Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/84

74 the annals of the world. But if modern science be right in these opinions, the very notion of God is removed altogether from the domain of practical life. So long as God appeared certainly to exist, he necessarily eclipsed and reduced to insignificance all other existences. So long as it was held possible to discover his will and mind, all other inquiries might reasonably be pronounced frivolous. But all is changed as soon as we begin to regard his existence as a mere hypothesis, and his will as inscrutable and beyond the reach of the human understanding. Not only is all changed, but all is reversed. Instead of being the one important question, God's will now becomes the one unimportant question, because the one question which it is essentially impossible to answer. Whereas, before we might charge men with frivolity who neglected this inquiry for inquiries the most important in themselves, now we may pronounce the shallowest dilettant, the most laboriously idle antiquary, a solid and sensible man, compared to the theologian. They pursue, to be sure, very minute objects, but they do or may attain them; the theologian attempts an impossibility—he is like the child who tries to reach the beginning of the rainbow.

It would appear, then, that that which I have called "human wisdom," and which is the butt, at the same time, of theology and science, is so because it is a kind of middle party between two mortally hostile factions. It is like the Girondins between the Royalists and the Jacobins; both may oppose, and may even in a particular case combine to oppose it, and yet on that account they may not have the smallest sympathy with each other. And the middle party once crushed, there will follow no reconciliation, but a mortal contest between the extremes. Is this so or is it otherwise? The question is whether the statement given above of the theological view of the universe is exhaustive or not? Is it all summed up in the three propositions that a Personal Will is the cause of the universe, that that Will is perfectly benevolent, that that Will has sometimes interfered by miracles with the order of the universe? If these propositions exhaust it, and science throws discredit upon all of them, evidently theology and science are irreconcilable, and the contest between them must end in the destruction of one or the other.

It may be remarked, in the first place, that these propositions are not so much an abstract of theology as of the particular theology now current. That God is perfectly benevolent is a maxim of popular Christianity, and it may be found stated in the Bible. But it is not necessary to theology as such. Many nations have believed in gods of mixed or positively malignant character. Other nations have indeed ascribed to their deities all the admirable qualities they could conceive, but benevolence was not one of these. They have believed in gods that were beautiful, powerful, immortal, happy, but not benevolent. It may even be said that the Bible and Christianity itself have not