78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is absorbed, in the knowledge of which he finds safety and happiness. 

 And such now is Nature to the scientific man. I do not now say tliat 

 it is good or satisfying to worship such a God, but I say that no class 

 of men since the world began have ever more truly believed in a God, 

 or more ardently, or with more conviction, worshiped him. Com- 

 paring their religion in its fresh youth to the present confused forms 

 of Christianity, I think a by-stander would say that though Christian- 

 ity had in it something far higher and deeper and more ennobling, yet 

 the average scientific man worships just at present a more awful, and, 

 as it were, a greater Deity than the average Christian. In so many 

 Christians the idea of God has been degraded by childish and little- 

 minded teaching ; the Eternal and the Infinite and the All-embracini; 

 has been represented as the head of the clerical interest, as a sort of 

 clergyman, as a sort of school-master, as a sort of philanthropist. 

 But the scientific man knows him to be eternal ; in astronomy, in 

 geology, he becomes familiar with the countless millenniums of his 

 lifetime. The scientific man strains his mind actually to realize God's 

 infinity. In the fixed stars he traces him, " distance inexpressible by 

 numbers that have name." Meanwhile, to the theologian, infinity and 

 eternity are very much of empty words when apfdied to the object of 

 his worship. He does not realize them in actual facts and definite 

 computations. 



But it is not merely because he realizes a stupendous Power that I 

 call the scientific man a theist. A true theist ought to recognize his 

 Deity as giving him the law to which his life ought to be conformed. 

 Now, here it is that the resemblance of modern science to theology 

 comes put most manifestly. There is no stronger conviction in this 

 age than the conviction of the scientific man, that all happiness de- 

 pends npon the knowledge of the laws of Nature, and the careful 

 adaptation of human life to them. Of this I have spoken before. 

 Luther and Calvin were not more jealous of the Church tradition that 

 had obscured the true word of God in the Scriptures than the mod- 

 ern man of science is of the metaphysics and conventional philoso- 

 phy tliat have beguiled men aAvay from Nature and her laws. They 

 want to remodel all education, all preaching, so that the laws of Na- 

 ture may become known to every man, and that every one may be in 

 a condition to find his happiness in obeying them. They chafe at the 

 notion of men studying any thing else. They behave toward those 

 who do not know Nature with the same sort of impatient insolence 

 with which a Christian behaved toward the worshipers of the em- 

 peror or a Mohammedan toward idolaters. As I sympathize very par- 

 tially with the Mohammedan, and not quite perfectly with the early 

 Christian, so I find the modern scientific zeal narrow and fanatical; 

 but I recognize that it is zeal of the same kind as theirs that is, that, 

 like theirs, it is theological. 



An infinite Power will inspire awe and an anxious desire to obey 



