the church as the habitation of religion, then the church must be fading away.” When one regards the amount of such writing that is being done, playing up in vivid phrase and picturesque description the campaigns of science against ignorance, he is not surprised to find even small children singing:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
I do not wonder what you are.
What you are I know right well,
And your component parts can tell.
A certain contrariness of disposition, therefore, such as led the Greek, weary of hearing Aristides always called “The Just,” to vote upon the other side, may well induce a man in an “age of science” to collect specimens of the things we do not understand. When once he has begun, however, to be a connoisseur of mystery, more than contrariness keeps him at it. For this lake of being, on which he launches [ p. 154 ] his craft to search for undiscovered coves, soon proves to be no lake at all, but an open branch of an illimitable sea, on which his skiffs of thought lose themselves over the rim of the world. He finds that the universe is not almost explored by scientific pioneers, but rather that, as Mr. Thomas Edison remarks, “No one knows one seven-billionth of one per cent about anything.”
Indeed, Mr. Edison’s remark suggests the source from which the most convinced testimonies to our ignorance come. It was to have been expected that religious folk would readily discount knowledge in the interests of faith. That Job in the humility of his spiritual experience should say, “We are but of yesterday, and know nothing”; that Paul with his religious agnosticism should say, “Now we see in a mirror, darkly”—“Now I know in fragments’; that Socrates, conscious of the failure of his philosophy to pierce the opaque depths of life should say, “One thing I know, that I know nothing”; that Emerson, with his love of teasing epigram, should cry, “Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know,” was to be anticipated. The really interesting testimonials [ p. 155 ] to our ignorance come rather from those in whom scientific wisdom is supposed to dwell. There is Mr. Herbert Spencer saying that in its ultimate nature life is incomprehensible. There is Professor William James saying that on an important subject in science’s own realm science must confess her imagination to be bankrupt; she has absolutely nothing to affirm; she says, “ignoramus, ignoramibus.” 'There is even Professor Ernst Haeckel saying, “We grant at once that the innermost character of nature is just as little understood by us as it was by Anaximander and Empedocles twentyfour hundred years ago, by Spinoza and Newton two hundred years ago, by Kant and Goethe one hundred years ago. We must even grant that this essence and substance become more mysterious and enigmatic the deeper we penetrate into the knowledge of its attributes.”
This last suggestion, that the world grows more mysterious the more we know about it, is somewhat startling. Popular thought commonly regards the clearing up of life’s unknown provinces as an enterprise requiring only persistent endeavor and sufficient time. Given so much habitable land of the known, [ p. 156 ] men think, our problem is to invade and cultivate as rapidly as possible the waste land of mystery. But the relationship between the two is not thus quantitative, so that the more you have of one the less you have of the other. Science is no pioneering king whose conquests gradually subdue the Empire of Ignorance until at last he shall weep for more worlds to conquer. Rather, the more we know about the world, the more mysterious it is. Sunrise to our fathers was strange enough, and they used at daybreak to sing a hymn to greet the coming dawn, but it is stranger now, when upon the surface of this wheeling earth we feel ourselves move in space as the sun brims the hill. This new universe created for us by our modern science, with its microscopic marvels, its reign of law, its innumerable stars, and, after the leisureliness and patience of the ages, with us upon the thin skin of this revolving planet in the sky, is more mysterious by far than that flat earth that once was cozily tucked beneath the coverlet of heaven.
When in 1836 Comte declared that it would be forever impossible to measure the distance to the stars, the world thought that it faced a [ p. 157 ] mystery; but when in 1838 Bessel did measure the distance to star 61 Cygni, the world found itself plunged into a real mystery that even yet staggers the imagination. Reveal a little information concerning the relation of mind to body and you raise more interrogations than you quell, Establish the mutability of species and you stir up more hares than you run down. The world with ether undiscovered was strange enough, but what with ether’s eerie activities now exposed in bewildering array, and ether itself capable of no better definition than “the nominative case of the verb, to undulate,” we are plunged into a mystifying world the perplexing like of which our sires never imagined. A cosmos in which we are told that it would take 250,000 years to count the atoms in a pin-head has not been noticeably simplified, especially when we are assured that those atoms revolve about each other in sidereal systems with a regularity as fixed, and at distances comparatively as great, as belong to stars and planets in the heavens.
