HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 587 



human family, and all the pity that they have accumulated, and, as it 

 were, capitalized in institutions, political, social, and ecclesiastical, 

 through countless generations. 



People are misled by the fact that Nature is often used in another 

 sense, and opposed, not to the supernatural, but to man. Kature is, 

 for shortness, often put instead of inanimate Nature. Inanimate 

 Nature is of course pitiless. It consists of laws which, like the law of 

 gravitation, take no note of happiness or misery, virtue or vice. But 

 if we abandoned our belief in the supernatural, it would not be only 

 Nature in this restricted sense that would be left to us ; we should 

 not give ourselves over, as it is often rhetorically described, to the 

 mercy of merciless powers winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, 

 and fire. The God we should believe in would not be a passionless, 

 uttei-ly inhuman power. He would indeed be a God, often neglecting 

 us in our need, a God often deaf to prayers. Nature including human- 

 ity would be our God. We should read his character not merely in 

 the earthquake and fire, but also in the still small voice ; not merely in 

 the destroying powers of the world, but, as Mohammed said, in the 

 compassion that we feel for one another; not merely in the storm that 

 threatens the sailor with death, but in the life-boat and the Grace 

 Darling that put out from shore to the rescue ; not merely in the 

 intricate laws that confound our prudence, but in the science that 

 penetrates them and the art which makes them subservient to our pur- 

 poses ; not merely in the social evils that fill our towns with misery 

 and cover our frontiers with war, but in the St. Francis that makes 

 himself the brother of the miserable, and in the Fox and Penn that 

 proclaim principles of peace, 



Let us take one of the principal maxims of the supernatural theol- 

 ogy, and observe how it is modified by the rejection of the supernatu- 

 ral. Tliat the just man will assuredly be rewarded with happiness is a 

 maxim resting upon evidence involving the supernatural. It depends 

 upon belief in a God of much more goodness and justice than we can 

 find in Nature ; it assumes a future state of which science furnishes 

 no clear evidence. Even when the Psalmist, speaking merely of the 

 present life, wrote, " I have been young, and now am old, and yet 

 saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread," 

 he perhaps thought of supernatural interpositions by wkich evil was 

 averted from the just man. Suppose, now, that we repudiate all such 

 beliefs, and confine ourselves strictlv to the facts of Nature as we dis- 

 cover them from uniform experience. Let us suppose that the ordi- 

 nary laws of Nature govern the lot of the just man, and that no ex- 

 emptions are made in his favor. Do we find that these ordinary laws 

 take no account of his justice, and that his prospects are in no respect 

 different from those of the unjust man ? Is Nature, as distinguished 

 from the supernatural, regardless of the distinction between virtue 

 and vice ? No doubt Nature is not a perfectly just judge. The just 



