Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/332

318 compelled to discover that the question is not so much of a creation, as of a rational conception of the creation—not of the fact, but of the method.

Religious faith does step in, where science fails, to say how the Cosmos began, and is ordered and sustained in perpetual harmony. Physical science, of course, has nothing to do with first and final causes, and therefore answers: "We cannot tell whether the Cosmos is eternal, or began in time." It is a higher philosophy that comes in to answer, with the irresistible definitions of a higher logic, that it began in time. According to the very terms of the proposition, matter is bounded by space and time, and exists only in, by, and through these limitations. Consequently, it is even a contradiction in terms to ask the question, whether it is eternal or not. It is the same absurdity as to ask if the finite be infinite; if the limited be ubiquitous; if the conditioned be unconditioned.

Again: Religion, sustained also by a true philosophical ontology, asserts that the relation of the infinite—to the finite of the eternal to the limited—is that of a Creator. For, if this is not so, then they must be of the same substance—that is, identical, which again is absurd by the very terms of the proposition.

Having the creation—the basement-matter—let us proceed to its metamorphoses. And here, coy as sea-born Thetis, it will take the valor, the skill, and the passionate pursuit of heroes worthy to wed immortal brides, to follow Nature through her protean form and into her concealed recesses.

These metamorphoses depending upon the elements of the Cosmos—upon the laws with which matter is endowed (and it would not be matter, remember—this Cosmos which we know—without them)—the investigation is strictly, and without the least irreverence, the legitimate province of rational physical science. It is as religiously a duty to make use of the reason to comprehend and "justify the ways of God to man," as it is, through faith and love, to adore him.

The method of creation, then, it is, and not the fact, that natural science deals with. It invites our attention to physics, simply, and leaves metaphysics to a higher school.

When, therefore, these doctors of the new school tell us that they are about to overthrow religion in one of its old dogmas—namely, as they define it themselves, that the Creator came here, and, like a potter upon his wheel, out of distinct lumps of clay, in certain definite periods, produced certain definite forms, which forms, in organic creatures, are species, and which may perish or endure, but cannot change—it is easy to see that they have not themselves risen above that anthropomorphic conception of Deity which they assume to condemn. They are still struggling with eyes half open to realize whether it is Santa Claus or papa in his nightcap. In a word, they have not arrived at the conception of the Creator as infinite and eternal, and that his acts are