Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/374

 356 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

and the investigator starts upon the trail of some other puz zling fact. So accustomed are modern men to this way of thinking that few realize what a radical and far reaching change in the conception of the universe it represents, and how profoundly it has modified man s mental attitude toward physical nature in particular. We may readily grant that this is shallow thinking. But even those who think more deeply find it difficult to connect these regular processes of nature with the activity of a personal being, or personal beings, in an intelligible way. Impersonal forces and laws seem to intervene somehow between the events and the acts of volition to which they are at most only indirectly re ferred.

This conception of the universe is greatly reinforced by the modern man s familiarity with machinery. Many minds which loyally maintain a theistic conception of the universe have derived from the machine their idea of the relation of the physical world to the divine intelligence. They seem to think that God made the universe and ordained the laws of nature ; and that nature operates under the control of those laws, which really determine all specific changes. The sig nificant aspect of it is that for their thought the actual per sonal activity of God is moved back one or perhaps many links in the chain of causation. God is in the background, and intervening between His will and the events of the natural world is a vast apparatus of forces and laws, im personal and unchangeable in their operation. In the thought of such persons, God is no more personally respon sible for any human tragedies that may result from the operation of those laws than the engineer is for the mangling of an unfortunate victim who is accidentally caught in the machinery which he is superintending. Another significant aspect of this mode of thought is that while God moves far ther into the background, the human control of these natural forces becomes more obvious and extensive. Men see that they are actually gaining power to direct the oper ation of those forces before which they once stood in help-

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