4 i 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the fury of the storm-demon, or an eclipse was God's anger, so nowa- 

 days men, ignorant of natural conditions, interpret epidemics as " visi- 

 tations," and regard " intuitions " as of divine origin. The inconsist- 

 ency, then, of the acceptance of theological side by side with scientific 

 principles, is only a continuation of the primitive mental state, and 

 must vanish when there is a general conviction that science is orderly 

 knowledge, and is coextensive with experience. If we can have no 

 knowledge transcending experience in the widest sense, and if faith is 

 the vision of things unknown dealing with what transcends knowl- 

 edge then the conflict between science and theology is the conflict 

 between knowledge and ignorance. 



Unless this be the character of faith, I dispute the claim of Theol- 

 ogy to the exclusive possession of faith as a principle of guidance. 

 Science also has its faith, and by it must all men to a great extent be 

 guided. But the faith of Theology and the faith of Science are very 

 different in their credentials. The former is the reliance on the truth of 

 principles handed down by tradition, of which no verification is possi- 

 ble, no examination permissible ; the latter is reliance on the truth of 

 principles which have been sought and found by competent inquirers, 

 tested incessantly by successive generations, are always open to verifica- 

 tion in all their details, and always modifiable according to fresh expe- 

 riences. We believe in the law of gravitation, though we never opened 

 the " Principia," and could not, perhaps, understand it; but we rely on 

 those who can understand it, and who have found its teachings in har- 

 mony with fact. We believe in the measurement of the velocity of 

 light, though ignorant of the methods by which the velocity is meas- 

 ured. We trust those who have sought and found. If we distrust them 

 the search is open to us as to them. The mariner trusts to the indica- 

 tions of the compass without pretending to know how these indications 

 were discovered, but assured by constant experience that they guide the 

 ship safely. That also is faith. 



But if the mental attitude is one of the same obedience as the theo- 

 logical faith, its justification is different. Its credentials are conformity 

 with experience. Those of theology are the statements of the sacred 

 books : the Vedas, Zendavesta, Bible, Koran. The statements therein 

 made concerning the divine nature, its relations with the human, and the 

 providential government of the world, are not open to the verification of 

 experience, for they were not sought and found in experience. If we 

 ask for their credentials, we are told that they are of divine origin. If 

 we ask for evidence of this divine origin, we are referred to history or 

 to our moral consciousness. Tradition has handed down these state- 

 ments through successive generations ; yet if we ask, as we ought to 

 ask, how the tradition itself originated, we are brought face to face with 

 this twofold difficulty : we cannot recognize that those who first pro- 

 mulgated the statements had any better means of knowing the truth 

 than we have; and we are struck with the fact that the statements thus 



