76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Now, the utmost tliat can be said is that theology has asserted 

 an analogy more or less strong between the phenomena of Nature 

 and human beings. Personality entire has never been attributed 

 in any theology to deities. Personality, as we know it, involves 

 mortality. Deities are always supposed immortal. Personality in- 

 volves a body. The highest theologies have declared God to be 

 incorporeal. We are brought back, then, to the will. Theologies 

 attribute to deities a loill like that of human^ beings. They do so ; 

 but again the highest theologies assert that the Divine Will is high 

 above the human; that there is "no searching" of it; "that as 

 the heaven is high above the earth, so are his ways than our ways, 

 and his thoughts than our thoughts." 



If the possibility of miracles were entirely given up, and the order 

 of Nature decided to be as invariable as science inclines to consider 

 it; if all the appearances of benevolent design in the universe were 

 explained away, it might be true that the belief in God would cease 

 to be consoling. Instead of being a spring of life and activity, it 

 might I am not now saying it would become a depressing and 

 overwhelming influence. And this, no doubt, is what people mean 

 when they identify, as they commonly do, the belief in God with be- 

 lief in an overruling Benevolence, and in the supernatural. They 

 mean to say, not exactly that the belief in God is necessarily this, 

 but that to be in any way useful or beneficial it must necessarily be 

 this. But for my present purpose it is important to distinguish be- 

 tween the God in whom ordinary people at the present day believe, 

 and a God of another character in whom they might conceivably 

 believe. I desire to insist upon the point that when science speaks of 

 God as a myth or an hypothesis, and declares the existence of God to 

 be doubtful, and destined always to remain doubtful, it is speaking of 

 a particular conception of God, of God conceived as benevolent, as 

 outside of Nature, as personal, as the cause of phenomena. Do these 

 attributes of benevolence, personality, etc., exhaust the idea of God ? 

 Are they not merely the most important, the most consoling of his 

 attributes, but the only ones? By denying them do we cease not 

 merely to be orthodox Christians, but to be theists ? 



Science opposes to God Nature. When it denies God it denies 

 the existence of any power beyond or superior to Nature ; and it may 

 deny at the- same time any thing like a cause of Nature. It believes 

 in cei'tain laws of coexistence and sequence in phenomena, and in de- 

 nying God it means to deny that any thing further can be known. 

 God and Nature, then, express ideas which are difierent in an impor- 

 tant particular. But it is evident enough that these ideas are not the 

 opposites that controversy would represent them to be. On the con- 

 trary, they coincide up to a certain point. Those who believe in Na- 

 ture may deny God, but those who believe in God believe, as a matter 

 of course, in Nature also. The belief in God includes the belief in 



