RELIGION AND THE OTHER SCIENCES 273 



with the world-governing Omnipotence; but both, the laws of our 

 thinking and those of the real world, reveal themselves as the har- 

 monious revelations of the creative reason of God, which, according 

 to Plato's fitting word, is the efficient ground of being as well as of 

 knowing. It is therefore not merely a demand of religious belief that 

 there is real truth in our God-consciousness, that there should be 

 an activity and revelation of God himself in the human mind; it is 

 also in the same manner a demand of science considering its last 

 principles, that the world, in order to be known by us as a rational, 

 regulated order, must have for its principle an eternal creative 

 reason. Long ago the old master of thinking, Aristotle, recognized 

 this fact clearly, when he said that order in the world without a prin- 

 ciple of order could be as little thinkable as the order of an army 

 without a commanding general. 



But while it is true that science, as the ground of the possibility 

 of its knowledge of the truth, must presuppose the same general 

 principle of intellectual knowledge which religion has as the object 

 of its practical belief, then by principle the apprehension is excluded 

 that any possible progress on the part of science in its knowledge 

 of the world can ever destroy religion. We are rather the more 

 justified in the hope that all true knowledge of science will be a help 

 to religion, and will serve as the means of purifying religion from the 

 dross of superstition. 



Truly it can easily be shown that a divine government of the 

 world breaking through, and now and then suspending the regular 

 order of nature through miraculous intervention, would not be more 

 majestic, but far more limited and human, than such a government 

 which reveals itself as everywhere and always the same in and 

 through its own ordained laws in the world. And again, that a 

 revelation prescribing secret and incomprehensible doctrines and 

 rites, demanding from humanity a blind faith, would far less be in 

 harmony with the guiding wisdom and love of God, and far less 

 could work for the intellectual liberty and perfection of humanity, 

 than such a revelation which is working in and through the reason 

 and conscience of humanity, and is realizing its purpose in the pro- 

 gressive development of our intellectual and moral capacities and 

 powers. When therefore science raises critical misgivings against 

 the supernatural and irrational doctrines of positive religion, then 

 the real and rightly understood interests of religion are not harmed 

 but rather advanced; for this criticism serves religion in helping 

 it to become free from the unintellectual inheritance of its early 

 days, in helping religion to consider its true intellectual and moral 

 essence, and to bring to a full display all the blessed powers which 

 are concealed within its nature, to press through the narrow walls of 

 an ecclesiasticism out into the full life of humanity, and to work as 



