III.

III.Sources of the Theistic Idea.Ourargument may fitly begin with an inquiry into the sources of the theistic idea and the shape which it has universally assumed among untutored men. The most primitive element which it contains is doubtless the notion ofdependenceupon something outside of ourselves. We are born into a world consisting of forces which sway our lives and over which we can exercise no control. The individual man can indeed make his volition count for a very little in modifying the course of events, but this end necessitates strict and unceasing obedience to powers that cannot be tampered with. To the behaviour of these external powers our actions must be adapted under penalty of death. And upon grounds noless firm than those on which we believe in any externality whatever, we recognize that these forces antedated our birth and will endure after we have disappeared from the scene. No one supposes that he makes the world for himself, so that it is born and dies with him. Every one perforce contemplates the world as something existing independently of himself, as something into which he has come, and from which he is to go; and for his coming and his going, as well as for what he does while part of the world, he is dependent upon something that is not himself.Between ancient and modern man, as between the child and the adult, there can be no essential difference in the recognition of this fundamental fact of life. The primitive man could not, indeed, state the case in this generalized form, any more than a young child could state it, but the facts which the statement covers were as real to him as they are to us.[A]The primitive man knew nothing of a world, in the modern sense of the word. The conception of that vast consensus of forces which we call the world or universe is a somewhat late result of culture; it was reached only through ages of experience and reflection. Such an idea lay beyond the horizon of the primitive man. But while he knew not the world, he knew bits and pieces of it; or, to vary the expression, he had his little world, chaotic and fragmentary enough, but full of dread reality for him. He knew what it was to deal from birth until death with powers far mightier than himself. To explain these powers, to make their actions in any wise intelligible, he had but one available resource; and this was so obvious that he could not fail to employ it. The only source of action of which he knew anything, since it was the only source which lay within himself, was the human will;[3]and in this respect, after all, the philosophy of the primeval savage was not so very far removed fromthat of the modern scientific thinker. The primitive man could see that his own actions were prompted by desire and guided by intelligence, and he supposed the same to be the case with the sun and the wind, the frost and the lightning. All the forces of outward nature, so far as they came into visible contact with his life, he personified as great beings which were to be contended with or placated. This primeval philosophy, once universal among men, has lasted far into the historic period, and it is only slowly and bit by bit that it has been outgrown by the most highly civilized races. Indeed the half-civilized majority of mankind have by no means as yet cast it aside, and among savage tribes we may still see it persisting in all its original crudity. In the mythologies of all peoples, of the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen, as well as of the North American Indians and the dwellers in the South Sea islands, we find the sun personified as an archer or wanderer, the clouds asgigantic birds, the tempest as a devouring dragon; and the tales of gods and heroes, as well as of trolls and fairies, are made up of scattered and distorted fragments of nature-myths, of which the primitive meaning had long been forgotten when the ingenuity of modern scholarship laid it bare.[4][A]Seenote Aat the end of the volume.In all this personification of physical phenomena our prehistoric ancestors were greatly assisted by that theory of ghosts which was perhaps the earliest speculative effort of the human mind. Travellers have now and then reported the existence of races of men quite destitute of religion, or of what the observer has learned to recognize as religion; but no one has ever discovered a race of men devoid of a belief in ghosts. The mass of crude inference which makes up the savage's philosophy of nature is largely based upon the hypothesis that every man hasanother self, a double, or wraith, or ghost. This "hypothesis of theother self, which serves to account for the savage's wanderings during sleep in strange lands and among strange people, serves also to account for the presence in his dreams of parents, comrades, or enemies, known to be dead and buried. The other self of the dreamer meets and converses with the other selves of his dead brethren, joins with them in the hunt, or sits down with them to the wild cannibal banquet. Thus arises the belief in an ever-present world of ghosts, a belief which the entire experience of uncivilized man goes to strengthen and expand."[5]Countless tales and superstitions of savage races show that the hypothesis of the other self is used to explain the phenomena of hysteria and epilepsy, of shadows, of echoes, and even of the reflection of face and gestures in still water. It is not only men, moreover, who are provided with other selves. Dumb beasts and plants, stone hatchets and arrows, articles of clothing and food, all have their ghosts;[6]and when the dead chief is buried, his wives andservants, his dogs and horses, are slain to keep him company, and weapons and trinkets are placed in his tomb to be used in the spirit-land. Burial-places of primitive men, ages before the dawn of history, bear testimony to the immense antiquity of this savage philosophy. From this wholesale belief in ghosts to the interpretation of the wind or the lightning as a person animated by an indwelling soul and endowed with quasi-human passions and purposes, the step is not a long one. The latter notion grows almost inevitably out of the former, so that all races of men without exception have entertained it. That the mighty power which uproots trees and drives the storm-clouds across the sky should resemble a human soul is to the savage an unavoidable inference. "If the fire burns down his hut, it is because the fire is a person with a soul, and is angry with him, and needs to be coaxed into a kindlier mood by means of prayer or sacrifice." He has no alternative butto regard fire-soul as something akin to human-soul; his philosophy makes no distinction between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity.It was in accordance with this primitive theory of things that the earliest form of religious worship was developed. In all races of men, so far as can be determined, this was the worship of ancestors.[7]The other self of the dead chieftain continued after death to watch over the interests of the tribe, to defend it against the attacks of enemies, to reward brave warriors, and to punish traitors and cowards. His favour must be propitiated with ceremonies like those in which a subject does homage to a living ruler. If offended by neglect or irreverent treatment, defeat in battle, damage by flood or fire, visitations of famine or pestilence, were interpreted as marks of his anger. Thus the spirits animating the forces of nature were often identified with the ghosts of ancestors, and mythology is filled with traces of the confusion. In the Vedic religion thepitris, or "fathers," live in the sky along with Yama, the originalpitriof mankind: they are very busy with the weather; they send down rain to refresh the thirsty earth, or anon parch the fields till the crops perish of drought; and they rush along in the roaring tempest, like the weird host of the wild huntsman Wodan. To the ancient Greek the blue sky Uranos was the father of gods and men, and throughout antiquity this mingling of ancestor-worship with nature-worship was general. With the systematic development of ethnic religions, in some instances ancestor-worship remained dominant, as with the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Romans; in others, a polytheism based upon nature-worship acquired supremacy, as with the Hindus and Greeks, and our own Teutonic forefathers. The great divinities of the Hellenic pantheon are all personifications of physical phenomena. At a comparatively late date the Roman adopted these divinities and paid to them a fashionable and literary homage, but his solemn and heartfelt rites were those with which he worshipped thelaresandpenatesin the privacy of his home. His hospitable treatment of the gods of a vanquished people was the symptom of a commingling of the various local religions of antiquity which insured their mutual destruction and prepared the way for their absorption into a far grander and truer system.[8]

Sources of the Theistic Idea.

Ourargument may fitly begin with an inquiry into the sources of the theistic idea and the shape which it has universally assumed among untutored men. The most primitive element which it contains is doubtless the notion ofdependenceupon something outside of ourselves. We are born into a world consisting of forces which sway our lives and over which we can exercise no control. The individual man can indeed make his volition count for a very little in modifying the course of events, but this end necessitates strict and unceasing obedience to powers that cannot be tampered with. To the behaviour of these external powers our actions must be adapted under penalty of death. And upon grounds noless firm than those on which we believe in any externality whatever, we recognize that these forces antedated our birth and will endure after we have disappeared from the scene. No one supposes that he makes the world for himself, so that it is born and dies with him. Every one perforce contemplates the world as something existing independently of himself, as something into which he has come, and from which he is to go; and for his coming and his going, as well as for what he does while part of the world, he is dependent upon something that is not himself.

