Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/840

818 of hysterical emotions, that I for one should despair of any good result from investigating minutely these curious conquests effected by pretentious physical marvels over the gaping intellectual credulity of moral coldness and disbelief.

Here the general discussion ended, but Dr. Ward, who had the right of reply, exercised it with alertness and vigor.

I can not understand, he said, Dr. Martineau's position, that because the best testimony which we have in modern times to the interference of Divine power in the chain of physical causation is more or less mixed up with what he would regard as superstition and hysterical emotion, therefore it is perfectly justifiable to leave such matters uninvestigated, and to pass by on the other side. Surely the whole character of modern civilization would be altered if we could prove satisfactorily for ordinary minds that the Divine will is a true cause, which manifests itself habitually to those who humbly receive the Divine revelations. Is not Dr. Newman's celebrated assertion that England would be in a far more hopeful condition if it were far more superstitious, more bigoted, more disposed to quail beneath the stings of conscience, and to do penance for its sins, than it is, at least plausible for one who, like Dr. Martineau, believes profoundly that the true worship of a righteous will is the highest end of all human life? Can anything be more superabundantly evident, more conspicuously and, so to say, oppressively clear, than that ninety-nine men out of every hundred live as if God were at most nothing more than a remote probability, which it is hardly worth while to take into account in the ordinary routine of life? Suppose, if you please, that the majority of men by studying the Lourdes miracles will be brought, if they are convinced at all, to burn an immense number of wax tapers to the holy Virgin, and to dress up a number of very gaudy dolls in the churches dedicated to her, by way of showing their gratitude to her for curing paralytics and other miserable sufferers by the application of Lourdes water. Is that so much more superstitious, after all, than attributing similar cures to the transit of St. Peter's shadow, or to handkerchiefs taken from St. Paul's body, as the author of the Acts of the Apostles certainly did? Nor, indeed, is it a matter of the very highest moment whether people show their faith foolishly or whether it overshoots the mark, and attributes imaginary effects to a real cause. What is a matter of the highest moment is whether or not they feel or do not feel their religious faith in every action of their life. If God is really ruling you, is it not better to feel his eye upon you, even though you show your sense of that vigilance unreasonably and foolishly, than to live on very much as you would do, if, as Isaiah said, God were on a journey or had gone to sleep? Can any one deny that any awakening, however rude its consequences, to the reality of Divine power, would be infinitely better than the rapidly growing habit of living as if behind Nature there were no God? I do not of course say this to