Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/162

148 Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience? The kind of evidence which theology accepts, or has accepted in the past is too much like that which led the old astrologer Nostradamus to predict the end of the world in 1886, because in this year Good-Friday falls upon St.George's day, and Easter upon St.Mark's day, the very latest date upon which Easter can happen.

Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view—the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and shapes the universe with man as the center. It has no trouble to believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as the special theatre of the celestial powers—powers to whom it has given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities.

Of all the great historical religions of the world, theology sees but one to be true and of divine origin: all the rest were of human invention, and for the most part mere masses of falsehood and superstition. Science recognizes the religious instinct in man as a permanent part of his nature, and looks upon the great systems of religion—Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, the polytheism of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, etc.—as its legitimate outgrowth and flowering, just as much as the different floras and faunas of the earth are the expression of one principle of organic life. All these religions may be treated as false, or all of them treated as true; what we can not say, speaking for science, is, that one is true and all the others are false. To it they are all false with reference to their machinery, but all true with reference to the need to which they administer. They are like the constellations of the astronomical maps, wherein the only things that are true and real are the stars; all the rest—Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion, etc.—are the invention of the astronomers. The eternal truths of man's religious nature have lent themselves to many figures of polytheism as well as of Christianity; these figures pass away or become discredited, but the truths themselves—the recognition of a Power greater and wiser than ourselves, to the law of which it is necessary that our conduct in some measure conform—never pass away. Was not Egypt saved by her religion, and Greece by hers, as much as England is by hers?