Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/603

Rh admiration and emulation. Some of the best have been hated and persecuted. Much virtue passes away entirely unacknowledged; much flagrant hypocrisy succeeds in its object.

"Still on the whole we find life worth having. The misery of it we find ourselves able to forget, or callously live through. Fortunately we have not imaginations strong enough to realize the sum of it, and we contrive to turn our thoughts away from the subject. And though the happiness is not great, the variety and novelty are. Life is interesting, if not happy. In spite of all the injustice which shocks us in human destiny, the inequality with which fortune is meted out, yet it may be discerned that, at least in the more fortunate societies, justice is the rule and injustice the exception. There are laws by which definite crimes are punished, there is a force of opinion which reaches vaguer offenses, and visits even dispositions to vice with a certain penalty. Virtue is seldom without some reward, however inadequate; if it is not recognized generally or publicly, it finds here and there an admirer, it surrounds itself with a little circle of love; when even this is wanting it often shows a strange power of rewarding itself. On the whole, we are sustained and reconciled to life by a certain feeling of hope, by a belief, resting on real evidence, that things improve and better themselves around us."

This is certainly a very different faith from Christianity. Whether it deserves to be called a faith at all, whether it justifies men in living and in calling others into life, may be doubted. But it is just as much a theology as Christianity. It deals with just the same questions and gives an answer to them, though a different answer. Both views, whatever may be professed, are views about God. Christianity regards God as a friend; it says that he is Love. The other view regards him as awful, distant, inhuman, yet not radically hostile.

It is said that such vague, general views do not deserve to be called science. This is of course admitted. There exists at the present moment no scientific theology independent of the supernatural and of the search for final causes. But this is not because no such theology can be constructed, but merely because it has not yet been constructed. Evidently it is constructing itself fast. The more men come to know Nature and to feel confidence in their knowledge, the more eagerly they will consider what is the attitude of Nature toward human beings. This question is not one which is in' any way removed from human knowledge, it is not one which it can be considered morbid to betray curiosity about. Yet this is the question of theology. Not only is it the only question with which theology ought to be concerned; it is the only question with which theology ever has been concerned. The theologies of the world are merely different attempts to answer it. If they have for the most part trespassed upon the domain of the supernatural, this has not been because theology is necessarily concerned with the supernatural, but in some cases because the line