Between ancient and modern man, as between the child and the adult, there can be no essential difference in the recognition of this fundamental fact of life. The primitive man could not, indeed, state the case in this generalized form, any more than a young child could state it, but the facts which the statement covers were as real to him as they are to us.[A]The primitive man knew nothing of a world, in the modern sense of the word. The conception of that vast consensus of forces which we call the world or universe is a somewhat late result of culture; it was reached only through ages of experience and reflection. Such an idea lay beyond the horizon of the primitive man. But while he knew not the world, he knew bits and pieces of it; or, to vary the expression, he had his little world, chaotic and fragmentary enough, but full of dread reality for him. He knew what it was to deal from birth until death with powers far mightier than himself. To explain these powers, to make their actions in any wise intelligible, he had but one available resource; and this was so obvious that he could not fail to employ it. The only source of action of which he knew anything, since it was the only source which lay within himself, was the human will;[3]and in this respect, after all, the philosophy of the primeval savage was not so very far removed fromthat of the modern scientific thinker. The primitive man could see that his own actions were prompted by desire and guided by intelligence, and he supposed the same to be the case with the sun and the wind, the frost and the lightning. All the forces of outward nature, so far as they came into visible contact with his life, he personified as great beings which were to be contended with or placated. This primeval philosophy, once universal among men, has lasted far into the historic period, and it is only slowly and bit by bit that it has been outgrown by the most highly civilized races. Indeed the half-civilized majority of mankind have by no means as yet cast it aside, and among savage tribes we may still see it persisting in all its original crudity. In the mythologies of all peoples, of the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen, as well as of the North American Indians and the dwellers in the South Sea islands, we find the sun personified as an archer or wanderer, the clouds asgigantic birds, the tempest as a devouring dragon; and the tales of gods and heroes, as well as of trolls and fairies, are made up of scattered and distorted fragments of nature-myths, of which the primitive meaning had long been forgotten when the ingenuity of modern scholarship laid it bare.[4]

[A]Seenote Aat the end of the volume.

[A]Seenote Aat the end of the volume.

In all this personification of physical phenomena our prehistoric ancestors were greatly assisted by that theory of ghosts which was perhaps the earliest speculative effort of the human mind. Travellers have now and then reported the existence of races of men quite destitute of religion, or of what the observer has learned to recognize as religion; but no one has ever discovered a race of men devoid of a belief in ghosts. The mass of crude inference which makes up the savage's philosophy of nature is largely based upon the hypothesis that every man hasanother self, a double, or wraith, or ghost. This "hypothesis of theother self, which serves to account for the savage's wanderings during sleep in strange lands and among strange people, serves also to account for the presence in his dreams of parents, comrades, or enemies, known to be dead and buried. The other self of the dreamer meets and converses with the other selves of his dead brethren, joins with them in the hunt, or sits down with them to the wild cannibal banquet. Thus arises the belief in an ever-present world of ghosts, a belief which the entire experience of uncivilized man goes to strengthen and expand."[5]Countless tales and superstitions of savage races show that the hypothesis of the other self is used to explain the phenomena of hysteria and epilepsy, of shadows, of echoes, and even of the reflection of face and gestures in still water. It is not only men, moreover, who are provided with other selves. Dumb beasts and plants, stone hatchets and arrows, articles of clothing and food, all have their ghosts;[6]and when the dead chief is buried, his wives andservants, his dogs and horses, are slain to keep him company, and weapons and trinkets are placed in his tomb to be used in the spirit-land. Burial-places of primitive men, ages before the dawn of history, bear testimony to the immense antiquity of this savage philosophy. From this wholesale belief in ghosts to the interpretation of the wind or the lightning as a person animated by an indwelling soul and endowed with quasi-human passions and purposes, the step is not a long one. The latter notion grows almost inevitably out of the former, so that all races of men without exception have entertained it. That the mighty power which uproots trees and drives the storm-clouds across the sky should resemble a human soul is to the savage an unavoidable inference. "If the fire burns down his hut, it is because the fire is a person with a soul, and is angry with him, and needs to be coaxed into a kindlier mood by means of prayer or sacrifice." He has no alternative butto regard fire-soul as something akin to human-soul; his philosophy makes no distinction between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity.

It was in accordance with this primitive theory of things that the earliest form of religious worship was developed. In all races of men, so far as can be determined, this was the worship of ancestors.[7]The other self of the dead chieftain continued after death to watch over the interests of the tribe, to defend it against the attacks of enemies, to reward brave warriors, and to punish traitors and cowards. His favour must be propitiated with ceremonies like those in which a subject does homage to a living ruler. If offended by neglect or irreverent treatment, defeat in battle, damage by flood or fire, visitations of famine or pestilence, were interpreted as marks of his anger. Thus the spirits animating the forces of nature were often identified with the ghosts of ancestors, and mythology is filled with traces of the confusion. In the Vedic religion thepitris, or "fathers," live in the sky along with Yama, the originalpitriof mankind: they are very busy with the weather; they send down rain to refresh the thirsty earth, or anon parch the fields till the crops perish of drought; and they rush along in the roaring tempest, like the weird host of the wild huntsman Wodan. To the ancient Greek the blue sky Uranos was the father of gods and men, and throughout antiquity this mingling of ancestor-worship with nature-worship was general. With the systematic development of ethnic religions, in some instances ancestor-worship remained dominant, as with the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Romans; in others, a polytheism based upon nature-worship acquired supremacy, as with the Hindus and Greeks, and our own Teutonic forefathers. The great divinities of the Hellenic pantheon are all personifications of physical phenomena. At a comparatively late date the Roman adopted these divinities and paid to them a fashionable and literary homage, but his solemn and heartfelt rites were those with which he worshipped thelaresandpenatesin the privacy of his home. His hospitable treatment of the gods of a vanquished people was the symptom of a commingling of the various local religions of antiquity which insured their mutual destruction and prepared the way for their absorption into a far grander and truer system.[8]

IV.Development of Monotheism.Suchan allusion to the Romans, in an exposition like the present one, is not without its significance. It was partly through political circumstances that a truly theistic idea was developed out of the chaotic and fragmentary ghost theories and nature-worship of the primeval world. To the framing of the vastest of all possible conceptions, the idea of God, man came but slowly. This nature-worship and ancestor-worship of early times was scarcely theism. In their recognition of man's utter dependence upon something outside of himself which yet was not wholly unlike himself, these primitive religions contained the essential germ out of which theism was to grow; but it is a long way from the propitiationof ghosts and the adoration of the rising sun to the worship of the infinite and eternal God, the maker of heaven and earth, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Before men could arrive at such a conception, it was necessary for them to obtain some integral idea of the heaven and the earth; it was necessary for them to frame, however inadequately, the conception of a physical universe. Such a conception had been reached by civilized peoples before the Christian era, and by the Greeks a remarkable beginning had been made in the generalization and interpretation of physical phenomena. The intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria, for two centuries before and three centuries after the time of Christ, was more modern than anything that followed down to the days of Bacon and Descartes; and all the leaders of Greek thought since Anaxagoras had been virtually or avowedly monotheists. As the phenomena of nature were generalized, the deities or superhuman beings regarded as their sources were likewise generalized, until the conception of nature as a whole gave rise to the conception of a single Deity as the author and ruler of nature; and in accordance with the order of its genesis, this notion of Deity was still the notion of a Being possessed of psychical attributes, and in some way like unto Man.But there was another cause, besides scientific generalization, which led men's minds toward monotheism. The conception of tutelar deities, which was the most prominent practical feature of ancestor-worship, was directly affected by the political development of the peoples of antiquity. As tribes were consolidated into nations, the tutelar gods of the tribes became generalized, or the god of some leading tribe came to supersede his fellows, until the result was a single national deity, at first regarded as the greatest among gods, afterwards as the only God. The most striking instance of this method ofdevelopment is afforded by the Hebrew conception of Jehovah. The most primitive form of Hebrew religion discernible in the Old Testament is a fetichism, or very crude polytheism, in which ancestor-worship becomes more prominent than nature-worship. At first theteraphim, or tutelar household deities, play an important part, but nature-gods, such as Baal, and Moloch, and Astarte, are extensively worshipped. It is the pluralelohimwho create the earth, and whose sons visit the daughters of antediluvian men. The tutelar deity, Jehovah, is originally thought of as one of theelohim, then as chief amongelohim, and Lord of the hosts of heaven. Through his favour his chosen prophet overcomes the prophets of Baal, he is greater than the deities of neighbouring peoples, he is the only true god, and thus finally he is thought of as the only God, and his name becomes the symbol of monotheism. The Jews have always been one of the most highly-gifted races in theworld. In antiquity they developed an intense sentiment of nationality, and for earnestness and depth of ethical feeling they surpassed all other peoples. The conception of Jehovah set forth in the writings of the prophets was the loftiest conception of deity anywhere attained before the time of Christ; in ethical value it immeasurably surpassed anything to be found in the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. It was natural that such a conception of deity should be adopted throughout the Roman world. At the beginning of the Christian era the classic polytheism had well-nigh lost its hold upon men's minds; its value had become chiefly literary, as a mere collection of pretty stories; it had begun its descent into the humble realm of folk-lore. For want of anything better people had recourse to elaborate Eastern ceremonials, or contented themselves with the time-honoured domestic worship of thelaresandpenates. Yet their minds were ripe for some kindof monotheism, and in order that the Jewish conception should come to be generally adopted, it was only necessary that it should be freed from its limitations of nationality, and that Jehovah should be set forth as Sustainer of the universe and Father of all mankind. This was done by Jesus and Paul. The theory of divine action implied throughout the gospels and the epistles was the first complete monotheism attained by mankind, or at least by that portion of it from which our modern civilization has descended. Here for the first time we have the idea of God dissociated from the limiting circumstances with which it had been entangled in all the ethnic religions of antiquity. Individual thinkers here and there had already, doubtless, reached an equally true conception, as was shown by Kleanthes in his sublime hymn to Zeus;[9]but it was now for the first time set forth in such wise as to win assent from the common folk as well as the philosophers, and to make itsway into the hearts of all men. Its acceptance was hastened, and its hold upon mankind immeasurably strengthened, by the divinely beautiful ethical teaching in which Jesus couched it,—that teaching, so often misunderstood yet so profoundly true, which heralded the time when Man shall have thrown off the burden of his bestial inheritance and strife and sorrow shall cease from the earth.[10]We shall presently see that in its fundamental features the theism of Jesus and Paul was so true that it must endure as long as man endures. Changes of statement may alter the outward appearance of it, but the kernel of truth will remain the same forever. But the shifting body of religious doctrine known as Christianity has at various times contained much that is unknown to this pure theism, and much that has shown itself to be ephemeral in its hold upon men. The change from polytheism to monotheism could not be thoroughly accomplished all at once. AsChristianity spread over the Roman world it became encrusted with pagan notions and observances, and a similar process went on during the conversion of the Teutonic barbarians. Yuletide and Easter and other church holidays were directly adopted from the old nature-worship; the adoration of tutelar household deities survived in the homage paid to patron saints; and the worship of the Berecynthian Mother was continued in that of the Virgin Mary.[11]Even the nameGod, applied to the Deity throughout Teutonic Christendom, seems to be neither more nor less thanWodan, the personification of the storm-wind, the supreme divinity of our pagan forefathers.[B][B]Seenote B. at the end of the volume.That Christianity should thus have retained names and symbols and rites belonging to heathen antiquity was inevitable. The system of Christian theism was the work of some of the loftiest minds that have ever appeared upon the earth; but it was adopted by millions of men and women, ofall degrees of knowledge and ignorance, of keenness and dullness, of spirituality and grossness, and these brought to it their various inherited notions and habits of thought. In all its ages, therefore, Christian theism has meant one thing to one person, and another thing to another. While the highest Christian minds have always been monotheistic, the multitude have outgrown polytheism but slowly; and even the monotheism of the highest minds has been coloured by notions ultimately derived from the primeval ghost-world which have interfered with its purity, and have seriously hampered men in their search after truth.In illustration of this point we have now to notice two strongly contrasted views of the divine nature which have been held by Christian theists, and to observe their bearings upon the scientific thought of modern times.

