Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/73

Rh loss which attends the translation of sentiment into organization may perhaps be exemplified in the case of our instinct for justice. That instinct, one with the love of truth, in its expression as a means of self-protection against wrong, has given rise to law and the courts. Are the results of their processes such as to awaken the reverence which the sentiment of justice compels? The discrepancy between religious feeling and ecclesiasticism; the love of right and law, as practically enacted and executed, suggests the parallel gap which philosophers and poets have so often mourned—the gulf between thought and language, which leaves music to suggest much that in speech must remain inarticulate. The great artists of the world, whose masterpieces fill the generations with wonder, have lamented how far execution has lagged behind conception. The supreme dramatist does not seem to have thought his work sufficiently valuable to take any special care to hand it down to posterity.

Religious feeling by its arrival at the theistic idea has done mankind incalculable service. How potent the thought that the universe is one, and represents one uncontradicted will! How influential for good the thought that a Supreme Mind, too great to be deceived, and absolutely righteous, knows every thought and act! "Thou God seest me," has, I think, restrained evil in the mind of conscientious theists, with a directness which might have been denied to reflections as to consequence. It is not because some of us may be dissatisfied with theology that we fail to recognize its value in the past and present. Associated with moral codes, it has impressed them on minds unfit by immaturity for the responsibilities of freedom, and by dogmatic force has doubtless given stability to order. Not because the Gods of the sects seem crude and imperfect conceptions are we to expect that the religious feeling which gave rise to all these will die out in man. It will, I believe, from age to age, go on endeavoring to form a theory which shall explain the facts of human life and universal Nature, which shall impress the imagination and influence the will.

One result of science will be profoundly influential here—its arrival at the idea of Law, its perception of uniformity and constancy in Nature; the proof which, in large part, it now possesses, that the history of the universe, from nebular mist to man, illustrates causation and continuity. This idea, excluding as it does the miraculous and the supernatural, leads us to regard the history of the universe as an unbroken and consistent unfolding. In this view, every item of knowledge we attain is secure from any interference from break in the natural order. We are incited to explore relations which are unchangeable. The sense of supreme mystery will grow as the margin of the known expands and touches larger and larger circles of the unknown; but any territory we may win we will feel sure of retaining. And, although our knowledge may not be either wide or deep, still much of it will doubtless be regarded as valuable and important