Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/862

844 Science might perhaps conveniently be defined as the kind and ex tent of knowledge which the constitution of the human mind permits us to have; and, so viewing it, we certainly fail to see what theology can do for us in the way of bringing knowledge or rational belief within our reach that science can not do. Will it be said that, while science reflects the limitations of the human mind, theology doas not do so? History would certainly not confirm such a contention. Science uses imagination, but keeps it, or tries to keep it, under control; theology, if we judge by the systems that have held sway in the past, has used imagination, has hardly even tried to control it, and has often been completely overmastered by it. In ancient Egypt, according to Erman, "we find a mythology with myths which are absolutely irreconcilable existing peacefully side by side; in short, an unparalleled confusion (which). . . became ever more hopeless during the three thousand years that, according to the pyramid texts, the Egyptian religion flourished." Yet the books in which this religion was set forth were so sacred that "even the gods themselves were supposed to wash seven times" before reading them. "The lively Grecian," as we know,

 "In a land of hills, Rivers and fertile plains and sounding shores, Under a cope of variegated sky, Could find commodious place for every god";

but the myths he wove about those gods were of so doubtful a moral tendency that Plato was opposed to allowing them to enter into the education of youth. Of the sacred rites of the Etruscans the historian Mommsen says that "their prevailing characteristics are a gloomy and withal tiresome mysticism, a ringing the changes on numbers, soothsaying, and that solemn enthroning of pure absurdity which at all times finds its own circle of devotees." The Latin religion, the same high authority tells us, had a respectable origin in the attempt to spiritualize and generalize the phenomena of Nature and the duties and functions of everyday life; but, by a gradual process of change, it "sank into a singular sobriety and dullness, and early became shriveled into an anxious and dreaiy round of ceremonies."

If science therefore can not lead us into all truth, it is tolerably clear that theology, as the world has heretofore known it, can not save us from all error, but on the contrary is exposed to all the perversions which an unchecked use of imagination can entail. The task to which Mr. Balfour has committed himself is to show that the particular system which he would recommend is free from the imperfections and, so to speak, organic weaknesses of all other systems, and that it stands forth as an unimpeachable authority in all those matters upon which science is incapable of instructing us. The accomplishment of this task, it is needless to say, will be watched with much interest by every reader of Mr. Balfour's recent volume.

We may remark before concluding that we are not nearly as much troubled as Mr. Balfour evidently thinks upholders of "naturalism" ought to be, by the knowledge that the primary data of science do not afford any hint of the moral law or of the highly developed human emotions that are associated therewith. Neither does the atomic theory or molecular chemistry afford any hint of the wonders of organic life, which yet depend on molecular association. We might know all that is to be known in regard to the elements as elements without discovering-the secret of the rose or of the tiniest