Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/720

692 adjustment and interdependence that in the hands of a Paley or a Sir Charles Bell have given the design argument such force and sweep. Compare the proofs of God's unity and intelligence open to a David or a Paul with those which Prof. Cooke finds in chemistry, or Winchell in geology, or Agassiz in natural history, and how much more manifold and marvelous the latter!

In the next place, science has been most helpful to religion in purifying its faiths and guiding its reverences. Now, this is a service that Faith much needs to have some one to do for her. For, sublime as are her aspirations, her intellectulintellectual [sic] vision is but dim. Her eye fixed on the heavens to which she would climb, she cannot discern distinctly the steps by which it is reached. She needs science ever to be at hand to direct her. In her mounting instinct, Faith stretches up her hand and clutches and clings to whatever she comes across. The misshapen tree which rescued the savage from the wild beast; the black stone which fell from the sky; the serpent or the crocodile whose strange form and power fascinate the primitive man—such are the objects that humanity, in its first dim gropings for an object of worship, embraces. Religion may remain long in this groveling stage, as it did among the Egyptians and Assyrians. But sooner or later, as knowledge increases, the powerlessness and the worthlessness of such things for the worship of thinking men are seen. Faith reaches up her hand to higher objects—the invisible but potent wind, the outstretched sky, the ethereal fire, the sun that warms and lights the whole earth. These are looked upon as mighty living beings, and venerated in solemn rites. But, again, as man learned more of these—the fixed laws which they obey—the confined paths in which they move, and, in learning this, learned more of himself—he recognized in conscious Intelligence and the overruling Will something greater than wind or fire. Faith raised her reverence, then, to a divinized humanity, a company of human gods—Jove, king of heaven, and Juno, queen; Mercury, messenger of the gods; Cupid, inspirer of love; and so on. But, again, with the growing comprehension of the unity of all Nature, man rose to the idea of a single supreme deity, a Jehovah—the eternal—I am Brahma, the one reality, of which all else are masks and shadows—and thrust down the other deities into the position of divinities, spirits, and devils. Still ReligonReligion [sic] had not got above superstition. She still clung for a long time to burnt-offerings, and washings, and fastings, macerations, and masses; interferences by good and evil spirits; ideas of God as jealous, wrathful, appeasable, repenting of what he had once done, interposing to mend his work. Gradually-increasing knowledge pulled one after another of these rounds also out of the hands of Religion, and her yearning fingers that must clasp something reached up still higher on the ladder of divine apprehension, until at last she grasped the conception of the universal, eternal action of One Infinite