Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/646

628 symbols of Egypt and Assyria. It was another great step to Baal, the blazing sun, and Moloch, wielder of draught and sunstroke, and Agni, friendly comrade of the hearth. But when astronomy and physics had reached sufficient growth to master all these wonders, and to predict the solstices and the eclipses, then the fullness of times had come once more; and now the greatest religious transition was accomplished that the human race has ever seen—a transition from the physical, and the brutal, and the astral, to the human and the moral, in man's search after a true (or the to him truest possible) representation of the infinite forces at play around him. In Abraham the Hebrew—עברי, the man who made the great transition—this important advance is typified for the Semitic races; for others, the results only are seen in the Olympian conceptions of Hesiod and Homer. For here we have, at last, the nature-forces presided over and controlled after a really human fashion. Crude, and only semi-moral, after all, as was this earliest humanizing effort, still human it was—not mechanical nor bestial. And it opened the way for Socrates to bring down philosophy, too, from heaven to earth, for Plato to discuss the mental processes in man, and apply them (writ large) to the processes of nature, and for Moses to elaborate with a divine sagacity a completely organized society, saturated through every fiber with this one idea—the unity of all the nature-forces, great and small, and their government, not by hap-hazard, or malignity, or fate, but by what we men call "Thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken." For this word "law" distinctly connotes rationality. It implies a quality akin to, and therefore expressible in terms of, human reason. Its usage on every page of every book of science means that; and repudiates, therefore, by anticipation, the dismal invitations to scientific despair with which the logicians à outrance are now so pressingly obliging us.

This grand transition, then, once made, all else became easy. The human imagination, the poetic or plastic power lodged in our brain, after many failures, had now at last got on the high-road which led straight to the goal. Redemption had come; it only needed to be unfolded to its utmost capabilities. Dull fate, dumb, sullen, and impracticable, had been renounced as infra-human and unworthy. Let stocks and stones in the mountains and the forests be ruled by it; not free, glad, and glorious men! Brute, bestial instinct also had been renounced, as contemptible and undivine in the highest degree. And so, at last, the culminating point was attained. The human-divine of Asiatic speculation, and the divinely-human of European philosophy, met and coalesced; and from that wedlock emerged Christianity. The "Something is" of mere bald analytic reasoning had become clothed by the imagination with that perfect human form and character than which nothing known to man is higher; and that very manhood, which is nowadays so loudly asserted by positivists and atheists to be the most divine thing known to science, was precisely the form in which