6io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The chief objection that any naturalistic scheme of religion has to 

 encounter comes from those who, applying the language of jurispru- 

 dence to every-day life, urge that the three terms, command, duty, 

 and sanction, are inseparably connected ; that command and duty are 

 correlative terms ; that, wherever a duty lies, a command has been sig- 

 nified. Such arguers refuse to recognize in a religion without some 

 supreme will constraining a religion at all. Thus Canon Liddon * 

 calls religion " essentially a relation to a person. . . . Religion con- 

 sists fundamentally in the practical recognition of a constraining bond 

 between the inward life of man and an unseen Person ; ... the main- 

 tenance of a real relation with the personal God, or with a Divine 

 Person really incarnate in Jesus Christ." The same objection appears 

 in a slightly altered form in pages of the London " Spectator," in the 

 course of a discussion upon natural religion, suggested by the work 

 before us : 



" We do not differ from this able writer in thinking that there is 

 such a thing as 'natural religion,' but we do differ from him when 

 he asserts there is such a thing for one who declines, or is unable, to 

 discover in the universe traces of a superphysical, we would rather 

 say, than a supernatural, Power that is, traces of a power to mold 

 and modify that in nature which is physical, in the direction and for 

 the purposes of that in nature which is not physical, but mental and 

 moral. There is no end of ' natural religion ' in the mere discovery of 

 human free-will, for that is the discovery that the adamantine chain 

 of physical necessity has been and is interrupted by the will of man 

 itself a discovery utterly inconsistent with the favorite scientific 

 view. There is no end of ' natural religion ' in the discovery of con- 

 science, that there is a moral obligation on us to do this rather than 

 that an obligation from which it is simply impossible to escape, with- 

 out bringing on ourselves an unappeasable remorse, and a sense of 

 conscious unworthiness from which it is impossible to dissociate the 

 conviction of invisible condemnation and displeasure. There is no end 

 of natural Christianity in the discovery that Christ is an ideal infinite- 

 ly and hopelessly above and beyond us, and yet full of power to draw 

 us upward, if we will, toward himself. But there is, to our minds, 

 nothing worthy of the name of natural religion or natural Christian- 

 ity at all that does not promise us guidance and excite in us trust. . . . 

 The author of ' Ecce Homo ' seems to us content to find a natural 

 religion in that which is neither natural nor religious not natural, 

 because, in spite of the paradox, it is in the highest sense natural to 

 man to lean on something beyond Nature ; not religious, because re- 

 ligion means something which is binding, something which we can 

 not in our hearts defy, and we can in our hearts defy any power which 

 only threatens us with extinction, and does not threaten us with inex- 

 tinguishable remorse." 



* " Some Elements of Religion." 