Development of Monotheism.

Suchan allusion to the Romans, in an exposition like the present one, is not without its significance. It was partly through political circumstances that a truly theistic idea was developed out of the chaotic and fragmentary ghost theories and nature-worship of the primeval world. To the framing of the vastest of all possible conceptions, the idea of God, man came but slowly. This nature-worship and ancestor-worship of early times was scarcely theism. In their recognition of man's utter dependence upon something outside of himself which yet was not wholly unlike himself, these primitive religions contained the essential germ out of which theism was to grow; but it is a long way from the propitiationof ghosts and the adoration of the rising sun to the worship of the infinite and eternal God, the maker of heaven and earth, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Before men could arrive at such a conception, it was necessary for them to obtain some integral idea of the heaven and the earth; it was necessary for them to frame, however inadequately, the conception of a physical universe. Such a conception had been reached by civilized peoples before the Christian era, and by the Greeks a remarkable beginning had been made in the generalization and interpretation of physical phenomena. The intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria, for two centuries before and three centuries after the time of Christ, was more modern than anything that followed down to the days of Bacon and Descartes; and all the leaders of Greek thought since Anaxagoras had been virtually or avowedly monotheists. As the phenomena of nature were generalized, the deities or superhuman beings regarded as their sources were likewise generalized, until the conception of nature as a whole gave rise to the conception of a single Deity as the author and ruler of nature; and in accordance with the order of its genesis, this notion of Deity was still the notion of a Being possessed of psychical attributes, and in some way like unto Man.

But there was another cause, besides scientific generalization, which led men's minds toward monotheism. The conception of tutelar deities, which was the most prominent practical feature of ancestor-worship, was directly affected by the political development of the peoples of antiquity. As tribes were consolidated into nations, the tutelar gods of the tribes became generalized, or the god of some leading tribe came to supersede his fellows, until the result was a single national deity, at first regarded as the greatest among gods, afterwards as the only God. The most striking instance of this method ofdevelopment is afforded by the Hebrew conception of Jehovah. The most primitive form of Hebrew religion discernible in the Old Testament is a fetichism, or very crude polytheism, in which ancestor-worship becomes more prominent than nature-worship. At first theteraphim, or tutelar household deities, play an important part, but nature-gods, such as Baal, and Moloch, and Astarte, are extensively worshipped. It is the pluralelohimwho create the earth, and whose sons visit the daughters of antediluvian men. The tutelar deity, Jehovah, is originally thought of as one of theelohim, then as chief amongelohim, and Lord of the hosts of heaven. Through his favour his chosen prophet overcomes the prophets of Baal, he is greater than the deities of neighbouring peoples, he is the only true god, and thus finally he is thought of as the only God, and his name becomes the symbol of monotheism. The Jews have always been one of the most highly-gifted races in theworld. In antiquity they developed an intense sentiment of nationality, and for earnestness and depth of ethical feeling they surpassed all other peoples. The conception of Jehovah set forth in the writings of the prophets was the loftiest conception of deity anywhere attained before the time of Christ; in ethical value it immeasurably surpassed anything to be found in the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. It was natural that such a conception of deity should be adopted throughout the Roman world. At the beginning of the Christian era the classic polytheism had well-nigh lost its hold upon men's minds; its value had become chiefly literary, as a mere collection of pretty stories; it had begun its descent into the humble realm of folk-lore. For want of anything better people had recourse to elaborate Eastern ceremonials, or contented themselves with the time-honoured domestic worship of thelaresandpenates. Yet their minds were ripe for some kindof monotheism, and in order that the Jewish conception should come to be generally adopted, it was only necessary that it should be freed from its limitations of nationality, and that Jehovah should be set forth as Sustainer of the universe and Father of all mankind. This was done by Jesus and Paul. The theory of divine action implied throughout the gospels and the epistles was the first complete monotheism attained by mankind, or at least by that portion of it from which our modern civilization has descended. Here for the first time we have the idea of God dissociated from the limiting circumstances with which it had been entangled in all the ethnic religions of antiquity. Individual thinkers here and there had already, doubtless, reached an equally true conception, as was shown by Kleanthes in his sublime hymn to Zeus;[9]but it was now for the first time set forth in such wise as to win assent from the common folk as well as the philosophers, and to make itsway into the hearts of all men. Its acceptance was hastened, and its hold upon mankind immeasurably strengthened, by the divinely beautiful ethical teaching in which Jesus couched it,—that teaching, so often misunderstood yet so profoundly true, which heralded the time when Man shall have thrown off the burden of his bestial inheritance and strife and sorrow shall cease from the earth.[10]

We shall presently see that in its fundamental features the theism of Jesus and Paul was so true that it must endure as long as man endures. Changes of statement may alter the outward appearance of it, but the kernel of truth will remain the same forever. But the shifting body of religious doctrine known as Christianity has at various times contained much that is unknown to this pure theism, and much that has shown itself to be ephemeral in its hold upon men. The change from polytheism to monotheism could not be thoroughly accomplished all at once. AsChristianity spread over the Roman world it became encrusted with pagan notions and observances, and a similar process went on during the conversion of the Teutonic barbarians. Yuletide and Easter and other church holidays were directly adopted from the old nature-worship; the adoration of tutelar household deities survived in the homage paid to patron saints; and the worship of the Berecynthian Mother was continued in that of the Virgin Mary.[11]Even the nameGod, applied to the Deity throughout Teutonic Christendom, seems to be neither more nor less thanWodan, the personification of the storm-wind, the supreme divinity of our pagan forefathers.[B]

[B]Seenote B. at the end of the volume.