Could we suppose that an African savage knew what was going on inside the painted stick he calls his fetish, we could well forgive [ p. 158 ] him for falling in obeisance before the marvel of it. Nor is the mystery greatly lessened when science changes her hypothesis and says that there are no gross and carnal atoms, but spirituelle electrons instead.
Mystery is not a transient trouble in human experience to be removed by increasing knowledge. Rather, it is a permanent problem made more urgent by increasing knowledge. Even the most ordinary falling stone, so far from being explained, is made by the law of gravitation so incomprehensible that Mr. Huxley says, ““Whoso appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvelousness.” The more a man knows, therefore, the more full of wonder he finds the world. The conceit of ignorance is to be explained by this suggestive fact that there are mysteries outside the range of the ordinary mind. It was a young child who said, “Now if you will tell me who made God, I think I shall understand everything”; it was a learned [ p. 159 ] philosopher who said, “The natural world is an incomprehensible scheme, so incomprehensible that a man must really, in the literal sense, know nothing at all, who is not sensible of his ignorance in it.”
Many a modern man, therefore, begins to recover from his first enthusiasm over a scien~ tifically explained universe. He cannot see that, for all that science has told him, he is one whit the less mysterious. When he deeply considers himself, he is still an utterly incredible creature. That this “forked Radish with a head fantastically carved” should be trotting up and down on this outlandish planet in the sky, shooting through space seventy-five times faster than a cannon ball; that it should be laughing and crying here, loving and hating, making such ado and consequence about itself, is far more marvelous than the wildest dreams of the apocalyptic prophets. Almost anything is likely to happen in a world where what we see about us has actually managed to happen. - Indeed, it is so unimaginably strange that we are alive at all, that for us to keep on being alive in spite of death would be an inconsiderable addition to the mystery. ‘To find ourselves [ p. 160 ] still existing in another world would be far less queer than to have found ourselves existing in the first place.
Science has wrought many suhieveniehis: but it has not cleared up a single elemental mystery, and it has created a thousand lesser mysteries that never were imagined until science came. Science has demonstrated that this oak of a world used to be an acorn, but how that acorn came into existence or whence it obtained the latent elements that now have become an oak, science has not suggested. Science has made it possible for a manufacturer to cut down three trees in his forest at 7.35 in the morning, to have them made into paper at 9.34, and to have them selling on the street as newspapers at 10.25; but whether the manufacturer, himself, is a brain that has a mind, or is a mind that has a brain, science cannot even guess.
When, therefore, one runs across some cocksure and dogmatic book, whether it be written by scientist or theologian, one well may turn from it with an overwhelming sense of its unreality to listen to Robert Louis Stevenson:
What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or [ p. 161 ] lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming ;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the Deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing, with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.
That this recurrent sense of wonder is justified, despite all that science has achieved, is [ p. 162 ] easily to be seen. However far back, for example, the scientist traces the journey which the universe has traveled, he comes at last to the pillars of Hercules, over which “plus ultra” is written, but through which no scientific investigation ever can pass. Nothing has been changed in the problem of life’s import by the substitution of milleniums for Bishop Usher’s 4004 B.c. Only now we have a longer walk before we arrive at that postern gate and look out into the great unknown from which the universal process comes. Nor can the philosopher here overreach the scientist and claim knowledge of the world’s origin. All the systems of metaphysics ever framed have this thing true of them: they are not rationales of a known universe, but attempted rationales of the philosopher’s faith about a universe unknown. He, too, stood at the postern gate and sent his soul on its great venture. He, too, believed before he reasoned, reasoned because he first believed, and used his logic to confirm or criticize his faith.
Whatever any man thinks about the cause of life is primarily faith. To be sure, it need not be a mere guess, a chance throw of volition’s [ p. 163 ] dice, without cause before or reasoned explanation afterward, but it must always be an hypothesis, ventured first and then defended. When Von Hartmann says, “The wholly blank and vague and limitless immensity which knows nothing of itself and which is so aberrant from its fundamental condition as to produce, contrary to its inherent nature, conscious beings who must suffer and wail and agonize as long as they are conscious,” that is faith. When John says, “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him,” that too is faith. The materialist who plants in the vast flower-pot of chaos his primal seed of matter and, like a gigantic master of legerdemain, waves his wand of words over it until the whole flowering universe grows from the dirt, is exercising faith as evidently as is the Christian when he rejoices in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
Moreover, if, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, a ‘man steadfastly endeavors to restrain his thought within the boundaries of demonstrable knowledge, he will not even then escape the influence of the unknown. What revealing [ p. 164 ] words at the close of Mr. Spencer’s autobiography about “the all-embracing mystery” which lies behind all lesser mysteries! “And along with this,” he adds, “rises the paralyzing thought—what if, of all that is thus incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension anywhere?” Even he finds his valuation of the unknown tingeing his estimate of life.
