Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/595

Rh awe and delight, if not of love. But upon those who do not study Nature the advance of science can have no other effect than to root out of their minds the very conception of God, The negative effect is not counterbalanced by any positive one. With them, if the supernatural person whose will holds the universe together is denied, the effect is that the universe falls at once to pieces. No other unity takes his place, and out of the human mind there perishes the most elevating thought, and out of human life the chief and principal sacredness. The remedy for this is to be found in the study of Nature becoming universal. Let all be made acquainted with natural laws; let all form the habit of contemplating them, and atheism in its full sense will become a thing impossible, when no mind shall be altogether without the sense, at once inspiring and sobering, of an eternal order.

But these remarks on the difficulty of harmonizing the scientific with the imaginative knowledge of things, are by way of digression. Our business at present is with the fact that knowledge is of these two kinds, and that the complete or satisfactory knowledge of any thing comes from combining them. When the object of knowledge is God, the first kind of knowledge is called theology, and the second may be called religion. By theology the nature of God is ascertained and false views of it eradicated from the understanding; by religion the truths thus obtained are turned over in the mind and assimilated by the imagination and the feelings.

When we hear it said, as it is said so commonly now, that the knowledge of God is impossible to man, and therefore that theology is no true science, of course the word God is used in that peculiar sense of which 1 have spoken above. Nature every one admits that we know or may know; but of any occult cause of phenomena, or of any supernatural being suspending the course of natural laws, it is denied that we can know any thing. But since every sort of theology agrees that the laws of Nature are the laws of God, it is evident that in knowing Nature we do precisely to the same extent know God. I am proposing for the present to treat the words of God and Nature as absolutely synonymous, which up to a certain point every one allows them to be. So long as we do so we are in no danger of trespassing beyond the proper domain of human inquiry; so long as we do so, theology, instead of being additional or antagonistic to science, is merely another name for science itself. Regarded in this way, we may say of God, that so far from being beyond knowledge, he is the one object of knowledge, and that every thing we can know, every proposition we can frame, relates to him. It may seem, however, that little is to be gained from giving this unusual sense to the word theology. If in the ordinary sense it is the name of an imaginary and delusive science, taken in this sense as a synonym for science itself, it is purely useless. By giving the word such an extension, it will be said, you destroy all its force. That we ought to study theology