[B]Seenote B. at the end of the volume.

That Christianity should thus have retained names and symbols and rites belonging to heathen antiquity was inevitable. The system of Christian theism was the work of some of the loftiest minds that have ever appeared upon the earth; but it was adopted by millions of men and women, ofall degrees of knowledge and ignorance, of keenness and dullness, of spirituality and grossness, and these brought to it their various inherited notions and habits of thought. In all its ages, therefore, Christian theism has meant one thing to one person, and another thing to another. While the highest Christian minds have always been monotheistic, the multitude have outgrown polytheism but slowly; and even the monotheism of the highest minds has been coloured by notions ultimately derived from the primeval ghost-world which have interfered with its purity, and have seriously hampered men in their search after truth.

In illustration of this point we have now to notice two strongly contrasted views of the divine nature which have been held by Christian theists, and to observe their bearings upon the scientific thought of modern times.

V.The Idea of God as immanent in the World.Wehave seen that since the primitive savage philosophy did not distinguish between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity, the religion of antiquity was an inextricable tangle of ancestor-worship with nature-worship. Nevertheless, among some peoples the one, among others the other, became predominant. I think it can hardly be an accidental coincidence that nature-worship predominated with the Greeks and Hindus, the only peoples of antiquity who accomplished anything in the exact sciences, or in metaphysics. The capacity for abstract thinking which led the Hindu to originate algebra, and the Greek to originate geometry, and both to attempt elaborate scientific theories of the universe,—this same capacity revealed itself in the manner in which they deified the powers of nature. They were able to imagine the indwelling spirit of the sun or the storm without help from the conception of an individual ghost. Such being the general capacity of the people, we can readily understand how, when it came to monotheism, their most eminent thinkers should have been able to frame the conception of God acting in and through the powers of nature, without the aid of any grossly anthropomorphic symbolism. In this connection it is interesting to observe the characteristics of the idea of God as conceived by the three greatest fathers of the Greek church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. The philosophy of these profound and vigorous thinkers was in large measure derived from the Stoics. They regarded Deity as immanent in the universe, and eternally operating through natural laws. In their view God is not a localizable personality, remote from the world, and actingupon it only by means of occasional portent and prodigy; nor is the world a lifeless machine blindly working after some preordained method, and only feeling the presence of God in so far as he now and then sees fit to interfere with its normal course of procedure. On the contrary, God is the ever-present life of the world; it is through him that all things exist from moment to moment, and the natural sequence of events is a perpetual revelation of the divine wisdom and goodness. In accordance with this fundamental view, Clement, for example, repudiated the Gnostic theory of the vileness of matter, condemned asceticism, and regarded the world as hallowed by the presence of indwelling Deity. Knowing no distinction "between what man discovers and what God reveals," he explained Christianity as a natural development from the earlier religious thought of mankind. It was essential to his idea of the divine perfection that the past should contain within itself all the germs of the future;and accordingly he attached but slight value to tales of miracle, and looked upon salvation as the normal ripening of the higher spiritual qualities of man "under the guidance of immanent Deity." The views of Clement's disciple Origen are much like those of his master. Athanasius ventured much farther into the bewildering regions of metaphysics. Yet in his doctrine of the Trinity, by which he overcame the visible tendency toward polytheism in the theories of Arius, and averted the threatened danger of a compromise between Christianity and Paganism, he proceeded upon the lines which Clement had marked out. In his very suggestive work on "The Continuity of Christian Thought," Professor Alexander Allen thus sets forth the Athanasian point of view: "In the formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as three distinct and coequal members in the one divine essence, there was the recognition and the reconciliation of the philosophical schools which had divided the ancient world. In the ideaof the eternal Father the Oriental mind recognized what it liked to call the profound abyss of being, that which lies back of all phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends awe to human minds seeking to know the divine. In the doctrine of the eternal Son revealing the Father, immanent in nature and humanity as the life and light shining through all created things, the divine reason in which the human reason shares, there was the recognition of the truth after which Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were struggling,—the tie which binds the creation to God in the closest organic relationship. In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the church guarded against any pantheistic confusion of God with the world by upholding the life of the manifested Deity as essentially ethical or spiritual, revealing itself in humanity in its highest form, only in so far as humanity recognized its calling and through the Spirit entered into communion with the Father and the Son."Great as was the service which theseviews of Athanasius rendered in the fourth century of our era, they are scarcely to be regarded as a permanent or essential feature of Christian theism. The metaphysic in which they are couched is alien to the metaphysic of our time, yet through this vast difference it is all the more instructive to note how closely Athanasius approaches the confines of modern scientific thought, simply through his fundamental conception of God as the indwelling life of the universe. We shall be still more forcibly struck with this similarity when we come to consider the character impressed upon our idea of God by the modern doctrine of evolution.

The Idea of God as immanent in the World.

Wehave seen that since the primitive savage philosophy did not distinguish between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity, the religion of antiquity was an inextricable tangle of ancestor-worship with nature-worship. Nevertheless, among some peoples the one, among others the other, became predominant. I think it can hardly be an accidental coincidence that nature-worship predominated with the Greeks and Hindus, the only peoples of antiquity who accomplished anything in the exact sciences, or in metaphysics. The capacity for abstract thinking which led the Hindu to originate algebra, and the Greek to originate geometry, and both to attempt elaborate scientific theories of the universe,—this same capacity revealed itself in the manner in which they deified the powers of nature. They were able to imagine the indwelling spirit of the sun or the storm without help from the conception of an individual ghost. Such being the general capacity of the people, we can readily understand how, when it came to monotheism, their most eminent thinkers should have been able to frame the conception of God acting in and through the powers of nature, without the aid of any grossly anthropomorphic symbolism. In this connection it is interesting to observe the characteristics of the idea of God as conceived by the three greatest fathers of the Greek church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. The philosophy of these profound and vigorous thinkers was in large measure derived from the Stoics. They regarded Deity as immanent in the universe, and eternally operating through natural laws. In their view God is not a localizable personality, remote from the world, and actingupon it only by means of occasional portent and prodigy; nor is the world a lifeless machine blindly working after some preordained method, and only feeling the presence of God in so far as he now and then sees fit to interfere with its normal course of procedure. On the contrary, God is the ever-present life of the world; it is through him that all things exist from moment to moment, and the natural sequence of events is a perpetual revelation of the divine wisdom and goodness. In accordance with this fundamental view, Clement, for example, repudiated the Gnostic theory of the vileness of matter, condemned asceticism, and regarded the world as hallowed by the presence of indwelling Deity. Knowing no distinction "between what man discovers and what God reveals," he explained Christianity as a natural development from the earlier religious thought of mankind. It was essential to his idea of the divine perfection that the past should contain within itself all the germs of the future;and accordingly he attached but slight value to tales of miracle, and looked upon salvation as the normal ripening of the higher spiritual qualities of man "under the guidance of immanent Deity." The views of Clement's disciple Origen are much like those of his master. Athanasius ventured much farther into the bewildering regions of metaphysics. Yet in his doctrine of the Trinity, by which he overcame the visible tendency toward polytheism in the theories of Arius, and averted the threatened danger of a compromise between Christianity and Paganism, he proceeded upon the lines which Clement had marked out. In his very suggestive work on "The Continuity of Christian Thought," Professor Alexander Allen thus sets forth the Athanasian point of view: "In the formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as three distinct and coequal members in the one divine essence, there was the recognition and the reconciliation of the philosophical schools which had divided the ancient world. In the ideaof the eternal Father the Oriental mind recognized what it liked to call the profound abyss of being, that which lies back of all phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends awe to human minds seeking to know the divine. In the doctrine of the eternal Son revealing the Father, immanent in nature and humanity as the life and light shining through all created things, the divine reason in which the human reason shares, there was the recognition of the truth after which Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were struggling,—the tie which binds the creation to God in the closest organic relationship. In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the church guarded against any pantheistic confusion of God with the world by upholding the life of the manifested Deity as essentially ethical or spiritual, revealing itself in humanity in its highest form, only in so far as humanity recognized its calling and through the Spirit entered into communion with the Father and the Son."