A man’s faith may be perplexed or positive, paralyzing or jubilant, but some thought or other about the “all-embracing mystery” a man is almost sure to have, and the more thoughtful he is, the more his world of present facts will take color like a chameleon from his conviction about the mysterious world that lies beneath it. At any rate, for all science’s achievements, he well may say,
It’s strange that God should fash to frame
The yearth and lift sae hie,
An’ clean forget to explain the same
To a gentleman like me.
Even more obviously is science unable to dispel mystery when its attention is directed [ p. 165 ] to the future. The problem of to-morrow is so utterly out of reach of knowledge that science must dismiss its consideration as futile guesswork. Yet it makes a real difference to life what a man thinks about the future; or if a man stoutly refuse to think, that makes a difference too. Men who by some weird chance should find themselves upon a ship, ignorant alike of its port of departure and its destination, might preoccupy themselves with many tasks, whether selfishly to get the best of the ship’s store or fraternally to contribute to the common weal, but how could the question of their unknown haven be quenched among them? Could they so thin their thought and narrowly concentrate their attention, as never to stand at the ship’s prow and think of that? Though some should lack imagination to care and some should drown their care in drink or smother it in work, the tone of the crew’s spirit, the hopelessness or joy or dogged resolution ‘with which the sails were set, and the discipline preserved, subtly would depend on what idea of the haven was gaining the popular assent— that it was good or evil, or that there was no [ p. 166 ] haven, only an endless sailing of the sea by a ship that never would arrive.
This interest in the future is not by any means the child of immature and ignorant curiosity. It is rather the immature and ignorant who feel the problem least, like those stolid and unquestioning natives of the African forest who never have been curious enough to inquire whether the sun that rises this morning is the same that set last night. The more man grows in intellectual range, the more it becomes impossible for him to row his boat with his back in the direction whither he is going, guiding his skiff by his wake alone, and never turning to scan the horizons ahead. Is this world of sacrifice and heart-break, of love and death, to have an outcome that will make the price of it worth while? Or do we face the slowly waning vitality of earth, its light dimmed, its heat consumed, its forces spent and wasted, until at last upon this wandering island in the sky some solitary Robinson Crusoe, the last living soul . in the universe, stumbles over the graves of the race in a vain search for some Black Friday to bear him company?
If a man is persuaded, as many apparently [ p. 167 ] are, that beyond the immediate balance of joy over sorrow which may exist, no real victory of good over evil is to be expected, whether we as individuals share in it or not; that so far from being “heirs of hopes too fair to turn out false,” humanity has been duped by its optimisms, not in form alone but in substance also, and that men, however fine in spiritual nature or great in serviceable ministry, are just so much “high-grade cosmic fertilizer” for a future harvest which at last will come to nothing; if he vividly perceive the meaning of such a lack of issue to the world, that humanity like a rocket, radiant in ascent and splendidly luminous in climax, in the end is but a falling stick, sans light, sans life, sans goal, sans everything, —surely such a conception of life’s issue will stain through into the texture of his most common day.
It is indeed open for a man to say that even so each one should “hold hard by his great soul, do out the duty.” After the Greeks at ‘Chaeronea had been irremediably defeated by Philip of Macedon, Demosthenes still turned on the Athenians to say, “I maintain that if the issue of this struggle had from the outset [ p. 168 ] been manifest to the whole world, not even then ought Athens to have shrunk from it, if Athens has any regard for her own glory, her past history, or her future reputation.” Many noble men have so faced life with no thought of victory for themselves or for their race. But at its best this is a dogged and stoical nobility, an obdurate and joyless heroism. It makes all service of personal and social ideals a toilsome search for gold at the end of a rainbow, after the myth is disbelieved and disillusion has fallen on the quest.
