Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/240

228, whatever the principal object of religious feeling in a particular case may be, of that object there springs up a natural religion and also a supernatural religion. There have been two classes of religions which have been conspicuous by their difference in the history of mankind. On the one hand, there have been the religions which have found their objects of worship principally in the sensible world, in physical phenomena, and in man considered as a physical phenomenon. On the other hand, there are the religions which contemplate more what is intellectual and moral. The best example of the former class is classical paganism, which, as I pointed out, was arrested in its development at the moment when it began to embrace the moral world; to the other class belong Judaism and Christianity. Now, both these forms of religion may be found connected with the supernatural and also unconnected with it. Classical paganism itself was a supernatural religion. The feelings excited in the Greek by the sight of a tree or a fountain did not end where they began, in admiration, delight, and love; they passed on into miracle. The natural phenomenon was transformed into a marvelous quasi-human being. But the same feelings aroused in the mind of Wordsworth produced a new religion of Nature not less real or intense than that of the ancients, but unconnected with the supernatural. He worships trees and fountains and flowers for themselves and as they are; if his imagination at times plays with them, he does not mistake the play for earnest. The daisy, after all, is a flower, and it is as a flower that he likes best to worship it. "Let good men feel the soul of Nature and see things as they are." In like manner moral religion has taken two forms. Judaism and Christianity are to a certain extent supernatural religions, but rationalistic forms of both have sprung up in which it has been attempted to preserve the religious principle which is at the bottom of them, discarding the supernatural element with which it is mixed. The worship of humanity, which has been springing up in Europe since the middle of the last century, is in a like manner a religion of moral qualities divorced from the supernatural.

If religion really accepts the supernatural even when its object is only isolated physical phenomena or human beings, how much more so when its object is God, whether God be regarded as the Cause of the universe or as the universe itself considered as a unity! Our experience of a limited physical phenomenon may be some measure of its powers; the antecedent improbability of its transcending in a particular case the limit which our experience had led us to put upon our conception of it may be very great. But who can place any limits to Nature or to the universe? We may indeed require rigid proof of whatever transcends our experience, but it is not only Orientals who say that "with God all things are possible;" the most scientific men are the most willing to admit that our experience is no measure of Nature, and that it is mere ignorance to pronounce a priori any