Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/651

Rh Yet no one can listen to ordinary sermons, no one can open popular books of piety or of doctrine, without feeling the urgent need there is among Churchmen for a higher appreciation of the majestic infinitude of God. It is true that, in these cases, it is the multitude and not the highly educated few who are addressed; and that, even among that multitude, there are none so grossly ignorant as to compare the Trinity to "three Lord Shaftesburys," and not many so childish as to picture "one Almighty descending into hell to pacify another." Such petulance is reserved for men of the highest intellectual gifts, who—whether purposely or ignorantly, it is hard to say—have stooped to provide their generation with a comic theology of the Christian Church. But, after all, it is impossible not to feel that the shadows of a well-loved past are lingering too long over a present that might be bright with joyous sunshine; that the subtilties of the schoolmen are too long allowed to darken the air with pointless and antiquated weapons; that the Renaissance, with its literary fanaticism, still reigns over the whole domain of Christian book-lore; and that the crude conceptions of the Ptolemaic astronomy have never yet, among ecclesiastics, been thoroughly dislodged or replaced by the far more magnificent revelations of the modern telescope. It is not asserted that no percolation of "things new" is going on. It is not denied that as in the first century a change in ideas about the priesthood carried with it a change in the whole religious system of which that formed the axis, so now a change in ideas about the earth's position in space demands a very skillful and patient readjustment of all our connected ideas. But such a readjustment of the old Semitic faith was effected, in the first century, by St. Paul; and there is no reason to think that the Church is unequal to similar tasks now. And in this country especially there is an established and organized "Ecclesia docens" which probably never had its equal in all Church history for the literary and scientific eminence of its leading members. For such a society to despair of readjusting its theology to contemporary science, or idly to stand by while others effect the junction, were indeed a disgraceful and incredible treason; so incredible that—until it be proved otherwise—no amount of vituperation or unpopularity should induce any reflecting Englishman to render that work impossible by allowing his Church to be trampled down, and its time honored framework to be given up as a spoil to chaos.

But there is yet another element in this question which binds the Church of Christ to give to its solution the very closest and most indefatigable attention. It is this: that from every science there arises nowadays a cry like that addressed to Jesus himself when on earth, "Lord, help me!" It is not as if atheism were satisfied with itself. In the pages of the "National Reformer" and similar organs of