HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 585 



siastic admiration unci emulation. Some of the best have been hated 

 and persecuted. Much virtue passes away entirely unacknowledged ; 

 much flagrant hypocrisy succeeds in its object. 



" Still on the wliole we find life worth having. The misery of it 

 we find ourselves able to forget, or callously live through. Fortu- 

 nately we have not imaginations strong enough to realize the sum of 

 it, and we contrive to turn our thoughts away from the subject. And 

 though the happiness is not great, the variety and novelty are. Life 

 is interesting, if not happy. In spite of all the injustice which shocks 

 us in human destiny, the inequality with which fortune is meted out, 

 yet it may be discerned that, at least in the more fortunate societies, 

 justice is the rule and injustice the exception. There are laws by 

 which definite crimes are punished, there is a force of opinion which 

 reaches vaguer offenses, and visits even dispositions to vice with a 

 certain penalty. Virtue is seldom without some reward, however in- 

 adequate ; if it is not recognized generally or publicly, it finds here 

 and there an admirer, it surrounds itself with a little circle of love ; 

 when even this is wanting it often shows a strange power of reward- 

 ing itself. On the whole, we are sustained and reconciled to life by a 

 certain feeling of hope, by a belief, resting on real evidence, that things 

 improve and better themselves around us." 



This is certainly a very different faith from Christianity. Whether 

 it deserves to be called a faith at all, whether it justifies men in living 

 and in calling others into life, maybe doubted. But it is just as much 

 a theology as Christianity. It deals with just the same questions and 

 gives an answer to them, though a diftereut answer. Both views, 

 whatever may be professed, are views about God. Christianity re- 

 gards God as a friend ; it says that he is Love. The other view re- 

 gards him as awful, distant, inhuman, yet not radically hostile. 



It is said that such vague, general views do not deserve to be 

 called science. This is of course admitted. There exists at the pres- 

 ent moment no scientific theology independent of the supernatural and 

 of the search for final causes. But this is not because no such theology 

 can be constructed, but merely because it has not yet been con- 

 structed. Evidently it is constructing itself fast. The more men 

 come to know Nature and to feel confidence in their knowledge, the 

 more eagerly they will consider what is the attitude of Nature toward 

 human beings. This question is not one which is in' any way removed 

 froiu human knowledge, it is not one which it can be considered mor- 

 bid to betray curiosity about. Yet this is the question of theology. 

 Not only is it the only question with which theology ought to be con- 

 cerned ; it is the only question with which theology ever has been con- 

 cerned. The theologies of the world ai'e merely different attempts to 

 answer it. If they have for the most part trespassed upon the domain 

 of the supernatural, this has not been because theology is necessarily 

 concerned with the supernatural, but in some cases because the line 



