Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/605

Rh human family, and all the pity that they have accumulated, and, as it were, capitalized in institutions, political, social, and ecclesiastical, through countless generations.

People are misled by the fact that Nature is often used in another sense, and opposed, not to the supernatural, but to man. Nature is, for shortness, often put instead of inanimate Nature. Inanimate Nature is of course pitiless. It consists of laws which, like the law of gravitation, take no note of happiness or misery, virtue or vice. But if we abandoned our belief in the supernatural, it would not be only Nature in this restricted sense that would be left to us; we should not give ourselves over, as it is often rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers—winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fire. The God we should believe in would not be a passionless, utterly inhuman power. He would indeed be a God, often neglecting us in our need, a God often deaf to prayers. Nature including humanity would be our God. We should read his character not merely in the earthquake and fire, but also in the still small voice; not merely in the destroying powers of the world, but, as Mohammed said, in the compassion that we feel for one another; not merely in the storm that threatens the sailor with death, but in the life-boat and the Grace Darling that put out from shore to the rescue; not merely in the intricate laws that confound our prudence, but in the science that penetrates them and the art which makes them subservient to our purposes; not merely in the social evils that fill our towns with misery and cover our frontiers with war, but in the St. Francis that makes himself the brother of the miserable, and in the Fox and Penn that proclaim principles of peace.

Let us take one of the principal maxims of the supernatural theology, and observe how it is modified by the rejection of the supernatural. That the just man will assuredly be rewarded with happiness is a maxim resting upon evidence involving the supernatural. It depends upon belief in a God of much more goodness and justice than we can find in Nature; it assumes a future state of which science furnishes no clear evidence. Even when the Psalmist, speaking merely of the present life, wrote, "I have been young, and now am old, and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread," he perhaps thought of supernatural interpositions by which evil was averted from the just man. Suppose, now, that we repudiate all such beliefs, and confine ourselves strictly to the facts of Nature as we discover them from uniform experience. Let us suppose that the ordinary laws of Nature govern the lot of the just man, and that no exemptions are made in his favor. Do we find that these ordinary laws take no account of his justice, and that his prospects are in no respect different from those of the unjust man? Is Nature, as distinguished from the supernatural, regardless of the distinction between virtue and vice? No doubt Nature is not a perfectly just judge. The just