RELIGION WITHOUT DOGMA. 55 



ology has become involved in endless contradictions. The Christian 

 idea of the Deity would seem to have been developed in the light of 

 the sympathies which have arisen in the domestic and social life of 

 man. These sympathies with their allied sentiments have been un- 

 warrantably projected out beyond their proper sphere, that of human 

 affairs, into an idea of the Divine it being forgotten in the process 

 that Nature in the broad view is the fullest manifestation of divine 

 power we know, and that from Nature herself in her manifold opera- 

 tions should we try to integrate a conception of its informing Spirit. 

 Hence the discrepancy between the conception of the theological Deity 

 and the facts of the universe. Do the processes of Nature exhibit 

 sympathy, mercy, or love ? Or do we not rather observe in them the 

 uniformity of a power manifested through an infinite mechanism 

 which neither excuses ignorance nor spares weakness ? Yet so widely 

 and in our view so unjustifiably have the ideas of God and Nature 

 diverged, that we find Tennyson asking, as he depicts the agony of the 

 struggle for existence and the profuse waste of organic life, " Are God 

 and Nature then, at strife ? " Any theory of the universe which en- 

 deavors to be comprehensive must subdue the impulses of sentiment 

 and emotion and face all the facts of experience. The natural order 

 shows us redundant life as necessary for the competition whereby the 

 fittest individuals and species may survive and advance. The fittest 

 may not from the human stand-point always be the best or the highest, 

 for the parasite, protected from contest in the stomach of a man or 

 horse, may degenerate and assume a type lower than that in which its 

 existence began. The system of prey, the thousands of species of para- 

 sites which make the days of so many nobler types of life miserable 

 and short all this does the natural order include, no less than the cul- 

 minations of human consciousness, genius, and conscience which thrill 

 us with their power as if we stood in the very presence of the Divine. 

 Nature presents to our view and study a mechanism of infinite com- 

 plexity. Its rules of action we may know in part, and, when we obey 

 that knowledge, happiness can be ours ; but, however diligent we may 

 be in study or willing in our obedience, all its laws we can never dis- 

 cern, and its wheels may seize us and painfully mar or quench our lives 

 at any moment the lurking germs of disease by inheritance within 

 us, or floating in the air around us, the incalculable forces of earth- 

 quake or tornado ; the liabilities incidental to modern locomotion, and 

 many of the processes of modern industry. These, together with the 

 willful exertion of human malignity, all beset us as subtractions from 

 joy in life. Our sympathies, baffled in their endeavor to find scope be- 

 yond the limits of human relations, return thither to their source, as 

 perhaps to the sole legitimate sphere for their exercise. Humanity re- 

 mains, though the supreme cause continue undefined. In the spirit of 

 much of what the theologians say, we find ourselves acknowledging 

 our inability to rise from phenomena to ultimate cause or essence. 



