Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/21

Rh the case of Paul, was not genuine. It was genuine to them, but it was entirely a subjective phenomenon, like the faith-cures we now often bear about; it was the power of the imagination working upon the conscience. It is not a necessary or universal experience, even among religious people. It may be said without any irreverence that it has gone out of fashion. The predisposition for that kind of experience no longer exists. "The belief in witchcraft," says Milman, "made people fancy themselves witches," and the belief in the efficacy of sudden conversions led to these sorts of moral and spiritual earthquakes.

Science looks upon religion as belonging to the sphere of the natural; it is the legitimate outcome of man's moral nature; the term that best expresses the complete development and flowering of all his faculties. To define it in the guarded terms which Principal Tulloch uses, namely, as "an inner power of Divine mystery awakening the conscience," is to make it something external to man and more or less arbitrary and theological. This view the world has long clung to, but it must go—is going. The Biblical writers had no theology; the Bible is strictly a religious book, and in no sense a theological treatise. Paul developed or outlined some theological notions; but wherein was Paul great—in his theology, or in his religious fervor; in his notions of predestination, or in his aspirations after righteousness? Jesus is as free from any theological bias as a child is from metaphysics. He taught but one thing, namely, that the kingdom of heaven is in the condition of the heart, a condition illustrated by his own life. The vast and elaborate system of theology which grew up out of his parables and his Orientalism, and overshadowed the world for fifteen hundred years or more, and begat some of the darkest crimes the history of man has to show, is as far from his spirit and that of his disciples as the east is from the west.

Undoubtedly, religion knows certain things in a more intimate and personal way than science does; so does poetry, so does literature; and science can understand how this is so. What we receive through the emotions is more vital and personal to us than what reaches us through the reason. The person in whose mind has been awakened a deep love of Christ, comes to know Christ in a way the mere outside observer does not; his spirit takes hold of the Christ-idea, and is filled and modified by it to an extent the other is not. An emotional process is more potent than a rational process. The knowledge thus gained is no more truly knowledge, but it is more vital knowledge. It is not merely conviction; it is attraction and affiliation as well. But this is true not of Christ merely; it is true of the whole range of our experience. If the flower, or the bird, or the rock awaken no emotion in the observer, will he ever come truly to know it? Unless we love an author, can we ever get at his deepest and most precious meaning? Hence Goethe said, "We learn to know nothing but what we love."