Page:Science the handmaid of religion.djvu/13

Rh Now in many ways has the increased knowledge of physical science aided religious knowledge. We have space to indicate but a few of them.

I. Physical science has clearly shown the immensity of the universe; some men of science would call it the infinity of the universe. That which theology had affirmed before of God, that He was infinite, has, it has been thought, been proved in respect to the universe by the discoveries of science. The immense spaces between the fixed stars, their huge size, the innumerable quantity of those stars, which are revealed in ever increasing numbers by the telescope, as it is made to increase in star-defining power, point to an infinitude of the physical universe which illustrates physically what theologians have always asserted concerning the Divine nature.

The of the Greek, the mundus of the Roman, was a small thing compared with the universe of the modern philosopher; but "the King eternal, immortal, invisible," of S. Paul, "the all-wise God," is still the same God of the Christian philosopher. Theology changes not; but physical science advances ideas more and more akin to those of theology. The universe, as we know it to-day, is more worthy of God as He was known in the time of S. Paul. And if we admit, in any sense, the axiom, that the universe considered as an effect must have had a cause, then we contend that the effect, as we know it now, is more worthy