Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/723

Rh and strange event. Their best instruments have caught sight of no devil, their deepest mining-shaft has reached no limbo of departed souls. They have traced beforehand the path that the comet would pursue, found the cause of the earthquake, the connection of disease with its physical antecedents and antidotes. Spectres have been reduced to illusions of the visual organs, and lunacy to affections of the cerebral lobes. The witches and imps of the old dispensation have vanished before the light of modern knowledge like shadows of a hideous night. Interruptions of the established order, whether by wizard or holy exorcist; special dispensations and interventions, whether from the realm of diablerie or providence, are no longer credited; but law, inflexible law, without the slightest slip or variation, is believed to reign always and everywhere. Lily and solar system unfold according to one and the same formula. The hallucination of the senses, the insane delirium, these also have their natural sources from which they flow in a regular order. Even in the exception lies hidden some deeper law.

With such a strong and iconoclastic hand has Science plied the axe in the domain of Faith. As every one knows, it has been exceedingly painful to many pious souls. It is charged that these reconstructions which modern inquiry have made and are making unsettle all the foundations of religion; that they strip off the bloom of mystery and sacredness from the flowers of faith and conduct to irreverence. Are they, in truth, to be deplored? It seems to me that they are not, but to be rejoiced at. It is true that they have given the death-blow to many forms of faith. It is true that they have disabused us of many ancient venerations. To-day, when we carry flame sealed in our vest-pocket ready to come forth at the scratch of a match, no fire-deity, of course, receives any longer the sacrifice of our first-born. To-day, when we bottle up the lightning and make it our errand-boy, we no longer revere it as the bolt of Jove. But for everything that Science has taken away from Religion, she has given her something greater. If she has weaned her of her blind awe of the unknown, she has substituted a more rational awe of the known. If with ruthless hand she battles down every baseless tradition and fond illusion, she consecrates with religious veneration the simplest real fact. If Nature no longer is the object of human dread, yet, as the useful storehouse whence we draw food and treasure, as the friendly Titan who performs for us tasks beyond our unassisted power, it holds a higher place. If the astronomer's lens has dissipated the ancient heavens, it is to show us system behind system of celestial bodies, blazing at immeasurable intervals in the depths of illimitable space. If geology has taken away the idea of a creation finished once for all in a certain six days of the year 4004, it has given us instead a continual process of moulding and perfecting carried on for 100,000,000 years. The rigorous probing that science has given to Nature does not remove any of its