Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/49

Rh in Nature and in history, to his yearnings for affection, to his sense of sin, to his passion for life and duty, which death cuts short. And that one of the two which is truest to humanity, which lays down the best code of duty, and creates the strongest capacity for accomplishing it, will, in the long run, prevail; a conclusion which science, so far as it believes in man, and religion, so far as it believes in God, must adopt. Here, once more, it is well nigh impossible to discern the immediate direction of the conflict, whatever may be our views as to its ultimate decision. Science is almost creating a new class of virtues; it is laying its finger with unerring accuracy upon the faults of the old morality; it is calling into existence a passion for intellectual truth. But then Religion has always given the strongest proofs of her vitality by her power of assimilating (however slowly) new truths, and of rejecting (alas! how tardily) old falsehoods, at the demands of reason and discovery. A religious man can always say that Christians, and not Christianity, are responsible for what goes amiss. It is because religious practice never has been, and is at this moment almost less than ever, up to the standard of what religious theory exacts, that we may have confidence in gradual improvement and advance, until that standard, toward the formation of which science will have largely contributed, be attained.

3. Closely connected with the above, follows the proposition that all attempts on the part of religion to confute the "skeptic" by purely intellectual methods are worse than useless. There is no intellectual short cut to the Christian faith; it must be built up in the minds of men by setting forth a morality that satisfies their nature, consecrates humanity, and establishes society. It is not because men love the truth, but because they hate their enemies, that in things religious they desire to have what they can call an overwhelming preponderance of argument on their side of the question, the possession of which enables them to treat their opponents as knaves or fools or both. Religion may have been the first to set this pernicious example, but, judging from the tone of much modern writing, Rationalism has somewhat bettered her instructions. No doubt it is a tempting thing to mount a big pulpit, and then and there, with much intellectual pomp, to slay the absent infidel—absent no less from the preacher's argument than from his audience. Delightful it may be, but all the more dangerous, because it plunges men at once into that error, so hateful to modern thought, of affirming that intellectual mistakes are moral delinquencies. No one, least of all science, denies that men are responsible for the consequences of their belief, provided these consequences are limited to such as are capable of being recognized and foreseen, and are not extended to comprehend endless perdition in a future state—an idea which is supposed, rightly or wrongly, to lurk beneath the preacher's logical utterances, and which religion has done next to nothing to disavow. And so we come to this conclusion: to build up by precept