io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



swarmed with spirits, good and evil ; disease, pestilence, storms, and 

 fires and floods were the work of evil spirits ; the more kindly motions 

 of Nature were the work of good spirits. A decrepit old woman could 

 turn herself into a wolf and devour her neighbor's flocks. Meteors, 

 eclipses, and comets were portents sent directly from Heaven for the 

 warning of mankind. 



How has all this been changed ! How completely the mind of man 

 now faces the other away, in everything except in theology faces 

 toward a natural explanation of all phenomena ! 



Let no hasty reader conclude that I am arguing against the reality 

 of religion ; I am only arguing against the reality of magic and mira- 

 cles ; against the conception of Christianity as a scheme for man's sal- 

 vation interpolated into human history, and in no sense one with the 

 constitution of the world ; against the idea that the spiritual life is in 

 no sense a possible development of man's natural capabilities ; but some- 

 thing superadded from without, a unique and peculiar kind of life, 

 which was made possible to man by the life and death of Christ, and 

 in no way possible before that event. It is not an evolution from 

 man's proper nature ; it comes from the opposite direction, and is 

 external and supplementary. "Christianity," say the Andover doc- 

 tors, "is a source of knowledge concerning God which is not given by 

 the external universe nor by the constitution of man, but only by 

 Christ." Religion is still conceived of as a miraculous scheme to rem- 

 edy some miscarriage or failure in the plan of God's dealings with man, 

 a failure whereby his relation to the race was radically changed. It is 

 looked upon as something naturally foreign to man, something to be 

 ingrafted upon him from without, not related at all to his natural 

 capacity for virtue and goodness ; something which a blameless man 

 may live and die without, but which a cut-throat during the last 

 moments of his life upon the scaffold may, by what is called an act 

 of faith and repentance, obtain ! Against such notions I am directing 

 my argument ; I am urging that the sentiment of religion is the same 

 in all ages and lands, differing in its outward forms, but not in its 

 inward essence, just as the sentiment of patriotism or of loyalty is the 

 same. How is a reasonable man to favor any scheme that rules out 

 the religion of Plato, and Zeno, and Seneca, and Epictetus, and Cicero, 

 and Lucretius, or Spinoza, or of Darwin, as of no avail, as only snares 

 of Satan ? The flowering of man's spiritual nature is as natural and 

 as strict a process of evolution as the opening of a rose or a morning- 

 glory. The vital inflorescent forces are from within, and are continu- 

 ous from the root up. But there is this difference : "While the plant 

 must have a congenial environment, light, warmth, etc., the human 

 flowering often takes place amid the most adverse surroundings ; but 

 no more so in the religious sphere than in the intellectual. 



Neither would I say that the " conversion " upon which our Puritan 

 ancestors laid such stress, and which is so dramatically illustrated in 



