Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/549

Rh more primitive substructure of civilization had been secured by the fixative power of religion, conflict arose between the practical requirement of self-preservation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the distinctively human thirst for betterment and progress. Furthermore, those classes or individuals which enjoy special privileges or advantages turn to the church as the preserver of the status quo. In fact, the church can so act, but only temporarily, until the disproportion between reward and merit has become so glaring that the unprivileged classes will endure it no longer. Retardation of progress leads to revolution. To that extent the church is as naturally the source of revolutions as science is of peaceful development. The church is unable to prevent progress, but can and does suppress the symptoms of progress. This is tantamount to screwing down the safety valve on a steam engine and hiding the steam gauge.

Recent history affords many instances in Roman catholic lands. It is noteworthy that in the protestant countries of northern Europe, the monarchy remains unthreatened, whereas in most of the catholic lands republics have, by revolutionary methods, supplanted the monarchs, Recently in Norway, as the free choice between monarchy and republic was presented to the people, they chose the former.

The foregoing considerations make clear a certain relation between science and religion. The further we go back in civilization, the more valuable we find religion to be. The further we rise in it, the more does religion retire into the background, giving place to science.

Can religion ever become superfluous?

Ostwald's answer to this query is, that one stratum of the people after another raises itself out of the ocean of religious conceptions, and that the movement toward the superfluity of religions is a gradual one, of which it is impossible to predict the date of completion, inasmuch as considerable portions of the human race are on so low a level of cultural capacity as to make it doubtful whether they will ever reach the highest plane. These will surely have a need for religions and will cherish them. In this sense are to be understood the words of Goethe:

 He who has science and art Has religion also, He who has neither of these, Let him have religion.

All religions maintain that the contents of their scripts and tenets constitute the truth, and that no mere human or mundane knowledge can claim this designation, since it is, at best, artificial and confessedly imperfect. On the other hand, the various religions contradict one another, each claiming for itself absolute truth as its exclusive possession in many and important points. Hence follows the conclusion that the claims of the several religions to the possession of the absolute truth neutralize one another and become invalid.