Great as was the service which theseviews of Athanasius rendered in the fourth century of our era, they are scarcely to be regarded as a permanent or essential feature of Christian theism. The metaphysic in which they are couched is alien to the metaphysic of our time, yet through this vast difference it is all the more instructive to note how closely Athanasius approaches the confines of modern scientific thought, simply through his fundamental conception of God as the indwelling life of the universe. We shall be still more forcibly struck with this similarity when we come to consider the character impressed upon our idea of God by the modern doctrine of evolution.

VI.The Idea of God as remote from the World.Butthis Greek conception of divine immanence did not find favour with the Latin-speaking world. There a very different notion prevailed, the origin of which may be traced to the mental habits attending the primitive ancestor-worship. Out of materials furnished by the ghost-world a crude kind of monotheism could be reached by simply carrying back the thought to a single ghost-deity as the original ancestor of all the others. Some barbarous races have gone as far as this, as for example the Zulus, who have developed the doctrine of divine ancestors so far as to recognize a first ancestor, the Great Father, Unkulunkulu, who created the world.[12]The kind of theism reached by this process of thought differs essentially from the theism reached through the medium of nature-worship. For whereas in the latter case the god of the sky or the sea is regarded as a mysterious spirit acting in and through the phenomena, in the former case the phenomena are regarded as coerced into activity by some power existing outside of them, and this power is conceived as manlike in the crudest sense, having been originally thought of as the ghost of some man who once lived upon the earth. In the monotheism which is reached by thinking along these lines of inference, the universe is conceived as an inert lifeless machine, impelled by blind forces which have been set acting from without; and God is conceived as existing apart from the world in solitary inaccessible majesty,—"an absentee God," as Carlyle says, "sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his universe, and 'seeing it go.'" This conception demands less of the intellect than the conception of God as immanentin the universe. It requires less grasp of mind and less width of experience, and it has accordingly been much the more common conception. The idea of the indwelling God is an attempt to reach out toward the reality, and as such it taxes the powers of the finite mind. The idea of God external to the universe is a symbol which in no wise approaches the reality, and for that very reason it does not tax the mental powers; there is an aspect of finality about it, in which the ordinary mind rests content and complains of whatever seeks to disturb its repose.I must not be understood as ignoring the fact that this lower species of theism has been entertained by some of the loftiest minds of our race, both in ancient and in modern times. When once such an ever-present conception as the idea of God has become intertwined with the whole body of the thoughts of mankind, it is very difficult for the most powerful and subtle intelligence to change the form ithas taken. It has become so far organized into the texture of the mind that it abides there unconsciously, like our fundamental axioms about number and magnitude; it sways our thought hither and thither without our knowing it. The two forms of theism here contrasted have slowly grown up under the myriad unassignable influences that in antiquity caused nature-worship to predominate among some people and ancestor-worship among others; they have coloured all the philosophizing that has been done for more than twenty centuries; and it is seldom that a thinker educated under the one form ever comes to adopt the other and habitually employ it, save under the mighty influence of modern science, the tendency of which, as we shall presently see, is all in one direction.Among ancient thinkers the view of Deity as remote from the world prevailed with the followers of Epikuros, who held that the immortal gods could not be supposed to trouble themselves about the paltry affairs of men, but lived a blessed life of their own, undisturbed in the far-off empyrean. This left the world quite under the sway of blind forces, and thus we find it depicted in the marvellous poem of Lucretius, one of the loftiest monuments of Latin genius. It is to all appearance an atheistic world, albeit the author was perhaps more profoundly religious in spirit than any other Roman that ever lived, save Augustine; yet to his immediate scientific purpose this atheism was no drawback. When we are investigating natural phenomena, with intent to explain them scientifically, our proper task is simply to ascertain the physical conditions under which they occur, and the less we meddle with metaphysics or theology the better. As Laplace said, the mathematician, in solving his equations, does not need "the hypothesis of God."[13]To the scientific investigator, as such, the forces of nature are doubtless blind, like thexandyin algebra, but this is only so long as he contents himself with describing their modes of operation; when he undertakes to explain them philosophically, as we shall see, he can in no wise dispense with his theistic hypothesis. The Lucretian philosophy, therefore, admirable as a scientific coördination of such facts about the physical universe as were then known, goes but very little way as a philosophy. It is interesting to note that this atheism followed directly from that species of theism which placed God outside of his universe. We shall find the case of modern atheism to be quite similar. As soon as this crude and misleading conception of God is refuted, as the whole progress of scientific knowledge tends to refute it, the modern atheist or positivist falls back upon his universe of blind forces and contents himself with it, while zealously shouting from the housetops that this is the whole story.To one familiar with Christian ideas, thenotion that Man is too insignificant a creature to be worth the notice of Deity seems at once pathetic and grotesque. In the view of Plato, by which all Christendom has been powerfully influenced, there is profound pathos. The wickedness and misery of the world wrought so strongly upon Plato's keen sympathies and delicate moral sense that he came to conclusions almost as gloomy as those of the Buddhist who regards existence as an evil. In the Timaios he depicts the material world as essentially vile; he is unable to think of the pure and holy Deity as manifested in it, and he accordingly separates the Creator from his creation by the whole breadth of infinitude. This view passed on to the Gnostics, for whom the puzzling problem of philosophy was how to explain the action of the spiritual God upon the material universe. Sometimes the interval was bridged by mediating æons or emanations partly spiritual and partly material; sometimes the world was held tobe the work of the devil, and in no sense divine.[14]The Greek fathers under the lead of Clement, espousing the higher theism, kept clear of this torrent of Gnostic thought; but upon Augustine it fell with full force, and he was carried away with it. In his earlier writings Augustine showed himself not incapable of comprehending the views of Clement and Athanasius; but his intense feeling of man's wickedness dragged him irresistibly in the opposite direction. In his doctrine of original sin, he represents humanity as cut off from all relationship with God, who is depicted as a crudely anthropomorphic Being far removed from the universe and accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized church. Compared with the thoughts of the Greek fathers this was a barbaric conception, but it was suited alike to the lower grade of culture in western Europe, and to the Latin political genius, which in the decline of the Empire was already occupying itself withits great and beneficent work of constructing an imperial Church. For these reasons the Augustinian theology prevailed, and in the Dark Ages which followed it became so deeply inwrought into the innermost fibres of Latin Christianity that it remains dominant to-day alike in Catholic and Protestant churches. With few exceptions every child born of Christian parents in western Europe or in America grows up with an idea of God the outlines of which were engraven upon men's minds by Augustine fifteen centuries ago. Nay, more, it is hardly too much to say that three fourths of the body of doctrine currently known as Christianity, unwarranted by Scripture and never dreamed of by Christ or his apostles, first took coherent shape in the writings of this mighty Roman, who was separated from the apostolic age by an interval of time like that which separates us from the invention of printing and the discovery of America. The idea of God upon which all this Augustinian doctrine is based is the idea of a Being actuated by human passions and purposes, localizable in space and utterly remote from that inert machine, the universe in which we live, and upon which He acts intermittently through the suspension of what are called natural laws. So deeply has this conception penetrated the thought of Christendom that we continually find it at the bottom of the speculations and arguments of men who would warmly repudiate it as thus stated in its naked outlines. It dominates the reasonings alike of believers and skeptics, of theists and atheists; it underlies at once the objections raised by orthodoxy against each new step in science and the assaults made by materialism upon every religious conception of the world; and thus it is chiefly responsible for that complicated misunderstanding which, by a lamentable confusion of thought, is commonly called "the conflict between religion and science."

The Idea of God as remote from the World.

Butthis Greek conception of divine immanence did not find favour with the Latin-speaking world. There a very different notion prevailed, the origin of which may be traced to the mental habits attending the primitive ancestor-worship. Out of materials furnished by the ghost-world a crude kind of monotheism could be reached by simply carrying back the thought to a single ghost-deity as the original ancestor of all the others. Some barbarous races have gone as far as this, as for example the Zulus, who have developed the doctrine of divine ancestors so far as to recognize a first ancestor, the Great Father, Unkulunkulu, who created the world.[12]The kind of theism reached by this process of thought differs essentially from the theism reached through the medium of nature-worship. For whereas in the latter case the god of the sky or the sea is regarded as a mysterious spirit acting in and through the phenomena, in the former case the phenomena are regarded as coerced into activity by some power existing outside of them, and this power is conceived as manlike in the crudest sense, having been originally thought of as the ghost of some man who once lived upon the earth. In the monotheism which is reached by thinking along these lines of inference, the universe is conceived as an inert lifeless machine, impelled by blind forces which have been set acting from without; and God is conceived as existing apart from the world in solitary inaccessible majesty,—"an absentee God," as Carlyle says, "sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his universe, and 'seeing it go.'" This conception demands less of the intellect than the conception of God as immanentin the universe. It requires less grasp of mind and less width of experience, and it has accordingly been much the more common conception. The idea of the indwelling God is an attempt to reach out toward the reality, and as such it taxes the powers of the finite mind. The idea of God external to the universe is a symbol which in no wise approaches the reality, and for that very reason it does not tax the mental powers; there is an aspect of finality about it, in which the ordinary mind rests content and complains of whatever seeks to disturb its repose.

