Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/17

Rh have to suffer the pangs of mortality just the same, and the consequences of sin just the same. When our theologians say that "Christ suffered for our sins, and that, because he suffered, our sins are forgiven," they make a statement that can not be rationally conceived; they use a language not comprehensible by human sense—the language of mysticism.

When we regard sin disinterestedly and in the light of our real knowledge, we find it but a relative term. It is not a positive thing as electricity is, but the absence of a thing, as cold is the absence of heat, or as darkness is the absence of light. It is the imperfection of human nature when tried by its highest possibilities. The theological conception of sin as imputed guilt has no more place in rational knowledge than sorcery has. The deeper our insight into the method of Nature, or the more we are impressed with the order and consistency of the world, the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us. To the man of science the old theology is like the traditional conception of angels—men with both wings and arms.

This conception breaks with the structural plan of all vertebrates, the same as theology does with the law of cause and effect. Human beings, with wings in place of arms, might be contrary to the fact; but such a conception does not violate the homologies of Nature, but beings with both wings and arms have no counterpart in the world. They are not merely contrary to experience, they are contrary to the fundamental principle of structure that runs through the animal kingdom. But when these armed and winged beings were first conceived of, this fact was not known as it is now, and the un-natural element in Christianity could not have been appreciated in past ages as it is to-day.

The doctrinal part of the popular Christianity, its supernaturalism, is an inheritance from the past as much as witchcraft or magic is. But it did not break with human knowledge then; it was in strict keeping with the elements of the marvelous, and the exceptional of which human knowledge was so largely made up. There was no science in those days, no conception of the course of human or natural events as the result of immutable law. The personal point of view prevailed in everything. Everything revolved about man; superhuman beings took sides for or against him. Indeed, so far as science or a rational conception of things is concerned, the fathers of the Church, and the framers of our popular theology, were mere children. Considerations were all-powerful with them, which, to-day, would not have a feather's weight with a man of ordinary intelligence. Children readily, even eagerly, believe almost any impossible thing you may tell them about Nature. As yet they have no insight into the course of Nature, or of the law of cause and effect, no fund of experience to serve as a touch-stone to the false or impossible. The same was true of the fathers, and of the races that witnessed the advent of Christianity—great in