If good may hope to conquer evil in some localities for some limited extent of time, but no conclusive and general victory can possibly arrive; if we are attempting to impose moral ideals upon an alien and inhospitable world, with dubious show of success now and certainty of failure in the end; if, in a word, in a Saharan universe, sterile of all spiritual meaning, we are vainly striving with our little atomizers to produce fertility, then it would still be best not to shrink from the conflict. But the more lucidly a man should perceive how thus all large human hopes were illusions in essence as well as form, the more difficult would it be for him [ p. 169 ] to keep heart in the struggle. Humanity in such a world would lack even the incentive that Demosthenes gave to Athens, “her future reputation.” The persistence of religious faith is due in part to this, that the race, like her best individuals, has passionately desired
Not without aim to go round
In an eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain.
At any rate, one begins curiously to wonder just what the intellectual basis is for that ultimatum, “Mysteries must give place to facts.”
Strangely enough, the part of life from which science has least of all succeeded in expelling mystery, is not life’s first source nor yet its ultimate goal, but rather that very province which knowledge has chosen for her own—the world of present facts. “Here,” says a follower of Comte, “let us abide contented within the home of positive experience; why wander outside into the unknown and the unknowable?” But no man ever yet succeeded [ p. 170 ] in treating daily experience as merely a receptacle for information. We all are active appreciators of life; we insist on value as well as fact; we demand interpretations, like Belshazzar offering royal rewards for the meaning of the enigmatic characters upon the wall. The scientific facts of the world are like the physicist’s analysis of the sunset into its constituent ether waves. ‘The poet, however, enraptured with the sunset, goes far beyond the physicist’s description. He dresses the ether waves in his appreciations. They walk no more unclothed, but richly decked in his discernments and interpretations. The poet’s sunset consists of the beauty which his insight finds there, and this perception of beauty is a personal affirmation, a judgment of value, a leap of esthetic faith.
How large a part of life’s real content lies in this mystical realm of value is at once evident. For special purposes some factual aspect of reality may be separated from the rest and on that our attention centered, as when the police officer describes a boy in terms of his Bertillon measurements, or a botanist analyzes the constitution of a flower. But this specially [ p. 171 ] abstracted phase of an experience is not the whole of it, as one learns when the mother’s evaluation of the boy bursts into passionate expression, or Wordsworth sings about the daffodils. In practical living such appraisals of any object can no more be separated from our knowledge of it than color can be separated from a Venetian vase. The coloring of worth is blown into the very substance of our thought. Every familiar fact of daily experience is thus a trysting place of information and insight, a habitation where value is wedded to fact.
The sciences make it their business to insulate certain special aspects of the world from the influence of this evaluating instinct. They seek the bare and unappreciated facts. For the biologist, in so far as he strictly adheres to the standpoint of his science, all living organisms are nothing more than physical tissues whose operations are controlled by unalterable laws. His duty is to describe and analyze, and in terms of proximate causes and effects to ex. plain the facts. For the purposes of his science, the nerves of a frog and the nerves of a Michelangelo, the brain of a newt and of a Newton would be equally objects of his regard. [ p. 172 ] They are all biological tissue. He does not value his facts as good or beautiful; he does not regard them as ends or means for personal purposes; he does not ask their significance in a world-scheme; and if he be a strict biologist he does not even so far prefer one fact to another as to desire healthy tissue rather than pathological. All organisms are for him nothing but objects for observation and report.
This isolation of a single aspect of reality and this impersonal attitude in the study of it are necessary and legitimate. Without them organized knowledge would be impossible. Even when the science is psychology, and the data are sensation, judgment, emotion, will, these facts must be insulated from all appraisal of values and studied as neutrally as though a geologist were analyzing rocks or an astronomer observing stars. As the chemist studies foods and poisons with equal zest, so the psychologist studies joy and sorrow, remorse and hope, without preference. They are facts impersonally to be observed, and in terms of natural law to be explained.
Men, however, become obsessed by this practical [ p. 173 ] method of the sciences. They regard this abstracted aspect of existence, these physical and psychical facts and laws, as the entire world of reality, and even postulate explanations which fit the isolated material of some special science as an adequate philosophy of life. But neither is the material of the sciences the whole of reality nor is science’s explanation of that material all of truth. After science has measured and weighed any group of facts, ascertained their quantitative aspects and determined the law of their sequence, we insist on discerning qualitative aspects everywhere. Appreciations and preferences, woven into the factual warp, make the real texture of our experience.
