Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/74

62 throughout the future of our race. The laws of gravitation and evolution may he included by the coming man in wider generalizations, but we can scarcely conceive their being ever regarded as other than immovable and fundamental portions of truth. We are not of those who say that human knowledge is only relative to the individual consciousness, and therefore shadowy and invalid. With reverence be it said, we hold that such knowledge as we have of water or iron, to be a part, however infinitesimal, of the divine knowledge of these things.

The instituted religions have not only given us the theistic idea, but have also laid us under weighty obligations by establishing the only means of formal instruction in morals known to our race. And here let us note the damage caused by the accidental association of a moral code with a cosmogony developed in early stages of knowledge. It is not because Genesis gives an unsatisfactory account of the world's beginning, that the decalogue does not validly register the dictates of human experience, taking form in the brain of a great lawgiver. The Mosaic and all other authoritative codes of conduct, as currently held to-day, are supported by appeals to experience; then it becomes the mission of competent thinkers to revise these codes in the light of all that men have thought and done to date. It becomes the duty of science to investigate the conditions of happiness, which we must morally fulfill if we want happiness; no other standard of conduct do we know than this.

For the essence of religion, the faith that the right will win, and that we should help it to win, we are indebted to Christianity in its rationalized forms, and for that faith we thank it.

But the churches have done more than preach theism and teach morality—they have endeavored to imitate their Founder in his care for the desolate and oppressed. Countless kind and tender spirits have found in the noble philanthropies of Christianity scope for their charity and mercy. Here, as elsewhere, we do not propose, in our independence, to disinherit ourselves of anything of value which Christianity can give. The scientific conceptions of duty at which we seek to arrive are to be broadened and deepened by the sympathies which yield the highest satisfactions of man. The necessity for the greater recognition of this element in conduct was never so urgent as now. The masses of mankind born into a world abounding with pain and evil have hitherto been disposed to consider their burdens as all equally providential. They are, however, now beginning to distinguish among the ills which beset them. Some they regard as inevitable, to be borne with manly courage; others, again, as infractions of justice, preventable or remediable by proper means. There is no prevalent recoil from the disciplines of home and business life, but there is wide-spread and growing discontent at the extreme inequalities of fortune—inequalities held to be the result of bad laws, unwise customs, and downright dishonesty. The enormous sale of Mr. Henry George's