I must not be understood as ignoring the fact that this lower species of theism has been entertained by some of the loftiest minds of our race, both in ancient and in modern times. When once such an ever-present conception as the idea of God has become intertwined with the whole body of the thoughts of mankind, it is very difficult for the most powerful and subtle intelligence to change the form ithas taken. It has become so far organized into the texture of the mind that it abides there unconsciously, like our fundamental axioms about number and magnitude; it sways our thought hither and thither without our knowing it. The two forms of theism here contrasted have slowly grown up under the myriad unassignable influences that in antiquity caused nature-worship to predominate among some people and ancestor-worship among others; they have coloured all the philosophizing that has been done for more than twenty centuries; and it is seldom that a thinker educated under the one form ever comes to adopt the other and habitually employ it, save under the mighty influence of modern science, the tendency of which, as we shall presently see, is all in one direction.

Among ancient thinkers the view of Deity as remote from the world prevailed with the followers of Epikuros, who held that the immortal gods could not be supposed to trouble themselves about the paltry affairs of men, but lived a blessed life of their own, undisturbed in the far-off empyrean. This left the world quite under the sway of blind forces, and thus we find it depicted in the marvellous poem of Lucretius, one of the loftiest monuments of Latin genius. It is to all appearance an atheistic world, albeit the author was perhaps more profoundly religious in spirit than any other Roman that ever lived, save Augustine; yet to his immediate scientific purpose this atheism was no drawback. When we are investigating natural phenomena, with intent to explain them scientifically, our proper task is simply to ascertain the physical conditions under which they occur, and the less we meddle with metaphysics or theology the better. As Laplace said, the mathematician, in solving his equations, does not need "the hypothesis of God."[13]To the scientific investigator, as such, the forces of nature are doubtless blind, like thexandyin algebra, but this is only so long as he contents himself with describing their modes of operation; when he undertakes to explain them philosophically, as we shall see, he can in no wise dispense with his theistic hypothesis. The Lucretian philosophy, therefore, admirable as a scientific coördination of such facts about the physical universe as were then known, goes but very little way as a philosophy. It is interesting to note that this atheism followed directly from that species of theism which placed God outside of his universe. We shall find the case of modern atheism to be quite similar. As soon as this crude and misleading conception of God is refuted, as the whole progress of scientific knowledge tends to refute it, the modern atheist or positivist falls back upon his universe of blind forces and contents himself with it, while zealously shouting from the housetops that this is the whole story.

To one familiar with Christian ideas, thenotion that Man is too insignificant a creature to be worth the notice of Deity seems at once pathetic and grotesque. In the view of Plato, by which all Christendom has been powerfully influenced, there is profound pathos. The wickedness and misery of the world wrought so strongly upon Plato's keen sympathies and delicate moral sense that he came to conclusions almost as gloomy as those of the Buddhist who regards existence as an evil. In the Timaios he depicts the material world as essentially vile; he is unable to think of the pure and holy Deity as manifested in it, and he accordingly separates the Creator from his creation by the whole breadth of infinitude. This view passed on to the Gnostics, for whom the puzzling problem of philosophy was how to explain the action of the spiritual God upon the material universe. Sometimes the interval was bridged by mediating æons or emanations partly spiritual and partly material; sometimes the world was held tobe the work of the devil, and in no sense divine.[14]The Greek fathers under the lead of Clement, espousing the higher theism, kept clear of this torrent of Gnostic thought; but upon Augustine it fell with full force, and he was carried away with it. In his earlier writings Augustine showed himself not incapable of comprehending the views of Clement and Athanasius; but his intense feeling of man's wickedness dragged him irresistibly in the opposite direction. In his doctrine of original sin, he represents humanity as cut off from all relationship with God, who is depicted as a crudely anthropomorphic Being far removed from the universe and accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized church. Compared with the thoughts of the Greek fathers this was a barbaric conception, but it was suited alike to the lower grade of culture in western Europe, and to the Latin political genius, which in the decline of the Empire was already occupying itself withits great and beneficent work of constructing an imperial Church. For these reasons the Augustinian theology prevailed, and in the Dark Ages which followed it became so deeply inwrought into the innermost fibres of Latin Christianity that it remains dominant to-day alike in Catholic and Protestant churches. With few exceptions every child born of Christian parents in western Europe or in America grows up with an idea of God the outlines of which were engraven upon men's minds by Augustine fifteen centuries ago. Nay, more, it is hardly too much to say that three fourths of the body of doctrine currently known as Christianity, unwarranted by Scripture and never dreamed of by Christ or his apostles, first took coherent shape in the writings of this mighty Roman, who was separated from the apostolic age by an interval of time like that which separates us from the invention of printing and the discovery of America. The idea of God upon which all this Augustinian doctrine is based is the idea of a Being actuated by human passions and purposes, localizable in space and utterly remote from that inert machine, the universe in which we live, and upon which He acts intermittently through the suspension of what are called natural laws. So deeply has this conception penetrated the thought of Christendom that we continually find it at the bottom of the speculations and arguments of men who would warmly repudiate it as thus stated in its naked outlines. It dominates the reasonings alike of believers and skeptics, of theists and atheists; it underlies at once the objections raised by orthodoxy against each new step in science and the assaults made by materialism upon every religious conception of the world; and thus it is chiefly responsible for that complicated misunderstanding which, by a lamentable confusion of thought, is commonly called "the conflict between religion and science."

