Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/83

Rh and drugged, so as to suit our human feebleness. If we cannot produce from the authoritative documents of religion texts directly sanctioning it, this is because the particular problem was not presented in ancient times to the nation which gave us our religion. Those documents are full of passages expressing in poetic forms and in language suited to another age the spirit of modern science. Notably, the book of Job, not in occasional passages only, but as its main object and drift, contrasts the conventional, and, as it were, orthodox view of the universe, with the view which those obtain who are prepared to face its awfulness directly.

Thus the religious view and the scientific view of the universe, which are thought to be so opposite, agree in this important point. Both protest earnestly against human wisdom. Both wait for a message which is to come to them from without. Religion says, "Let man be silent, and listen when God speaks." Science says, "Let us interrogate Nature, and let us be sure that the answer we get is really Nature's, and not merely an echo of our own voice." Now, whether or not religion and science agree in what they recommend, it is evident that they agree in what they denounce. They agree in denouncing that pride of the human intellect which supposes it knows every thing, which is not passive enough in the presence of reality, but deceives itself with pompous words instead of things, and with flattering eloquence instead of sober truth.

Here, however, it will be said, the agreement between religion and science ends, and even this agreement is only apparent. Science protests against the idols or delusions of the human intellect, in order that it may substitute for them the reality of Nature; religion sacrifices all those idols to the greatest of them all, which is God. For what is God—so the argument runs—but an hypothesis, which religious men have mistaken for a demonstrated reality? And is it not precisely against such premature hypotheses that science most strenuously protests? That a Personal Will is the cause of the universe—this might stand very well as an hypothesis to work with, until facts should either confirm it, or force it to give way to another either different or at least modified. That this Personal Will is benevolent, and is shown to be so by the facts of the universe, which evince a providential care for man and other animals—this is just one of those plausibilities which passed muster before scientific method was understood—but modern science rejects it as unproved. Modern science holds that there may be design in the universe, but that to penetrate the design is, and probably always will be, beyond the power of the human understanding. That this Personal Will has on particular occasions revealed itself by breaking through the customary order of the universe, and performing what are called miracles—this is one of those legends of which histories were full, until a stricter view of evidence was introduced, and the modern critical spirit sifted thoroughly