Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/755

Rh From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance Religion rather than to promote any particular system of Theology; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more and more that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from the period when he had little, if any, ideas of a great power above him, through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry toward better forms of belief, making him more and more accessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences show, too, within the historic period the same tendency, and especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above all, through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth.

Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this evolution "between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender mercies are over all his works; between the God of the Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning; between the God of the Old Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath seen nor can see; between the God of Leviticus, who was so particular about the sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; between the God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who will have all men to be saved; between the God of Exodus, who is merciful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ—the heavenly Father'—who is kind unto the unthankful and the evil."

However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology and its kindred or subsidiary sciences may, in the interest of simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of "the fall"; however completely they may fossilize various dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation" and "schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the great minds of the theological period; science, so far from making inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian development of it, will strengthen all that is essential in it, giving new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations. For the one great legitimate,