DEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 77 



Nature, as the whole inchides the part. Science would represent 

 theoloj^y as disregarding Nature, as passing over those laws which 

 govern the universe, and occupying itself solely with occasional sus- 

 pensions of them, or with ulterior, inscrutable causes. But this ac- 

 count of theology is derived from a partial view of it. It is prac- 

 tically to some extent true of the theologies of recent times, which 

 have been driven out of the domain of Nature by the rival and vic- 

 torious method of physical science. But it is not true at all of the 

 older theologies. They occupied themselves quite as much with laws 

 as with causes ; so far from being opposed to science, they were in 

 fact themselves science in a rudimentary form ; so far from neglecting 

 the natural for the supernatural, they recognized no such distinction. 

 The true object of theology at the beginning was to throw liglit upon 

 natural laws ; it used, no doubt, a crude method, and in some cases 

 it attempted problems which modern science calls insoluble. Then, 

 when a new method was introduced, theology stuck obstinately to its 

 old one, and when the new method proved itself successful, theology 

 gradually withdrew into those domains, where as yet the old method 

 was not threatened, and might still reign without opposition. Thus 

 it began to be supposed that law belonged to science, and suspension 

 of law, or miracle, to theology ; that the one was concerned with Na- 

 ture, and the other with that which was above Nature. Gradually 

 tlie name of God began to be associated with the supernatural, and 

 scientific men began to say they had nothing to do with God, and 

 tlieologians to find something alien to them in the word Nature. 



Yet theology can never go further than this in repudiating Nature. 

 It can never deny that Nature is an ordinance of God ; it caa never 

 question that the laws of Nature are laws of God. It may indeed 

 treat them as of secondary importance ; it may consider that they 

 reveal God in an aspect in which it is not most important that we 

 should know him. But it cannot and does not deny that Nature, 

 too, is a revelation of God ; it ought not to deny that natural phi- 

 losophy is a part of theology, that there is a theology which may be 

 called natural, and which does not consist in a collection of the evi- 

 dences of benevolent design in the universe, but in a true deduction of 

 the laws which govern the universe, whatever those laws may be, and 

 whatever they may seem to indicate concerning the character of God. 



But, if, on the one hand, the study of Nature be one part of the 

 study of God, is it not true, on the other, that he who believes only 

 in Nature is a theist, and has a theology? Men slide easily from the 

 most momentous controversies into the most contemptible logomachies. 

 If we will look at tilings, and not merely at words, we shall soon see 

 that the scientific man has a theology and a God, a most impressive 

 theology, a most awful and glorious God. I say that man believes in a 

 God who feels himself in the presence of a Power apart from and im- 

 measurably above his own, a Power in the contemplation of which he 



