Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/164

150 that the kingdom of heaven is not a place, but a state of mind. Hence, coming to Christ is coming to our truer, better selves, and conforming our lives to the highest ideal. Was not Paul a savior of mankind also? Without Paul it is probable that Christianity would have cut but an insignificant figure in this world. He was its thunderbolt; his words still tingle in our ears.

I by no means say that this is the only view that can be taken of Christ as the Saviour of mankind; I say it is the only view science or reason can take—the only view which is in harmony with the rest of our knowledge of the world.

What can science, or, if you please, the human reason, in its quest of exact knowledge, make of the cardinal dogmas of the Christian Church—the plan of salvation, justification, the Trinity, or "saving grace," etc.? Simply nothing. These things were to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness, and to the man of science they are like an utterance in an unknown tongue. He has no means of verifying them; they lie in a region entirely beyond his ken.

Witness the efforts of the Andover professors, in their latest manifesto, "Progressive Orthodoxy," to give a basis of reason to the dogma of vicarious atonement. The result is mere verbal jugglery. To say that Christ, laying down his life, makes you or me, or any man, capable of repenting in a way or in a degree we were not capable of before, or that a man's capacity in any direction can be increased without effort on his part, and by an event of which he may never have heard, are assertions not credible, because they break completely with the whole system of natural knowledge.

In short, the truth of this whole controversy between science and theology seems to me to be this: If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology, with all its miraculous machinery, must go. But if there is a higher principle by which we are to be guided in religious matters, if there is an eye of faith which is superior to the eye of reason—a proposition which I for one neither affirm nor deny—then the whole aspect of the question is changed, and it is science and not theology that is blocking the way.

But the attitude of Professor Drummond is, that there is nothing true in divinity that is not true in science, or at least in harmony with science, and the main purpose of his book is to demonstrate this fact.

The proof here offered is nothing more than the old argument from analogy, the analogy being drawn from the principles of biology instead of from the general course of nature, as with Butler. It is the assumption that these biological processes or laws are identical in the spiritual and physical spheres that furnishes the starting-point of the book. "The position we have been led to take up is not that the spiritual laws are analogous to the natural laws, but that they are the same laws. It is not a question of analogy, but of identity." Still, the