Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/335

Rh also natural that there should be an almost universal concurrence in their views of primitive times, because there was nothing in their disputes about the dogmas of Christianity to bring the early ages of man and of the earth into discussion. When, therefore, the skeptics, in their profound ignorance of theology and of the higher philosophy, ran against these sand-bags of individual opinions, it was natural for them to suppose that they had discovered the very citadel of religion; although, as we have seen, these anthropomorphic schemes are no more like religion than the play-house earthworks of children, piled up some summer's day on the sandy shore, are like Fort Morgan. Yet, from this simple psychological connection in their growth, history, science, and theology, since that period have been polemical; and, when, by the application of truly rational and scientific methods, thinking men began to construct the natural history of the earth from the facts recorded in the strata of its crust, and it began to be seen that all organic forms are modeled upon one common plan and developed out of primordial types under the operation of natural laws, an alarm was sounded, as if the principles of Faith were really involved, and in danger of impending overthrow. In their alarm and trepidation the guardians of the dimly-comprehended regions of Religion, regarding all who wander out of the beaten paths of knowledge as "false knaves," begin their examinations always, like a certain famous magistrate, with the question, "Masters, do you serve God?" and insist that "God" shall be written first, "for God forbid but God should go before such villains."

On the other hand, again, as remarked, there are scientific men who would also be philosophers, who suppose the anthropomorphic, that is, the poetic expressions of religious conceptions, to be essential to and the very gist of worship. Not having arrived at any thing beyond anthropomorphic notions of the Deity themselves, they weakly imagine that no other are possible; that there is no religion, no religious worship, nothing to lift man out of and beyond himself into the contemplation of the unexpressed sublimities of the Infinite and the Almighty, except the legends of the miracles and wonders of remote ages. Hence one of them now boasts that, in the advance of science, "anthropomorphism" (by which he means religion itself) "is driven to its last intrenchment—the mind and heart of man himself." When was it ever anywhere else? When was it ever any thing else (that is the expression of it) than a development of the imagination—the faculty of faith—the æsthetical faculty—that which lifts man above the clods of earth and makes him akin to the immortal and the divine? For is not religion both a science and an art?—from the inductive point of view as truly a science as any other, and the climax and crowning glory of all the others? and also an art, a fine art, as truly as any other, and the most divinely beautiful of them all?

Alas for the philosopher who thinks it driven to the last ditch!