VII.Conflict between the Two Ideas, commonly misunderstood as a Conflict between Religion and Science.Inillustration of the mischief that has been wrought by the Augustinian conception of Deity, we may cite the theological objections urged against the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Leibnitz, who as a mathematician but little inferior to Newton himself might have been expected to be easily convinced of the truth of the theory of gravitation, was nevertheless deterred by theological scruples from accepting it. It appeared to him that it substituted the action of physical forces for the direct action of the Deity. Now the fallacy of this argument of Leibnitz is easy to detect. It lies in a metaphysical misconception of the meaning of the word "force." "Force" is implicitly regarded as a sort of entity or dæmon which has a mode of action distinguishable from that of Deity; otherwise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the one for the other. But such a personification of "force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting each other with a "force" which varies directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase as a convenient metaphor by which to describe the manner in which the observed movements of the two bodies occur. It explains that in presence of each other the two bodies are observed to change their positions in a certain specified way, and this is all that it means. This is all that a strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is all that observation can possibly prove. Whatever goes beyond this and imaginesor asserts a kind of "pull" between the two bodies, is not science, but metaphysics. An atheistic metaphysics may imagine such a "pull," and may interpret it as the action of something that is not Deity, but such a conclusion can find no support in the scientific theorem, which is simply a generalized description of phenomena. The general considerations upon which the belief in the existence and direct action of Deity is otherwise founded are in no wise disturbed by the establishment of any such scientific theorem. We are still perfectly free to maintain that it is the direct action of Deity which is manifested in the planetary movements; having done nothing more with our Newtonian hypothesis than to construct a happy formula for expressing the mode or order of the manifestation. We may have learned something new concerning the manner of divine action; we certainly have not "substituted" any other kind of action for it. And what is thus obvious in this simple astronomical exampleis equally true in principle in every case whatever in which one set of phenomena is interpreted by reference to another set. In no case whatever can science use the words "force" or "cause" except as metaphorically descriptive of some observed or observable sequence of phenomena. And consequently at no imaginable future time, so long as the essential conditions of human thinking are maintained, can science even attempt to substitute the action of any other power for the direct action of Deity. The theological objection urged by Leibnitz against Newton was repeated word for word by Agassiz in his comments upon Darwin. He regarded it as a fatal objection to the Darwinian theory that it appeared to substitute the action of physical forces for the creative action of Deity. The fallacy here is precisely the same as in Leibnitz's argument. Mr. Darwin has convinced us that the existence of highly complicated organisms is the result of an infinitely diversified aggregate of circumstances so minute as severally to seem trivial or accidental; yet the consistent theist will always occupy an impregnable position in maintaining that the entire series in each and every one of its incidents is an immediate manifestation of the creative action of God.In this connection it is worth while to state explicitly what is the true province of scientific explanation. Is it not obvious that since a philosophical theism must regard divine power as the immediate source of all phenomena alike, therefore science cannot properly explain any particular group of phenomena by a direct reference to the action of Deity? Such a reference is not an explanation, since it adds nothing to our previous knowledge either of the phenomena or of the manner of divine action. The business of science is simply to ascertain in what manner phenomena coexist with each other or follow each other, and the only kind of explanation with which it can properly deal is thatwhich refers one set of phenomena to another set. In pursuing this, its legitimate business, science does not touch on the province of theology in any way, and there is no conceivable occasion for any conflict between the two. From this and the previous considerations taken together it follows not only that such explanations as are contained in the Newtonian and Darwinian theories are entirely consistent with theism, but also that they are the only kind of explanations with which science can properly concern itself at all. To say that complex organisms were directly created by the Deity is to make an assertion which, however true in a theistic sense, is utterly barren. It is of no profit to theism, which must be taken for granted before the assertion can be made; and it is of no profit to science, which must still ask its question, "How?"[15]We are now prepared to see that the theological objection urged against the Newtonian and Darwinian theories has its rootsin that imperfect kind of theism which Augustine did so much to fasten upon the western world. Obviously if Leibnitz and Agassiz had been educated in that higher theism shared by Clement and Athanasius in ancient times with Spinoza and Goethe in later days,—if they had been accustomed to conceive of God as immanent in the universe and eternally creative,—then the argument which they urged with so much feeling would never have occurred to them. By no possibility could such an argument have entered their minds. To conceive of "physical forces" as powers of which the action could in any wise be "substituted" for the action of Deity would in such case have been absolutely impossible. Such a conception involves the idea of God as remote from the world and acting upon it from outside. The whole notion of what theological writers are fond of calling "secondary causes" involves such an idea of God. The higher or Athanasian theism knows nothing of secondary causes in aworld where every event flows directly from the eternal First Cause. It knows nothing of physical forces save as immediate manifestations of the omnipresent creative power of God. In the personification of physical forces, and the implied contrast between their action and that of Deity, there is something very like a survival of the habits of thought which characterized ancient polytheism. What are these personified forces but little gods who are supposed to be invading the sacred domain of the ruler Zeus? When one speaks of substituting the action of Gravitation for the direct action of Deity, does there not hover somewhere in the dim background of the conception a vague spectre of Gravitation in the guise of a rebellious Titan? Doubtless it would not be easy to bring any one to acknowledge such a charge, but the unseen and unacknowledged part of a fallacy is just that which is most persistent and mischievous. It is not so many generations, after all, since our ancestors were barbarians and polytheists; and fragments of their barbaric thinking are continually intruding unawares into the midst of our lately-acquired scientific culture. In most philosophical discussions a great deal of loose phraseology is used, in order to find the proper connotations of which we must go back to primitive and untutored ages. Such is eminently the case with the phrases in which the forces of nature are personified and described as something else than manifestations of omnipresent Deity.This subject is of such immense importance that I must illustrate it from yet another point of view. We must observe the manner in which, along with the progress of scientific discovery, theological arguments have come to be permeated by the strange assumption that the greater part of the universe is godless. Here again we must go back for a moment to the primeval world and observe how behind every physical phenomenon there weresupposed to be quasi-human passions and a quasi-human will. Now the phenomena which were first arranged and systematized in men's thoughts, and thus made the subject of something like scientific generalization, were the simplest, the most accessible, and the most manageable phenomena; and from these the conception of a quasi-human will soonest faded away. There are savages who believe that hatchets and kettles have souls, but men unquestionably outgrew such a belief as this long before they outgrew the belief that there are ghost-like deities in the tempest, or in the sun and moon. After many ages of culture, men ceased to regard the familiar and regularly-recurring phenomena of nature as immediate results of volition, and reserved this primeval explanation for unusual or terrible phenomena, such as comets and eclipses, or famines and plagues. As the result of these habits of thought, in course of time, Nature seemed to be divided into two antithetical provinces. On the one hand,there were the phenomena that occurred with a simple regularity which seemed to exclude the idea of capricious volition; and these were supposed to constitute the realm of natural law. On the other hand, there were the complex and irregular phenomena in which the presence of law could not so easily be detected; and these were supposed to constitute the realm of immediate divine action. This antithesis has forever haunted the minds of men imbued with the lower or Augustinian theism; and such have made up the larger part of the Christian world. It has tended to make the theologians hostile to science and the men of science hostile to theology. For as scientific generalization has steadily extended the region of natural law, the region which theology has assigned to divine action has steadily diminished. Every discovery in science has stripped off territory from the latter province and added it to the former. Every such discovery has accordingly been promulgated and established in the teethof bitter and violent opposition on the part of theologians. A desperate fight it has been for some centuries, in which science has won every disputed position, while theology, untaught by perennial defeat, still valiantly defends the little corner that is left it. Still as of old the ordinary theologian rests his case upon the assumption of disorder, caprice, and miraculous interference with the course of nature. He naively asks, "If plants and animals have been naturally originated, if the world as a whole has been evolved and not manufactured, and if human actions conform to law, what is there left for God to do? If not formally repudiated, is he not thrust back into the past eternity, as an ultimate source of things, which is postulated for form's sake, but might as well, for all practical purposes, be omitted?"[16]The scientific inquirer may reply that the difficulty is one which theology has created for itself. It is certainly not science that has relegated the creative activity of God to some nameless moment in the bygone eternity and left him without occupation in the present world. It is not science that is responsible for the mischievous distinction between divine action and natural law. That distinction is historically derived from a loose habit of philosophizing characteristic of ignorant ages, and was bequeathed to modern times by the theology of the Latin church. Small blame to the atheist who, starting upon such a basis, thinks he can interpret the universe without the idea of God! He is but doing as well as he knows how, with the materials given him. One has only, however, to adopt the higher theism of Clement and Athanasius, and this alleged antagonism between science and theology, by which so many hearts have been saddened, so many minds darkened, vanishes at once and forever. "Once really adopt the conception of an ever-present God, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and it becomes self-evident that the law of gravitation is but an expressionof a particular mode of divine action. And what is thus true of one law is true of all laws."[17]The thinker in whose mind divine action is thus identified with orderly action, and to whom a really irregular phenomenon would seem like a manifestation of sheer diabolism, foresees in every possible extension of knowledge a fresh confirmation of his faith in God. From his point of view there can be no antagonism between our duty as inquirers and our duty as worshippers. To him no part of the universe is godless. In the swaying to and fro of molecules and the ceaseless pulsations of ether, in the secular shiftings of planetary orbits, in the busy work of frost and raindrop, in the mysterious sprouting of the seed, in the everlasting tale of death and life renewed, in the dawning of the babe's intelligence, in the varied deeds of men from age to age, he finds that which awakens the soul to reverential awe; and each act of scientific explanation but reveals an opening through which shines the glory of the Eternal Majesty.

Conflict between the Two Ideas, commonly misunderstood as a Conflict between Religion and Science.

