Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/460

444 science and real religion. If any man shall charge me with being an infidel as touching geometry, and try to turn me out of the church of science, I shall become hotly indignant, because I know that Euclid did not believe more in geometry than I do, and I believe as much in the teachings of geometry as I do in the teachings of theology, regarding them both, as Aristotle did, as mere human sciences, ranking theology with psychology, geology, and botany. And, being by profession a theologian, I certainly believe in theology.

And this brings us back to what was stated in the beginning, as one of the causes of this cry of "conflict." It is the confounding of theology with religion. Theology is not religion any more than psychology is human life, or zoölogy is animal life, or botany is vegetable life. Theology is objective; religion is subjective. Theology is the scientific classification of what is known of God; religion is a loving obedience to God's commandments. Every religious man must have some theology, but it does not follow that every theologian must have some religion. We never knew a religious man without some kind of a theology, nor can we conceive such a case. But we do know some theologians who have little religion, and some that seem to have none. There may be a conflict between theology and some other sciences, and religious men may deplore that conflict, or may not, according to their measure of faith. There are those whose faith is so large and strong that they do not deplore such a conflict, because they know that if, for instance, a conflict should come between geology and theology, and geology should be beaten, it will be so much the better for religion; and if geology should beat theology, still so much the better for religion: according to the spirit of the old Arabic adage, If the pitcher fall on the stone, so much the worse for the pitcher; and if the stone fall on the pitcher so much the worse for the pitcher. Geologists, psychologists, and theologists, must all ultimately promote the cause of religion, because they must confirm one another's truths, and explode one another's errors; and a religious man is a man whose soul longs for the truth, who loves truth because he loves God, who knows if the soul be sanctified it must be sanctified by the truth, even as the mind must be enlarged and strengthened by the truth. He knows and feels that it would be as irreligious in him to reject any truth found in Nature, as it would be for another to reject any truth found in the Bible.

But there is no necessary conflict between even theology and any other science. Theology has to deal with problems into which the element of the infinite enters. It will therefore have concepts some two of which will be irreconcilable, but not therefore contradictory. For instance, to say that God is "an infinite person" is to state the agreement of two concepts which the human mind is supposed never to have reconciled, and never to be able to reconcile. But they are