DEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 75 



formly represented God as perfectly benevolent. In the Old Testament 

 he is described as just, but at the same time terrible and pitiless against 

 the wicked ; and at least one form of modern Christianity, Calvinism, 

 takes a view of the Divine character which it is impossible to reconcile 

 with infinite benevolence. Moreover, if almost all theologies have 

 introduced what we should ascribe as miracle, yet it would be very 

 incorrect to class many of them in this respect with that current view 

 of Christianity, which represents God as demonstrating his existence 

 by occasional interruptions of the order, otherwise invariable, of Na- 

 ture. Probably, in the majority of theologies, no other law of Xature, 

 except the will of God, is recognized ; miracle, when it is introduced, 

 is not regarded as breaking through any order; the very notion con- 

 veyed by the word supernatural is unacknowledged ; miraculous occur- 

 rences are not distinguished from ordinary ones, except as being rarer, 

 and not distinguished from rare occurrences at all. To an ancient 

 Jew probably an earthquake and the staying of the sun on Gibeon 

 were occurrences of precisely the same character and not distinguished 

 as they are in our minds, the one as rare but natural, the other as super- 

 natural and miraculous. All that was miraculous might have been 

 removed from the creed of an ancient Jew without shaking his theology. 

 Two out of the three propositions, then, are not necessary to the theo- 

 logical view of the universe. But surely the third is. Surely all theol- 

 ogy implies that a Personal Will is the cause of the universe. I cannot 

 admit even this. In the first place it is a very shallow view of the- 

 ologies which represents them as having in all cases sprung from spec- 

 ulation about causes. Undoubtedly we can trace this speculation in 

 our own religion. The phenomena of the world are accounted for 

 very manifestly in the book of Genesis by the fiat of a Personal Will. 

 But this is not at all an invariable character of theology. The Deity 

 of a thing is often regarded in theologies not at all as the cause of it, 

 but in quite another way, perhaps I might say as the imity of it. No 

 one has ever supposed that the Greeks regarded Poseidon as the cause 

 of the sea. Athena seems to have been suggested to them by the 

 sky, but she is not the cause of the sky. And it would be easy to 

 conceive a theology which did not occupy itself at all with causes, but 

 which at the same time conceived the separate phenomena of the 

 universe, or the universe itself alto^eihQY personally 



May we, then, alter the proposition thus instead of saying. It is 

 characteristic of the theological vieAV of the universe to suppose a 

 personal will or wills to be the cause of all phenomena, may we say, 

 Theology invariaVdy conceives the universe under the form of per- 

 sonality, a personal will being assumed as either the cause or the 

 law of phenomena ? Even this would be to go too far. Personality 

 is only known to us as belonging to human beings. Personality is 

 properly the abstraction of the qualities common to man, woman 

 and child. Of these one of the principal is what we call the will. 



