HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 577 



awe and delight, if not of love. But upon those who do not study 

 Nature the advance of science can have no other effect than to root 

 out of their minds the very conception of God, The negative effect 

 is not counterbalanced by any positive one. With tliem, if the super- 

 natural person whose will holds the universe together is denied, tlie 

 effect is that the universe falls at once to pieces. No other unity takes 

 his place, and out of the human mind there perishes the most elevating 

 thought, and out of human life the chief and princij^al sacredness. 

 Tlie remedy for this is to be found in the study of Nature becoming 

 universal. Let all be made acquainted with natural laws ; let all form 

 the habit of contemplating them, and atheism in its full sense will 

 become a thing impossible, when no mind shall be altogether without 

 the sense, at once inspiring and sobering, of an eternal order. 



But these remarks on the difficulty of harmonizing the scientific with 

 the imaginative knowledge of things, are by way of digression. Our 

 business at present is with the fact that knowledge is of these two 

 kinds, anrl that the complete or satisfactory knowledge of any thing 

 comes from combining them. When the object of knowledge is God, 

 the first kind of knowledge is called theology, and the second may be 

 called religion. By theology the nature of God is ascertained and 

 false views of it eradicated from the understanding ; by religion the 

 truths thus obtained are turned over in the mind and assimihited by 

 the imagination and tlie feelings. 



When we hear it said, as it is said so commonly now, that the 

 knowledge of God is impossible to man, and therefore that theology 

 is no true science, of course the word God is used in that peculiar 

 sense of which 1 have spoken above. Nature every one admits tliat 

 we know or may know; but of any occult cause of phenomena, or of 

 any supernatural being suspending the course of natural laws, it is 

 denied that we can know any thing. But since every sort of theology 

 agrees that the laws of Nature are the laws of God, it is evident that 

 in knowing Nature we do precisely to the same extent know God. I 

 am proposing for the present to treat the words of God and Nature 

 as absolutely synonymous, which up to a certain point every one 

 allows them to be. So long as we do so we are in no danger of tres- 

 passing beyond the proper domain of human inquiry ; so long as Ave 

 do so, theology, instead of being additional or antagonistic to science, 

 is merely another name for science itself. Regarded in this way, we 

 may say of God, that so far from being beyond knowledge, be is the 

 one' object of knowledge, and that every thing we can know, every 

 proposition we can frame, relates to liim. It may seem, however, that 

 little is to be gained from giving this unusual sense to the word the- 

 ology. If in the ordinary sense it is the name of an imaginary and 

 delusive science, taken in this sense as a synonym for science itself, it 

 is i)urely useless. By giving the word such an extension, it will be 

 said, you destroy all its force. That we ought to study theology be- 



VOL. Til. 37 



