Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/87

Rh Nature, as the whole includes the part. Science would represent theology as disregarding Nature, as passing over those laws which govern the universe, and occupying itself solely with occasional suspensions of them, or with ulterior, inscrutable causes. But this account of theology is derived from a partial view of it. It is practically to some extent true of the theologies of recent times, which have been driven out of the domain of Nature by the rival and victorious method of physical science. But it is not true at all of the older theologies. They occupied themselves quite as much with laws as with causes; so far from being opposed to science, they were in fact themselves science in a rudimentary form; so far from neglecting the natural for the supernatural, they recognized no such distinction. The true object of theology at the beginning was to throw light upon natural laws; it used, no doubt, a crude method, and in some cases it attempted problems which modern science calls insoluble. Then, when a new method was introduced, theology stuck obstinately to its old one, and when the new method proved itself successful, theology gradually withdrew into those domains, where as yet the old method was not threatened, and might still reign without opposition. Thus it began to be supposed that law belonged to science, and suspension of law, or miracle, to theology; that the one was concerned with Nature, and the other with that which was above Nature. Gradually the name of God began to be associated with the supernatural, and scientific men began to say they had nothing to do with God, and theologians to find something alien to them in the word Nature.

Yet theology can never go further than this in repudiating Nature. It can never deny that Nature is an ordinance of God; it can never question that the laws of Nature are laws of God. It may indeed treat them as of secondary importance; it may consider that they reveal God in an aspect in which it is not most important that we should know him. But it cannot and does not deny that Nature, too, is a revelation of God; it ought not to deny that natural philosophy is a part of theology, that there is a theology which may be called natural, and which does not consist in a collection of the evidences of benevolent design in the universe, but in a true deduction of the laws which govern the universe, whatever those laws may be, and whatever they may seem to indicate concerning the character of God.

But, if, on the one hand, the study of Nature be one part of the study of God, is it not true, on the other, that he who believes only in Nature is a theist, and has a theology? Men slide easily from the most momentous controversies into the most contemptible logomachies. If we will look at things, and not merely at words, we shall soon see that the scientific man has a theology and a God, a most impressive theology, a most awful and glorious God. I say that man believes in a God who feels himself in the presence of a Power apart from and immeasurably above his own, a Power in the contemplation of which he