Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/242

230 humanity. Now, what third kind of religion can there be unless we introduce a third or supernatural order of beings? I answer that the natural religion of God, though closely connected with both of these religions, is nevertheless clearly distinct from them. Its material is certainly the same; it contemplates the same phenomena and no others, but it contemplates them in a different spirit and for a different purpose. The object which excites its admiration may be, as in the former case, a tree, a flower, the sky, or the sea, but the admiration, when aroused, goes beyond the object which aroused it, and fixes upon a great unity, more or less strongly realized, in which all things cohere. It is thus that the view which the man of science takes of any natural object differs from that taken by an uneducated man. The admiration of the latter is, as it were, pagan. It ends in the particular form and color before it. It sees nothing in the object but the object itself. But the eye of science passes entirely beyond the object and sees the law that works in it; instead of the individual it sees the kind, and beyond the kind it sees higher unities in endless scale. What it admires is also in a sense Nature, but it is not Nature as a collective name for natural things, but Nature as the unity of natural things, or, in other words, God. Similar, with feelings less distinct but probably stronger, is the contemplation of Nature in ancient Hebrew poetry, which, when it surveys the great phenomena of the world, instead of considering each by itself in succession, instinctively collects them under a transcendent unity. Instead of saying, "How spacious the floor of ocean, how stately the march of the clouds across heaven, how winged the flight of the wind!" the Hebrew poet says, "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."

We see, then, that human admiration, when it organizes itself in religion, may take three forms and not two only. Not only may it fix itself almost exclusively upon sensible phenomena and become paganism, or turn away from the sensible world to contemplate moral qualities as in Christianity, but also it may fix itself not upon the phenomena themselves, but upon a unity of them. The simplest form of this religion of unity is, I suppose, Mohammedanism, which not only contemplates a unity of the world, but takes scarcely any interest in the phenomena themselves, the unity of which it contemplates. Lost in the idea of the greatness of God, it loses its interest in the visible evidences of his greatness; but in most cases this religion of unity is combined with one or both of the other religions. The unity worshiped is not an abstract unity, but a unity either of the physical or of the moral world, or of both. In paganism the physical world is not worshiped simply for itself, but a feeble attempt is made to establish some unity among its phenomena by setting up a supreme Jove over the multitude of deities. In the moral religions the tendency to