Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/20

10 swarmed with spirits, good and evil; disease, pestilence, storms, and fires and floods were the work of evil spirits; the more kindly motions of Nature were the work of good spirits. A decrepit old woman could turn herself into a wolf and devour her neighbor's flocks. Meteors, eclipses, and comets were portents sent directly from Heaven for the warning of mankind.

How has all this been changed! How completely the mind of man now faces the other away, in everything except in theology—faces toward a natural explanation of all phenomena!

Let no hasty reader conclude that I am arguing against the reality of religion; I am only arguing against the reality of magic and miracles; against the conception of Christianity as a scheme for man's salvation interpolated into human history, and in no sense one with the constitution of the world; against the idea that the spiritual life is in no sense a possible development of man's natural capabilities; but something superadded from without, a unique and peculiar kind of life, which was made possible to man by the life and death of Christ, and in no way possible before that event. It is not an evolution from man's proper nature; it comes from the opposite direction, and is external and supplementary. "Christianity," say the Andover doctors, "is a source of knowledge concerning God which is not given by the external universe nor by the constitution of man, but only by Christ." Religion is still conceived of as a miraculous scheme to remedy some miscarriage or failure in the plan of God's dealings with man, a failure whereby his relation to the race was radically changed. It is looked upon as something naturally foreign to man, something to be ingrafted upon him from without, not related at all to his natural capacity for virtue and goodness; something which a blameless man may live and die without, but which a cut-throat during the last moments of his life upon the scaffold may, by what is called an act of faith and repentance, obtain! Against such notions I am directing my argument; I am urging that the sentiment of religion is the same in all ages and lands, differing in its outward forms, but not in its inward essence, just as the sentiment of patriotism or of loyalty is the same. How is a reasonable man to favor any scheme that rules out the religion of Plato, and Zeno, and Seneca, and Epictetus, and Cicero, and Lucretius, or Spinoza, or of Darwin, as of no avail, as only snares of Satan? The flowering of man's spiritual nature is as natural and as strict a process of evolution as the opening of a rose or a morning glory. The vital inflorescent forces are from within, and are continuous from the root up. But there is this difference: While the plant must have a congenial environment, light, warmth, etc., the human flowering often takes place amid the most adverse surroundings; but no more so in the religious sphere than in the intellectual.

Neither would I say that the "conversion" upon which our Puritan ancestors laid such stress, and which is so dramatically illustrated in