Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/174

160 good, is one thing; but, formulated into a system of theology and assuming to rest upon exact demonstration, is quite another. As such it is exposed to the terrible question, Is it true? In other words, it comes within the range of science, and must stand its fire. When miracles are brought forward as an evidence of the truth of Christianity, the natural philosopher is bound to ask. Do miracles take place?

If our life were alone made up of reason or of exact knowledge, science would be all in all to us. So far as it is made up of these things, science must be our guide. But probably four fifths of life is quite outside of the sphere of science; four fifths of life is sentiment. The great ages of the world have been ages of sentiment; the great literatures are the embodiments of sentiment. Patriotism is a sentiment; love, benevolence, admiration, worship, are all sentiments.

Man is a creature of emotions, of attractions, and intuitions, as well as of reason and calculation. Science can not deepen your love of country, or of home and family, or of honor or purity, or enhance your enjoyment of a great poem or work of art, or of an heroic act, or of the beauty of Nature, or quicken your religious impulses. To know is less than to love; to know the reason of things is less than to be quick to the call of duty. Unless we approach the Bible, or any of the sacred books of antiquity, or the great poems, or Nature itself—a bird, a flower, a tree—in other than the scientific spirit, the spirit whose aim is to express all values in the terms of the reason or the understanding, we shall miss the greatest good they hold for us. We are not to approach them in a spirit hostile to science, but with a willingness to accept what science can give, but knowing full well that there is a joy in things and an insight into them which science can never give. There is probably nothing in the Sermon on the Mount that appeals to our scientific faculties, yet there are things here by reason of which the world is vastly the gainer. Indeed, nearly all the recorded utterances of Christ rise into regions where science can not follow. "Take no thought of the body." "He that would save his life shall lose it." "Except ye become as little children, ye can not enter the kingdom of heaven," etc. These things are in almost flat contradiction of the precepts of science.

It may be noted that Christ turned away from or rebuked the more exact, skeptical mind that asked for a sign, that wanted proof of everything, and that his appeal was to the more simple, credulous, and enthusiastic. He chose his disciples from among this class, men of faith and emotion, not too much given to reasoning about things. In keeping with this course of action, nearly all his teachings were by parables. In fact, Christ was the highest type of the mystical, parable-loving. Oriental mind, as distinguished from the exact, science-loving. Occidental mind.

Let us not make the mistake of supposing that all truth is scientific truth, or that only those things are true and valuable which are capable