Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/89

Rh more serious thinker in reply to a similar theory: "To stop there is to see but the surface of things; for it still remains to ask how mankind have effected this transformation of a metaphor (or a dream) into a god, and what mysterious force has pushed them into making the transition.... In order to change any sensuous impression into a god, there must have previously existed the idea of a god." Yes, clearly the latent idea must have been, in some way, already ingrained in human nature, so that it only needed (as Plato would say) an awakening from its hibernation; else why should human dreams produce a "religion" and bestial dreams produce none? The question, therefore, is not fully answered by Mr. Spencer's entertaining speculation, any more than the miracle (as Dr. Btichner all but calls it) of "hereditary gout" is explained by the jubilant paean of the materialist, "Give me but matter and force, and all obscurities instantly vanish away!" For no reasonable man, who accepts the modern doctrine of the eternity and identity of energy, can entertain a doubt that religion—the most powerful human stimulant we know of—must have pre-existed somehow in the bosom of the unknown, though it only revealed itself at a certain fitting stage in the development of the world. And when we have reached this confession, have we not simply found our way back to that general truth which the Church has couched in every sort of parable and symbol, viz., that (the "how" and the "when" being left for history to unravel) religious ideas, especially in their most fruitful and catholic form, are a gift, an unfolding, a revelation from the bosom of the unknown God?

2. There are, however, far more serious and more practical subjects for reflection suggested by Mr. Spencer's paper, than any which relate to the past. Let by-gones be by-gones! Our contemporaries are an impatient generation, and are very apt to consign to their mental waste-paper basket anything which they are pleased to condemn as "ancient history." What, then, has Mr. Spencer to tell us about the present state of religion? and what hopes does he unfold to us as we gaze, under his direction, into the future?

It is truly disappointing to be obliged to say of so devoted a student and so patient a thinker (1), that he has failed to work his subject out, and (2) that he has fallen into a passion. It would be well worth while to make these two not unfriendly charges, if only they should succeed in inducing this able writer to give to the world some further product of his thinking on the strangely fascinating subject of religion. For the truth is that, when Mr. Bradlaugh and others proclaim, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God," they almost put themselves out of court at once by parading their inherent defect of sympathy with ordinary mental conditions. And when, in higher social grades. Dr. Congreve and the Positivists