Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/241

Rh thing to be impossible. Accordingly, those religions which have had for their object the unity of the universe, or what we call, par excellence, God, as distinguished from gods many and lords many, have generally been most lavish of miracle. They have delighted to believe in whatever is most improbable, because by doing so they seemed to show how strongly they realized the greatness of their Divinity. Credo quia impossibile is a paradox specially belonging to the religion of God. But, on the other hand, there is nothing in this religion that requires the miraculous. Those who realize the infinity and eternity of Nature most, and who are most prepared to admit that nothing is impossible, may quite well believe at the same time that the laws of Nature are invariable, and may be as skeptical as the most narrow-minded slaves of experience about particular stories of miracle that come before them. Indeed, there is perceptible, both in Judaism and Christianity, along with the fullest and readiest belief in miracle, a certain contempt for those who attach much importance to such occasional exceptions to general law. Prophets and apostles and Christ himself believe one and all that God can and does, at his pleasure, suspend ordinary laws; they believe this as a matter of course, and with a kind of wonder that any one can doubt it; but they hold it rather as a matter of course than as a matter of much importance—though they may hold a particular suspension of law to be very important for the light it throws on the Divine will; and it is evident that the God of their worship is rather the God who habitually maintains his laws than the God who occasionally suspends them. As therefore we found that the physical religion which in paganism existed along with a belief in the supernatural appeared elsewhere divorced from it, and that the Christian religion of humanity reappeared in modern religions divorced from miracle, so we may expect to find somewhere a purely natural religion of God.

I have before asserted that modern science, however contemptuously it may reject the supernatural, has nevertheless both a theology and a God. It has a God because it believes in an Infinite and Eternal Being; it has a theology because it believes in the urgent necessity of obeying his laws and in the happiness that comes from doing so. Is it not equally true that it has or may have a religion? If religion be made of love, awe and admiration, is not Nature a proper object of these as well as of scientific study?

It will be said that the religion of God thus understood is intelligible enough, but has no character of its own by which it may be differenced from the physical and moral religions described above. When we admire a flower we are worshiping Nature, but this is paganism stripped of the supernatural, or Wordsworthianism. When we admire justice or self-sacrifice in any human being, we are again, after the explanation given above, worshiping Nature, but this is Christianity stripped of the supernatural, or the modern religion of