Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/345

Rh specialist will blandly put aside religion, because he can not without trouble relate it with what he can touch and taste and handle. To relate truths which belong to different orders plainly requires a greater effort than to relate those which belong to the same. Yet if the effort be not made, the predominant study may still advance, but at a real, perhaps a fatal, cost. The atrophy of faith is commoner than atrophy elsewhere. For men have come to think that while they must devote a lifetime to science, or philosophy, or art, or literature, they can pick up their religion as they go. And the result is, that religion becomes like a tender exotic in their lives, and in their struggle for existence "the thorns spring up and choke it." Agnosticism is often an ex post facto, though honest, justification in theory for a religious atrophy which has already taken place in fact, just as men deceive themselves and appeal to "other-worldliness" to cover the neglect of daily duties. Christianity makes faith the Christian's work. It knows no short cut to spiritual truth, only the royal road of individual search and personal effort. But there are agnostics like Darwin, and there are agnostics whose agnosticism is a thin disguise for plump self-satisfaction. There are evolutionists like Darwin, who can not see their way to Christ; there are also evolutionists like the great American botanist, just dead, who speaks of himself as—

One who is scientifically, and in his own fashion, a Darwinian, philosophically a convinced theist, and religiously an accepter of the "Creed commonly called the Nicene" as the expression of the Christian faith.

Among the many difficulties which in the preceding articles we have not touched, there are two which will probably be present to the minds of many. Without attempting to discuss them, we may state them, and suggest the lines on which, as it seems to us, they should be dealt with.

1. It may be said, "Then you are prepared to give up Genesis?" To which it may be answered, "Yes," if by "giving up Genesis" you mean refusing to claim for it what it never claims for itself—that it is a prophetic anticipation of nineteenth-century science, and a revealed short cut to Darwinism. We can not sympathize with those "reconcilers" who would read between the lines of the Mosaic history a meaning which, if had been stated in plain words, would have put an infinitely greater strain on the faith of those for whom it was written than even its verbal accuracy would put on ours in the present day.

2. Then, it may be asked, "How about the fall? Is that an allegory, or a metaphorical name for a step forward in evolution?" We answer briefly: The fall implies a change, and a