By as much as a living man, lured by ideals, mastered by purposes, pleased by hopes, exalted by love, differs from the manikin in the medical school, with his painted nerves and wooden muscles, by so much does the real world of life differ from the definitions of science. All that produces civilization and art springs from this over-world of value-judgments and worth-estimates. All cathedrals and paintings, [ p. 174 ] all poetry, romance, music, and religion are their children.
This world of insight and purpose, of value and ideal, is the world in which man actually lives. The attitude of science, drawing off the sense of worth from life and isolating the remainder, is an artifice convenient but not comprehensive. No scientist lives up to it when he leaves his laboratory and goes home.
Indeed, when the scientist reaches home where the free play of his appreciation clothes his life with worth, he might well commune with himself in some such way as this:
‘My science certainly does not exhaust the real meaning of my life. The mystery forever escapes the test-tube. When science has said the last word about my children, they mean infinitely more to me than science has declared, and no investigation ever can discover how much a home is worth. I accumulate facts in my laboratory, but unvalued facts are uncracked nuts—the meat of them is unpossessed. It takes more than science to get at the meat of life: it takes the sense of worth. If I, therefore, must value facts in order to live at all, why do I complain because my friend, the preacher, feels for life as a whole what I feel for some of the parts?
As in a musical composition the estimate of [ p. 175 ] any phrase must in the end consider the or. ganizing motif and complete effect of the whole work, so, facing as we do the necessity of valuing things, ideas, persons, institutions, social movements, all of which are by innumerable relationships intermeshed and unified, where shall we stop this operation short of interpreting the whole? At what point shall we say to appreciation, “Thus far and no farther”? Events do not stand like bottles in the rain, disparate and unrelated, sharing neither their emptiness nor their abundance, but like interflowing rivulets they are so reticulated that to trace the spring and issue of one is to trace the springs and issues of them all. The complete appraisal of the least item subtly involves the appraisal of the sum. No detail is the whole of itself; the universe is the rest of it. Religion is the appreciation of life’s meaning as a whole. It does for the bare facts of the world what the poet’s vision does for the ether waves of the sunset or a mother’s love for the - Bertillon measurements of a boy. It clothes them with radiant meanings. It perceives in them eternal worth and significance. It lifts the ponderous world to its ear as we lift a sea [ p. 176 ] shell, and hears mysterious messages of hope and peace. It is evaluation in its most exalted and comprehensive exercise. Atany rate, when the laboratory has answered its last question and all other sciences have added their results to the pile, the real mystery of life has not yet been even touched.
Upon this three-fold mystery, the world’s cause, the world’s goal, and the world’s meaning, rests the perpetuity of religion. In Professor John Fiske’s phrase, she is yet “the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of mankind upon the earth.” The mourners have gathered many times to give her remains a decent burial, but the obsequies have always been indefinitely postponed. 'The deceased was always too lively for the funeral. In Butler’s Analogy we are informed that the fashionable society of his day was convinced that Christianity had already one foot in the grave. Shortly after, however, Wesley and Whitefield arrived to guide one of the most amazing religious renewals in all history. Religion [ p. 177 ] has an indefatigable ability to come back. The reason for this lies deep. Many fantastic and exaggerated ambitions have invited human endeavor, but none so wild and quixotic as the attempt to abide contented within the realm of positively known facts. No one ever abode there for a single hour, and there is not enough such knowledge extant for a man to live on during his most simple day. The mind continuously colors and manipulates all life by its interpretations. Like loose type, the facts are set by ventures of faith into gloomy, humdrum prose or into exalted poetry.
Now, a wholesome religion is simply that form of faith which alone has succeeded in making life worth while; which fills it with purpose, dignifies it with value, inspires it with motive, and comforts it with hope. In an age of science, as much as ever before in all history, religion says:
Without me you grow to learn a little about the world you live in, your minds limited on every side by boundaries across which they look into deep mystery; without me 'you rejoice in the transient beauties of the world and more in human loves and friendships, you suffer much with broken bodies [ p. 178 ] and more with broken family ties, and then die as you were born, the spawn of mindless, soulless forces that never purposed you and never cared. As with yourselves, so with your fellows—they came from nowhere save the dust and go nowhither save back to it again, and without me the whole world is purposeless, engaged with blind hands that have no mind behind them on tasks that mean nothing and are never done.
