Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/23

Rh and good"; or when he says with Micah, "And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" or when he says with Solomon that "the fear of the Lord is to hate evil"; or with Jeremiah, "He judged the cause of the poor and needy—was not this to know me? saith the Lord"; or when he says with St. James, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world," he gives utterance to sentiments that appeal to the best there is in every man, and that agree with the highest wisdom of all ages and races. Science can understand it and verify it.

But when he talks to us about Jesus in the language of the evangelical churches—about the atonement, original sin, sanctification, saving grace, etc.—he simply uses a jargon that may mean something to him, but can mean nothing at all to an outsider. He states things as facts which have no ground either in reason or experience; they belong to a world apart, which neither the rest of our knowledge nor our natural faculties of reason and observation can put us in communication with. He might just as well talk about the elixir of life or of the philosopher's stone. The traditional theology has undoubtedly proved itself a good working hypothesis with crude and half-developed minds, but upon what thoughtful and cultivated person does it now make an impression? No race has been lifted out of barbarism without the aid of supernatural machinery. Once lifted out, how prone we are to discredit the machinery! We have no further use for it. We have outgrown it. But the mass of mankind are slow to outgrow it. To the mass of mankind the miraculous element of Christianity still seems vital and of first importance. Discredit that, and you have discredited religion itself in their eyes. But not so with the philosopher, or with the man who is bent on seeing and knowing things exactly as they are.

I think it is in accordance with the rest of our knowledge that Christianity could not have made its way in the world, its superior ethical and moral system could not have gained the ascendency, without the cloud of myths in which they came enveloped. What a seal of authentication is put upon it by the myth of the resurrection of Jesus! How this fact stuns and overwhelms the ordinary mind! Was it Talleyrand who replied to some enthusiast who proposed to start a new religion, that he advised him to begin by getting himself crucified, and to rise again on the third day? As a new cult founded upon reason alone, or as a natural religion alone, Christianity could not have coped with the supernatural religions that then possessed the world. Men's minds were not prepared for it, and it is probably equally true that the mass of mankind are not yet prepared for a religion based upon natural knowledge alone. But the time is surely coming, and natural science is to be the chief instrument in bringing it about. The religious sense of man is less and less dependent upon