Page:A World Without God.pdf/6

 pointing to heaven, it responds to the most eager of its questions. It offers to the conscience a law claiming to regulate every act and every word. And it offers to the heart an absolutely love-worthy being as the object of its adoration. Whether these immense offers of religion are all genuine, or all accepted by us individually, they are quite unmatched by anything which science, or art, or politics, or commerce, or even friendship, has to bestow." Let us consider this most curious paragraph. Religion offers to the intellect an explanation of the universe, "true or false we need not now consider". Pardon me, that is exactly what the intellect must consider, for a false explanation is worthless, and may be mischievous—as when it is accepted as true and prevents further investigation. One religion tells us that God made man out of dust and Woman out of a rib; another relates that the earth was populated by Deucalion and Pyrrha throwing stones behind them, Deucalion's stones turning into men, and Pyrrha's into women; a third explains the sexes by saying that Brahma made a figure male and female, and then slit it in half; all these are "explanations". "Take them all", Miss Cobbe says amiably: "never mind whether they are true or false". Yet the value of an explanation depends entirely on the amount of truth it contains. It is idle for Miss Cobbe to answer that the explanation offered by "religion" is not that of any special religion, Jewish or Pagan; belief in God and in immortality offers per se no explanation of the universe, and each special religion dogmatises but does not explain. Yet these fables are "quite unmatched by anything which science has to bestow"! The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, of Newton and Laplace, of Lamarck and Darwin, are all thrown into the shade as explanations when compared with these grotesque fancies of religion. I prefer the science.

"Pointing to heaven it responds to the most eager of its questions." And the response, I suppose, may be "true or false" as it happens. Happy hunting-grounds or Elysian fields, the Eastern magnificence of John or the sensual houri-filled paradise of Mahomet, it is all one to Miss Cobbe. Religion says "something" of a life after death. And to her impatient, unbalanced, helter-skelter mind, the crudest and most absurd answers are better than the patient sober silence of Science where knowledge fails.

"It offers to the conscience a law claiming authority to