The recuperative power of religion lies in the elemental unwillingness of men to live in such a world. The parvenues of science who a generation ago foresaw the downfall of religion,— “In fifty years your Christianity will have died out,” said one,—are going to be as disappointed as was the fashionable society of Butler’s day. For there is more to life than science ever can deal with, and so far as the eternal problems of our human lot are concerned, all the sciences together are like inch-worms clambering up the Matterhorn in an endeavor to discover the distance to the stars.
This does not mean that science has no effect upon religion. Science affects religion tremendously, Science lays violent hold on old traditions, long hallowed in pious sentiment, and [ p. 179 ] scatters them in scorn to the four winds. Science invades the realm of history, with no regard for the part of it called sacred, and like Antiochus E;piphanes rides on a war-horse into the very Holy of Holies to see whether the tales of it be true. Science takes old arguments, long used in defense of the faith, and makes them as obsolete as bows and arrows at Verdun, Science with pitiless disregard of anything but sheer truth, gives old cosmologies the lie, although the church weeps for her dead like Rachel for her children and will not be comforted. Science, an absolute monarch in her own realm, will let no sacred books, no sacred customs, no sacred history, escape the alembie of her investigations and no consideration can thwart her progress toward one goal, the truth,
When, however, science has laid bare the last fact concerning the religious history of man, when she has cut the ground from under ecclesiastical traditions until the hearts of the priests melt like water, and has sent into eternal exile legends and myths grown hoary in popular belief, religion herself is perennial still. In the end she renews her vigorous youth, and rises relieved from burdensome encumbrances. Still [ p. 180 ] her proper province is unravaged by an enemy. Still men, knowing all that science can discover touching the sense of moral obligation, curiously question whether, like Haeckel, they shall say that the sense of duty is “a long series of phyletic modifications in the phronema of the cortex,” or like Wordsworth, discern there the “Stern daughter of the Voice of God.” Stil grief imperiously insists on an interpretation, some Paul, upon the one side, saying, “Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory,” and on the other, some Bertrand Russell with his hopeless skepticism: ‘““Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.” Still men lift their eyes to the stars and wonder whether he was right who called the universe “a mechanical process in which we may discover no aim or purpose whatever’ or whether the heavens do declare the glory of God. Still men curiously question whether they are souls with transient bodies, or bodies with transient souls, and the whole world of life with its abysmal mysteries insists on being interpreted. “He must have been an ill [ p. 181 ] advised god who could make no better sport than to change himself into so lean and hungry a world’; so Schopenhauer. And Paul? “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!”
This prodigious difference lies not in the fact; it lies in the interpretation of the fact. It is not a contest of science; it is a contest of insight and evaluation, of vision and faith, and all the hosts of argument and reason which these marshal in their support. This involves no quarrel between faith and knowledge. There is no such quarrel. Here, as everywhere, faith is the only road to knowledge, for whether in astronomy or theology the facts are explained by ventures of theory first, which are verified as best they can be afterward. No one has put it better than President Pritchett of the Carnegie Institute: “Science is grounded in faith just as is religion, and scientific truth, like religious truth, consists of hypotheses never wholly verified, that fit the facts more or less closely.”
A true theology uses the same intellectual methods that a true science does, but theology [ p. 182 ] and religion are not identical. Religion is the life of which theology is the theoretic formulation. Religion puts on creeds like garments, and wears them as a science does hypotheses, until, worn out, they must be thrown aside for better. But religion herself still persists. For religion is a warm confidence in the testimony of a man’s best hours that the spiritual life is real, and in the witness of the world’s greatest souls that God is good. Religion is living as though our life were no amateur theatrical display from which we may retire at will, but urgent business where fidelity and serviceableness contribute to a victory of righteousness that in the end will surely come. Religion is brotherliness inspired by the assurance that something in the universe abides forever, grows and bears fruit at last, and that this eternal element is not the lowest, dirt, but the loftiest, personality. Religion is a well-spring of character born of friendship with the Power not ourselves, and of cordial trust in him and selfsurrender to his will. The obsequies of religion are not yet due! Humanity is too deathlessly athirst for some such revelation of Eternal Goodness, and.some such interpretation of [ p. 183 ] life’s deep significance as Christians have always found in Christ.
When science has answered her last question, man still will be saying,
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o’ her tenderness.