Inillustration of the mischief that has been wrought by the Augustinian conception of Deity, we may cite the theological objections urged against the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Leibnitz, who as a mathematician but little inferior to Newton himself might have been expected to be easily convinced of the truth of the theory of gravitation, was nevertheless deterred by theological scruples from accepting it. It appeared to him that it substituted the action of physical forces for the direct action of the Deity. Now the fallacy of this argument of Leibnitz is easy to detect. It lies in a metaphysical misconception of the meaning of the word "force." "Force" is implicitly regarded as a sort of entity or dæmon which has a mode of action distinguishable from that of Deity; otherwise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the one for the other. But such a personification of "force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting each other with a "force" which varies directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase as a convenient metaphor by which to describe the manner in which the observed movements of the two bodies occur. It explains that in presence of each other the two bodies are observed to change their positions in a certain specified way, and this is all that it means. This is all that a strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is all that observation can possibly prove. Whatever goes beyond this and imaginesor asserts a kind of "pull" between the two bodies, is not science, but metaphysics. An atheistic metaphysics may imagine such a "pull," and may interpret it as the action of something that is not Deity, but such a conclusion can find no support in the scientific theorem, which is simply a generalized description of phenomena. The general considerations upon which the belief in the existence and direct action of Deity is otherwise founded are in no wise disturbed by the establishment of any such scientific theorem. We are still perfectly free to maintain that it is the direct action of Deity which is manifested in the planetary movements; having done nothing more with our Newtonian hypothesis than to construct a happy formula for expressing the mode or order of the manifestation. We may have learned something new concerning the manner of divine action; we certainly have not "substituted" any other kind of action for it. And what is thus obvious in this simple astronomical exampleis equally true in principle in every case whatever in which one set of phenomena is interpreted by reference to another set. In no case whatever can science use the words "force" or "cause" except as metaphorically descriptive of some observed or observable sequence of phenomena. And consequently at no imaginable future time, so long as the essential conditions of human thinking are maintained, can science even attempt to substitute the action of any other power for the direct action of Deity. The theological objection urged by Leibnitz against Newton was repeated word for word by Agassiz in his comments upon Darwin. He regarded it as a fatal objection to the Darwinian theory that it appeared to substitute the action of physical forces for the creative action of Deity. The fallacy here is precisely the same as in Leibnitz's argument. Mr. Darwin has convinced us that the existence of highly complicated organisms is the result of an infinitely diversified aggregate of circumstances so minute as severally to seem trivial or accidental; yet the consistent theist will always occupy an impregnable position in maintaining that the entire series in each and every one of its incidents is an immediate manifestation of the creative action of God.

In this connection it is worth while to state explicitly what is the true province of scientific explanation. Is it not obvious that since a philosophical theism must regard divine power as the immediate source of all phenomena alike, therefore science cannot properly explain any particular group of phenomena by a direct reference to the action of Deity? Such a reference is not an explanation, since it adds nothing to our previous knowledge either of the phenomena or of the manner of divine action. The business of science is simply to ascertain in what manner phenomena coexist with each other or follow each other, and the only kind of explanation with which it can properly deal is thatwhich refers one set of phenomena to another set. In pursuing this, its legitimate business, science does not touch on the province of theology in any way, and there is no conceivable occasion for any conflict between the two. From this and the previous considerations taken together it follows not only that such explanations as are contained in the Newtonian and Darwinian theories are entirely consistent with theism, but also that they are the only kind of explanations with which science can properly concern itself at all. To say that complex organisms were directly created by the Deity is to make an assertion which, however true in a theistic sense, is utterly barren. It is of no profit to theism, which must be taken for granted before the assertion can be made; and it is of no profit to science, which must still ask its question, "How?"[15]

We are now prepared to see that the theological objection urged against the Newtonian and Darwinian theories has its rootsin that imperfect kind of theism which Augustine did so much to fasten upon the western world. Obviously if Leibnitz and Agassiz had been educated in that higher theism shared by Clement and Athanasius in ancient times with Spinoza and Goethe in later days,—if they had been accustomed to conceive of God as immanent in the universe and eternally creative,—then the argument which they urged with so much feeling would never have occurred to them. By no possibility could such an argument have entered their minds. To conceive of "physical forces" as powers of which the action could in any wise be "substituted" for the action of Deity would in such case have been absolutely impossible. Such a conception involves the idea of God as remote from the world and acting upon it from outside. The whole notion of what theological writers are fond of calling "secondary causes" involves such an idea of God. The higher or Athanasian theism knows nothing of secondary causes in aworld where every event flows directly from the eternal First Cause. It knows nothing of physical forces save as immediate manifestations of the omnipresent creative power of God. In the personification of physical forces, and the implied contrast between their action and that of Deity, there is something very like a survival of the habits of thought which characterized ancient polytheism. What are these personified forces but little gods who are supposed to be invading the sacred domain of the ruler Zeus? When one speaks of substituting the action of Gravitation for the direct action of Deity, does there not hover somewhere in the dim background of the conception a vague spectre of Gravitation in the guise of a rebellious Titan? Doubtless it would not be easy to bring any one to acknowledge such a charge, but the unseen and unacknowledged part of a fallacy is just that which is most persistent and mischievous. It is not so many generations, after all, since our ancestors were barbarians and polytheists; and fragments of their barbaric thinking are continually intruding unawares into the midst of our lately-acquired scientific culture. In most philosophical discussions a great deal of loose phraseology is used, in order to find the proper connotations of which we must go back to primitive and untutored ages. Such is eminently the case with the phrases in which the forces of nature are personified and described as something else than manifestations of omnipresent Deity.

This subject is of such immense importance that I must illustrate it from yet another point of view. We must observe the manner in which, along with the progress of scientific discovery, theological arguments have come to be permeated by the strange assumption that the greater part of the universe is godless. Here again we must go back for a moment to the primeval world and observe how behind every physical phenomenon there weresupposed to be quasi-human passions and a quasi-human will. Now the phenomena which were first arranged and systematized in men's thoughts, and thus made the subject of something like scientific generalization, were the simplest, the most accessible, and the most manageable phenomena; and from these the conception of a quasi-human will soonest faded away. There are savages who believe that hatchets and kettles have souls, but men unquestionably outgrew such a belief as this long before they outgrew the belief that there are ghost-like deities in the tempest, or in the sun and moon. After many ages of culture, men ceased to regard the familiar and regularly-recurring phenomena of nature as immediate results of volition, and reserved this primeval explanation for unusual or terrible phenomena, such as comets and eclipses, or famines and plagues. As the result of these habits of thought, in course of time, Nature seemed to be divided into two antithetical provinces. On the one hand,there were the phenomena that occurred with a simple regularity which seemed to exclude the idea of capricious volition; and these were supposed to constitute the realm of natural law. On the other hand, there were the complex and irregular phenomena in which the presence of law could not so easily be detected; and these were supposed to constitute the realm of immediate divine action. This antithesis has forever haunted the minds of men imbued with the lower or Augustinian theism; and such have made up the larger part of the Christian world. It has tended to make the theologians hostile to science and the men of science hostile to theology. For as scientific generalization has steadily extended the region of natural law, the region which theology has assigned to divine action has steadily diminished. Every discovery in science has stripped off territory from the latter province and added it to the former. Every such discovery has accordingly been promulgated and established in the teethof bitter and violent opposition on the part of theologians. A desperate fight it has been for some centuries, in which science has won every disputed position, while theology, untaught by perennial defeat, still valiantly defends the little corner that is left it. Still as of old the ordinary theologian rests his case upon the assumption of disorder, caprice, and miraculous interference with the course of nature. He naively asks, "If plants and animals have been naturally originated, if the world as a whole has been evolved and not manufactured, and if human actions conform to law, what is there left for God to do? If not formally repudiated, is he not thrust back into the past eternity, as an ultimate source of things, which is postulated for form's sake, but might as well, for all practical purposes, be omitted?"[16]

The scientific inquirer may reply that the difficulty is one which theology has created for itself. It is certainly not science that has relegated the creative activity of God to some nameless moment in the bygone eternity and left him without occupation in the present world. It is not science that is responsible for the mischievous distinction between divine action and natural law. That distinction is historically derived from a loose habit of philosophizing characteristic of ignorant ages, and was bequeathed to modern times by the theology of the Latin church. Small blame to the atheist who, starting upon such a basis, thinks he can interpret the universe without the idea of God! He is but doing as well as he knows how, with the materials given him. One has only, however, to adopt the higher theism of Clement and Athanasius, and this alleged antagonism between science and theology, by which so many hearts have been saddened, so many minds darkened, vanishes at once and forever. "Once really adopt the conception of an ever-present God, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and it becomes self-evident that the law of gravitation is but an expressionof a particular mode of divine action. And what is thus true of one law is true of all laws."[17]The thinker in whose mind divine action is thus identified with orderly action, and to whom a really irregular phenomenon would seem like a manifestation of sheer diabolism, foresees in every possible extension of knowledge a fresh confirmation of his faith in God. From his point of view there can be no antagonism between our duty as inquirers and our duty as worshippers. To him no part of the universe is godless. In the swaying to and fro of molecules and the ceaseless pulsations of ether, in the secular shiftings of planetary orbits, in the busy work of frost and raindrop, in the mysterious sprouting of the seed, in the everlasting tale of death and life renewed, in the dawning of the babe's intelligence, in the varied deeds of men from age to age, he finds that which awakens the soul to reverential awe; and each act of scientific explanation but reveals an opening through which shines the glory of the Eternal Majesty.

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