Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/313

288 endless. The only religion that they can teach is the religion of endurance and of courage. Or one may compare them to the warriors in king Atli’s house. Only the all-seeing Eternal Thought can possibly discover their significance. Of themselves they are just the fighters in the blood and dust of the banqueting hall.

All this we just now affirm without full proof. But our previous discussion has been one long illustration of it. You find or think you find in the world a religiously valuable power or tendency at work. But at once there stands beside it its sworn foe. Is it Evolution that you have found? There stands beside it Dissolution. Is it the tender care of a fatherly nature for the very sparrows? Then appears beside it the cruelty and deceit of nature. Is it the beauty of the world that suggests a power-loving beauty? Nay, but the rottenness and the horror of natural disease and decay assert as boldly the workings of a power that hates beauty. Are all these seeming powers just mere phantoms, whose truth is in the laws of physics? Then the world is a vast wreck of colliding molecules. Are these powers real tendencies? Then their fight is seemingly endless. The world of the powers is indeed full of physical law, because and only because its facts are found, by means of thought that has a deeper foundation, to be cases of certain general rules. But for our religious purpose, this world of the powers seems a chaos.

“But,” says some one, “all this is no disproof of the existence of a real but to us not perfectly clear